The Nouveaux Réalistes : an Avant-Garde: Martial Raysse, Yves Klein, Niki de Saint Phalle, jean Tinguely and César

In his manifesto for the group, the great art critic and theorist Pierre Restany uses a single expression to characterize the diversity of artistic practices of the artists of the Nouvéau Réalisme : "a poetic recycling of the urban, industrial, publicitary reality". That is to say, an art of reappropriation of the surrounding reality that is direct, and that is the uniting line amongst works as diverse as Yves Klein's proto-Conceptual art or César's Dada-like assemblages. As such, the group of the Nouveaux réalistes is, in a way, the French response to American Pop Art, and they too will mark the decade of the 1960s - the group is founded precisely in 1960.

In the French Post-War scene marked by the triumph of Lyrical abstraction and Abstract expressionism, the Nouveaux Réalistes represent a very singular avant-garde : not a return to figurative painting per se, but a direct citation of reality. Their members count famously Yves Klein, but also Martial Raysse, Niki de Saint Phalle - the only female artist of the group, Jean Tinguely and César, to name but a few. We hope that, through a selection of several works from these artists, the viewer can be able to better aporeciate the singularity aand diversity of their art.