Works by a pre-Pop, post-abstract expressionist generation of artists
who rejected painterly expression and embraced the object.
As the 1950s became the 1960s, a new generation of artists around the
globe rejected direct painterly expression and returned decisively to
the object. Moving away from abstract expressionism and toward the
sensibility that would become Pop, these artists--among them Raymond
Hains, Martial Raysse, Yves Klein, Daniel Spoerri, Jean Tinguely, and
Robert Rauschenberg--effectively established a new set of artistic
paradigms that would influence the decade ahead. New Realisms:
1957-1962 maps this international field of artistic practice,
showcasing more than 200 works by artists of the period. The title
echoes the name of the French movement of the 1960s "Nouveau Réalisme."
Indeed, the work of the Nouveaux Réalistes group anchors the book (and
the exhibition it accompanies), but at the same time, New Realisms
represents a wider range of related instincts, diversely expressed. The
emphasis is on a constellation of activities in play before the new
critical terms and categories of Pop Art were set in stone. The book
views the emerging artistic scene from the other end of the telescope,
as it were: from a European perspective rather than from that of
American Pop Art. New Realisms is emphatically hybrid, encompassing
the initiatives of the French group as well as trajectories in New York
that stretched from painting to "Environment" to Happening.
Artists include: Arman, George Brecht, Cesar, Christo, Gérard
Deschamps, Jim Dine, François Dufrêne, Oyvind Fahlstrom, Raymond Hains,
Allan Kaprow, Yves Klein, Yayoi Kusama, Roy Lichtenstein, Piero Manzoni,
Claes Oldenburg, Giuseppe Pinot Gallizio, Robert Rauschenberg, Martial
Raysse, Mimmo Rotella, Niki de Saint Phalle, Daniel Spoerri, Jean
Tinguely, Robert Watts, and Robert Whitman.
Essays by: Julia Robinson, Hannah Feldman, Agnes Berecz, Emmelyn
Butterfield-Rosen, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh.
Exhibition: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; June
19th-October 4th, 2010.
Distributed by the MIT Press for the Reina Sofia Museum
