Arman

Galerie Rive Droite, Anjou
Galerie Saqqârah, Gstaad
Galerie Alfred Schmela, Düsseldorf
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 1968

Krefeld, Kaiser Wilhelm Museum, Sammlung Helga und Walther Lauffs - Amerikanische und Europäische Kunst der sechziger und siebziger Jahre, 1983-84, p. 40, no. 5, illustrated
Paris, Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais; Hannover, Sprengel Museum, Le Nouveau Réalisme: Revolution des Alltäglichen, 2007-08, p. 132, no. 68, illustrated in colour

Art Now, Assemblage and Accumulation, Tokyo 1971, p. 10, illustrated
Henry Martin, Arman, New York 1973, p. 73, no. 57, illustrated in colour
Hans Joachim Albrecht, Die Farbe in der Skulptur der Gegenwart, Zürich 1980, p. 9, illustrated
Denyse Durand-Ruel, Arman: Catalogue Raisonné, Paris 1991, Vol. II, p. 90, no. 148, illustrated
Exhibition Catalogue, Munich, Kunsthalle der Hypo-Kulturstiftung, Traumwelt der Puppen, 1991, p. 44, no. 21

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the illustration fails to fully capture the three-dimensional nature of the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. There is a very small paint loss to the back edge of the right side of the box and another towards the front bottom left side of the box. Close inspection reveals very faint scratches to the left side edge of the box towards the top and centre.
"In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective, qualified opinion. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

Massacre des Innocents I is a masterpiece of European Pop. Made in the critical year of 1961, it shows Arman, one of the leading lights of Nouveau Réalisme, responding to the same societal stimuli that inspired Rauschenberg and Warhol across the Atlantic. Independent of his American cousins, Arman forged an art form that levelled the terrain between high and low cultures, searching for a medium capable of expressing the new aesthetic era that dawned with the new decade, as Europe pulled itself out of post-war austerity and into the burgeoning consumerist age.

By the late 1950s Arman ceased to look for abstract solutions to the problem of making art in an era of mechanical reproduction, and instead started appropriating ideas and things from contemporary existence. In Massacre des Innocents I, Arman makes a deeply affecting exposé of what he regarded as a consumer society defined by its debris, the jettisoned by-products of contemporary life. Among the group of young Nouveau Realistes, who defined themselves as sharing "new perspective approaches of reality", Arman is distinct in his aesthetic of detritus. His Accumulations fetishize the commonplace, a superlative take on the Duchampian readymade. He took to altering the status of an object by salvaging multiple versions of the same thing, and piling them up, squeezing out visual rhythms and implications from repetition, in complete rejection of the artist's touch which had become the hallmark of Abstract Expressionist American and European painting. The Accumulations were most often from a domestic source - they could be any kind of rubbish - cups, combs, coffee grinders. Looking towards an individual or collective memory, the objects became ciphers through which to provoke the audience as to larger ideas.

In the present work, the collection of dirty, worn out dolls becomes more than a collection of commonplace things: it is a brilliant meditation on Rubens' The Massacre of the Innocents (c. 1611-12). Rubens depicted the sheer physical brutality of the story through the emphatic cascade of muscled limbs. The complex composition has bodies intertwined in a knot of undulating flesh, harnessing a spectrum of emotions - anguish, violence, tenderness, desperation. In Arman's version the deadpan expressions on the dolls' faces keep a tight and disconcerting lid on the emotions of Rubens' original. Similarly, the exuberance of Rubens' brushwork is in stark relief to Arman's anonymous assemblage of limp bodies. Their dolls' painted faces give none of the passions in Rubens' painting away; their deformed, eerie imitations of the human form stress the absolute eeriness of the subject. There are certain conscious parallels. The downward pull of Rubens' composition is mimicked by the increasingly dense crush of limbs towards the bottom. In a range of sizes, their bodies are plaited, and face different directions, looking up, down and sideways haphazardly. Arman embraced chance - as a mark of this, in 1958 he even decided to change his name from Armant, in accordance with a printing error. (An appropriate extra touch of irony, Rubens' Massacre of the Innocents had been misattributed to one of Rubens' assistants until it was sold by Sotheby's in 2001).

In his rendition, Arman is zooming in one of the many intriguing details in Rubens' masterpiece - the most important detail perhaps, the heap of dead children. From amid the pasty mixture of greyish-whites, beiges and salmon pinks, in the Accumulation, details also gradually emerge. A face punctured with holes as big as its eye-sockets. A remnant of woollen hair, or the incisions of a plastic comb-over; a groin poking forward, shorn of legs. Through the process of accumulation, destruction and assembly, Arman suggests a chilling parallel between Herod's act of mass-destruction and the mass-consumerism of the modern world.

In 1961, the year that Massacre de Innocents I was made, Arman made his debut in the United States. In doing so he brought to the nascent American Pop Art scene a particularly European edge and became swiftly involved in a lively reciprocation of ideas with American contemporaries such as Warhol and Lichtenstein. Predating Warhol's seminal forays into reproduction and seriality that he first explored in his Campbell's Soup exhibition at the Ferus Gallery in 1962, Arman's Massacre des Innocents I should be seen as the very seed germ of Pop, the art movement that brought about the greatest aesthetic change in the second half of the last century. Moreover, this knowing piece is loaded with the weight of its historical context. It looks back to the realities of an exhausted Europe, still in the process of recovery from World War II. So, in its mausoleum-cum-museum case, Massacre des Innocents I is a brave and deeply moving image of aftermath. As a finely-tuned extension of his aesthetic of detritus, Massacre des Innocents I is an investigation into the aftermath of a specifically named masterpiece, and the aftermath of painting in general.