Art May 2007
Exhibition note
On “Le Nouveau Réalisme” at the Galeries nationales du Grand Palais, Paris.
"Le Nouveau Réalisme"
Galeries nationales du Grand Palais, Paris.
March 28, 2007-July 2, 2007
Le nouveau réalisme, the new realism, the biggest current art exhibition in Paris, is a collection of welcome nonsense. It is welcome because a day at the exhibition is amusing and entertaining while you are there, and afterwards you leave with a new eye for the grimy or colorful objects that litter that attractively unkempt city. It is nonsense because French artists and critics will insist on talking about its products in a way that is pretentious and muddled.
Le nouveau réalisme began in France in the late 1950s and flourished there and in the neighboring countries in the 1960s. It was a welcome reaction against abstract art. In place of abstraction, the practitioners of the new realism sought art in everyday objects, in the layers of torn and superimposed fly-posters that...
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