Arman

American, born France, 1928–2005

Death placeNew York City, New York, United States

Birth placeNice, France

BiographyArman, the French-born American painter and sculptor who died in New York on Saturday aged 76, was closely associated with the New Realist and Pop Art movements, and made a career out of turning the contents of dustbins into "assemblages"; numerous museums and collectors paid large sums for his burned rubbish, broken violins, combs, taps, smashed typewriters, spoons and door handles, and last year an auction of 400 of his works fetched some 2.8 million euros.

Armand Pierre Fernandez was born on November 17 1928 in Nice, where his father Antonio was an antique dealer. At the age of six he was sent to the Cours Poisat School for Girls, because his father was reluctant to part young Armand from his best friend, a girl called Micheline. By 1936, he had taken up chess (he was to remain fascinated by games), and two years later his father taught him the basics of oil painting - not a medium with which he troubled the art world much.

In 1940 he went to the Lycée Parc Impérial in Nice, from which he was expelled. Thereafter he went to boarding schools at Grasse and Vence, before being readmitted to the lycée to take his baccalaureat. In 1946 he proceeded to the École Nationale d'Art Décoratif in his home city, but left - by his own account, in protest against the "social conservatism" of the authorities - three years later without taking his degree.

He had, however, begun to bid for local dealers and developed a knowledge of Chinese porcelain which tied in with a growing interest in matters Oriental. He took up judo, and met Yves Klein and Claude Pascal, with whom he embarked on a hiking holiday. The three shared an adolescent absorption with Buddhism, Rosicrucianism, astrology and Van Gogh, in whose honour they vowed to be known by their first names. (Armand became Arman after a misprint at the Galerie Iris Clert in 1958; after initial fury, he decided he preferred it.) After a spell at the École du Louvre in 1949, where he was training as an auctioneer, Arman set off for Madrid with Klein to teach judo.

Arman served with the medical corps of the French Marines in Indochina, and returned to Nice in 1953, where he married Eliane Radigue, with whom he had two daughters and a son (they were divorced in 1971). He began working in abstracts and collaborated with Klein on "happenings", but an exhibition by Kurt Schwitters caused him to reappraise, and then to repudiate, all his work to date, and in 1955 he began his series Cachets, sheets of paper covered with rubber stamps. He had his first solo show in Paris and travelled widely.

In the 1960s, this series was followed by Allures; much the same, except that the marks were made by the objects themselves. It was a technique he never entirely abandoned: works such as Open Mouths featured crude prints of adjustable spanners.

Arman began destroying the objects themselves and exhibiting the bits in 1959; his Poubelles (dustbins) were rubbish in a glass box. In a radical departure in 1964 at the Stedelijk, Amsterdam, he showed his Accumulations, assemblages of the same stuff in a plexiglass box, or in polyester. Colères were smashed furniture. At the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago in 1969 he brilliantly combined these techniques by accumulating broken rubbish, in the exhibition Art by Telephone.

By then, Arman was regarded as a founding father of the Nouveaux Réalistes, and had been living in America (inevitably, in the Chelsea Hotel) since 1963. Robert Rauschenburg taught him English and he became a citizen in 1973, changing his name to Armand Pierre Arman.

From the 1970s, he lived in a loft in SoHo, New York, studied Kung Fu with his second wife Corice Canton (by whom he had two sons and a daughter), played Go, and exported broken and burnt items wrapped in plastic or concrete to major mueums everywhere. Sculptures included a pile of clocks (Paris), a pile of tyres (South Korea) and a sliced cello in bronze (New York).

In 1998 Arman sliced up books for Amnesty International. He was a Grand Officier des Arts et des Lettres, and designed a plate for the Franklin Mint.

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