Arman, Estampes: Catalogue raisonné

Arman is most associated with the Nouveau Realisme (New Realism) movement that emerged in 1960, and which represented France's response to the trend of Pop art that was sweeping Europe and the United States. Arman had first emerged as a lyrical abstract painter, but he soon rejected the style and began making sculpture inspired by the concept of the readymade. Arman studied art in Paris in the early 1950s, and his painting was heavily influenced by such leading artists of the time as Jackson Pollock and Nicolas de Stael. Yet like Klein, Arman reacted against the gestural techniques and visual motivations of the Abstract Expressionists and Tachistes, and sought other means of creating images, that would have a basis in ideas. Arman committed himself to making concrete forms of art out of the real and tangible, using the manufactured products of modern society. Throughout his long career, he devised a series of means by which real objects would produce works of art that echoed the gestural abstractions of Abstract Expressionism and Tachisme.