Arman

Nice, judo, and Yves Klein, 1928–1949

Armand Pierre Fernandez was born in Nice on 17 November 1928, the son of Antonio Fernandez, an antiques dealer who was also an amateur painter, photographer and cellist. His father taught him oil painting and photography.

He passed his baccalauréat in philosophy and mathematics in 1946 and enrolled at the École Nationale des Arts Décoratifs in Nice. At a judo class held in a Nice police school he met Yves Klein and Claude Pascal, and the three later hitchhiked across Europe together. The friendship with Klein lasted until Klein's death in 1962.

Paris, the École du Louvre, and the rubber stamps, 1949–1959

In 1949 Arman moved to Paris to study at the École du Louvre, where he concentrated on archaeology and Asian art. In 1951 he taught judo at the Bushido Kai club in Madrid, and in 1952 he served as a medical orderly in the French military during the war in Indochina. In 1953 he married the composer Éliane Radigue; they had three children, Marion, Anne and Yves.

An exhibition of the German Dadaist Kurt Schwitters in 1954 changed his direction. He began the Cachets, inked rubber-stamp impressions repeated across paper and fabric, and showed them at his third solo exhibition, at Galerie Iris Clert in Paris in 1958. The show was a success, and it moved his work away from the abstract painting he had considered his real career.

By then he was signing with his first name only, in homage to Vincent van Gogh, who signed his canvases "Vincent". The story told about the missing d is that a printer dropped it by mistake from an exhibition announcement, and that Arman liked the shorter name and kept it. Accident or choice, from 1957 he used Arman rather than Armand. When he took United States citizenship in 1973 he made Armand Pierre Arman his legal name, and kept Arman for his art.

Le Plein and the New Realists, 1960–1962

In 1958 Yves Klein had emptied Galerie Iris Clert and exhibited the bare room as Le Vide, The Void. In 1960 Arman answered in the same space: he filled the gallery with refuse and called it Le Plein, The Full. The two shows are often described together: Klein had exhibited an empty room, and Arman exhibited a full one.

In October 1960 Arman joined Yves Klein, François Dufrêne, Raymond Hains, Martial Raysse, Daniel Spoerri, Jean Tinguely, Jacques Villeglé and the critic Pierre Restany in founding Nouveau Réalisme. César, Mimmo Rotella, Niki de Saint Phalle and Christo joined the group later.

new perceptive approaches of the real

nouvelles approches perceptives du réel

Between 1954 and 1962 he began the series he is known for.

• Cachets — inked rubber-stamp impressions on paper and fabric, begun after the 1954 Schwitters exhibition
• Allures d'objet — the paint traces objects leave when moved across a surface
• Poubelles — collections of strewn refuse, the contents of trash bins presented as they are
• Accumulations — identical objects gathered in transparent polyester or Plexiglas cases, with welded versions from 1962
• Coupes and Colères — objects, often violins and saxophones, sliced, burned or smashed, and the pieces mounted on canvas

New York, Duchamp's circle, and bronze, 1961–1981

Arman first exhibited in the United States in 1961, at the Cordier Warren Gallery in New York, and from that year kept a part-time home in the city alongside Nice. He lived first at the Chelsea Hotel and later on Church Street, with studios on the Bowery and then in TriBeCa. At a dinner given by the artist and collector William Copley he met Marcel Duchamp.

Andy Warhol filmed him on 5 March 1964, during a dinner performance staged by the artist Daniel Spoerri. In the four-minute silent reel, titled Dinner at Daley's, Arman sits in profile, reading through the meal. Warhol owned two of Arman's Poubelles and an accumulation called Amphetamines; they were sold at Sotheby's auction of Warhol's collection in May 1988.

Working with a foundry in Normandy, Arman began casting accumulations in bronze, and musical instruments, above all strings, became a lasting theme. In 1971 he married Corice Canton; they had two children, Yasmine and Philippe. On 31 January 1973 he became a United States citizen.

Public monuments, 1982–1995

Arman worked at monument scale in his last two decades. Long Term Parking, completed in 1982 at the Château de Montcel in Jouy-en-Josas outside Paris, is a tower of concrete holding sixty cars, most of them French.

In 1985 the French state commissioned L'Heure de tous, a bronze accumulation of clocks, for the cour du Havre of Gare Saint-Lazare. A second Arman work, Consigne à vie, stands in the station's cour de Rome. In 1989 his sixth child, Yves Cesar Arman, was born to Carrole Cesar. In 1995 the Lebanese government commissioned Hope for Peace for Beirut, a thirty-two-metre monument holding eighty-three tanks and military vehicles, marking fifty years of the Lebanese army.

How Arman worked

The working rule behind most of Arman's art was one object, many times. He chose a manufactured thing — a watch, a doll's hand, a gas gauge, a violin — and repeated it until the group, not the object, became the picture. The container did the framing: transparent polyester or a Plexiglas case held the mass in place and let the viewer count. He did not arrange so much as pour, and the appearance of chance was part of the method.

Destruction was the other half of the practice. In the Colères he smashed an instrument and fixed the debris at the moment of scatter; in the Coupes he sliced one into clean sections and laid the anatomy out in order. From the mid-1960s, working with the Bocquel foundry in Normandy, he translated both gestures into bronze, which turned the smashed violin from an event into a monument. Musical instruments, above all strings, stayed his favorite material: an object whose whole identity is its shape, still recognizable in any state of ruin.

The subject underneath was the consumer city itself: production lines, shop windows, and the trash can at the end of the cycle. The accumulations state it without commentary, by volume alone.

Death and a grave in Paris

Arman died of cancer on 22 October 2005, at his home in Manhattan. He was seventy-six. The New York Times obituary two days later called him a sculptor "known internationally for his surprising accumulations of trash and found objects".

On 17 November 2008, the day he would have turned eighty, part of his ashes was interred at Père-Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, in division 11.

The monument carries a bronze cello, and a plaque reads "Enfin seul !" ("Finally alone!"), signed Arman. The stone itself gives his death year, wrongly, as 2003.

Reception and afterlife

Museum exhibitions came early. The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis both gave him solo exhibitions in 1964, and the Palazzo Grassi in Venice followed in 1967. The Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris showed Objets Armés in 1975. Retrospectives followed: Parade der Objekte toured from Hanover in 1982, the Brooklyn Museum surveyed the years 1955 to 1991, and the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume in Paris mounted its own in 1998.

After his death, the Centre Pompidou mounted a retrospective in the autumn of 2010, and Museum Tinguely in Basel followed in 2011. His work sits in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Detroit Institute of Arts and the Walker Art Center. A multi-volume catalogue raisonné by Denyse Durand-Ruel covers the work of the 1960s. France decorated him twice over: Knight of the Legion of Honour, and Knight and then Officer of the National Order of Merit, the higher rank coming in 1993.