Yves Klein and the Nouveau Réalisme

Niki de Saint Phalle, “Shooting Painting”, 1961

Yves Klein (Nice, 1928 – Paris,1962) was a French artist and is considered an important figure in post-war European art. Although he co-funded the Nouveau Réalisme, critics of Klein's time classify him as neo-Dada, but others have since classified Klein as an early, though "enigmatic," Post-Modernist.

Many of his early paintings were monochrome and in a variety of colours. By the late 1950s, Klein's monochrome works were almost exclusively in a deep blue hue which he eventually patented as International Klein Blue.

As well as conventionally made paintings, in a number of works Yves Klein had naked female models covered in blue paint dragged across or laid upon canvases to make the image, using the models as "living brushes". He called this type of work Anthropometry.
Nouveau Réalisme (New Realism) refers to an artistic movement founded in 1960 by the art critic Pierre Restany and the painter Yves Klein during the first collective exposition in the Apollinaire gallery in Milan.

Pierre Restany wrote the original manifesto for the group, titled the "Constitutive Declaration of New Realism," in April 1960, proclaiming, "Nouveau Réalisme - new ways of perceiving the real.” This joint declaration was signed on October 27, 1960, in Yves Klein's workshop, by nine people: Yves Klein, Arman, Francois Dufrêne, Raymond Hains, Martial Raysse, Pierre Restany, Daniel Spoerri, Jean Tinguely and Jacques de la Villeglé; in 1961 these were joined by César, Mimmo Rotella, then Niki de Saint Phalle and Gérard Deschamps. The artist Christo joined the group in 1963. The group was dissolved in 1970.

In 1961 Niki de Saint Phalle, (Paris, 1930 – San Diego, 2002) became known around the world for her Shooting paintings. A shooting painting consisted of a wooden base board on which containers of paint were laid, then covered with plaster. The painting was then raised and de Saint Phalle would shoot at it with a .22 caliber rifle. The bullets penetrated paint containers which spilled their contents over the painting. This "painting style" was completely new, and she travelled around the world performing shooting sessions. Saint Phalle had stopped making these shooting pictures in 1963 as in her own words, ‘I had become addicted to shooting, like one becomes addicted to a drug'.

Décollage, in art, is the opposite of collage; instead of an image being built up of all or parts of existing images, it is created by cutting, tearing away or otherwise removing, pieces of an original image. A similar technique is the lacerated poster, a poster in which one has been placed over another or others, and the top poster or posters have been ripped, revealing to a greater or lesser degree the poster or posters underneath. The lacerated poster was an artistic intervention that sought to critique the newly emerged advertising technique of large-scale colour advertisements. In effect, the decollage destroys the advertisement, but leaves its remnants on view for the public to contemplate.