The artist Arman was associated in the public mind with his trademark handling of his materials: objects would be excitingly destroyed and then presented, often repetitively, stuck on board or canvas or reassembled in some striking fashion.

But Arman was no one-trick pony. If some of his pieces could seem formulaic, the work he produced in a career lasting nearly 60 years sustained a real ability to surprise and delight. And some of it was truly iconic, like the famous Long Term Parking, a towering monument made of scrapyard cars set in concrete. Or the Martyrs’ Monument in Beirut, which applied the same treatment to tanks. Or even, more modestly, the towers of old clocks and suitcases that greet travellers outside St Lazare station, Paris. Arman was a maker of sardonic or gleeful totems, and, like the Pop artists with whom he was so often associated, very much a product of the postwar boom years.

Armand Pierre Fernandez was born in Nice in 1928. He studied at the local school of decorative arts and then at the Ecole du Louvre in Paris. In Nice he befriended Yves Klein, with whom he shared a love of judo. He was also a fine chess player, good enough to compete with Marcel Duchamp, a grand master and the father of the readymade, whose blessing he enjoyed in his early career.

The relationship with Klein was fruitful. When Klein emptied the Iris Clert gallery for his famous Void exhibition in 1958, Arman followed in 1960 by filling the same gallery with crates, junk, seafood and debris for his Le Plein exhibition.

By then he was officially Arman, thanks to a typographic error which had omitted the D from an invitation. With the poet and painter Claude Pascal, Klein and Arman had formed a group called Triangle whose chief contribution to art history was its members’ decision to sign their works with only their first name.

Arman’s first distinctive pieces in the 1950s set out to debunk the spiritual pretensions of the dominant Abstract Expressionism by, say, dragging objects and metal scrap dipped in paint across the canvas to produce the same effects. For an exhibition in 1954 he produced paintings with rubber stamps. Repetition and mechanical means were to the fore.

Like Jasper Johns in the US, Arman took a cool, satirical approach to the rhetoric of expression and spontaneity. The emphasis was the accidental. And to that was added the introduction of found objects when Arman discovered Kurt Schwitters.

Arman’s early methods included dipping everyday objects in paint and throwing them at the canvas (his Allures d’objets), or smashing containers full of liquid pigment on to the support. Then came the Accumulations and Poubelles: the former piled up all kinds of identical objects, often in Plexiglas boxes, while the latter were what their title advertised: the contents of rubbish bins kept under Plexiglas.

Historically, Arman is inseparable from the Nouveaux Réalistes, a group of artists that also includes Klein, Tinguely, Hains, Spoerri and Villeglé, who were brought together in October 1960 under the aegis of the critic Pierre Restany, as a French riposte to US Pop Art.

These artists all appropriated real objects, the products and detritus of industrial, urban society. Arman recalled that this New Realism was “the shortest-lived movement in the history of art. Twenty minutes after it was formed, there was a general punch-up.” Its critical shelf life would last much longer.

By the mid-1960s Arman was hot artistic property. He experimented with more spectacular ways of treating objects, smashing them for his Colères (rages), sawing them into slices for his Coupes (cuts) or, as Klein had done, by going at the canvas with a blowtorch and setting the result in resin (Combustions). These works were taut with the tension between the semi-vandalistic violence that produced them and the strangely pleasing result, between the intense energy of the process and the final repose. There was also a kind of melancholy, too, associated with the discarded and exhausted.

From the 1960s Arman spent his life between New York and Vence in the South of France. He also started to use new instead of used objects and, over the years, the aesthetic qualities of his works came to the fore: the vivid, lustrous colours and sheer sense of profusion of some pieces seemed to push any kind of social comment into the background.

His sliced violins or classical statuettes sometimes looked like “daring modern art” for staid collectors. And to meet his own costs — and to feed his collecting habit — Arman would also produce multiples on occasion.

Not that he lacked principles (although the combination of financial success and living well in the US did prompt such accusations in his native France). He married a black woman and declared himself on the side of the Black Panthers, and in 1970 he gave the profits from an exhibition at the Reese Gallery, New York, to the cause of black liberation. In 1990 he refused to exhibit in Nice in protest at the National Front sympathies of the city’s mayor.

But perhaps more than social critique, Arman’s relation to objects was chiefly one of fascination. His great passion was for African sculpture, which he collected furiously and admired for its explosive inner power, and he tried to charge his own objects with a similar magic.





Arman (Armand Fernandez), artist, was born on November 17, 1928. He died on October 22, 2005, aged 76.