VISUAL ARTS + MUSEUMS

The Menil Collection presents the exhibition Leaps into the Void: Documents of Nouveau Réalist Performance. On view March 19, 2010 through August 8, 2010.

Nouveau Réalisme, translated as “New Realism,” was an artistic movement centered in Paris that took place in the early 1960s. With pyrotechnics, exploding pigment, blowtorches, lacerated décollage, and found materials, it is characterized by a paradoxical emphasis on notions of deconstruction and accumulation. Founded by art critic Pierre Restany, and led by Yves Klein along with artists Niki de Saint Phalle, Jean Tinguely, Martial Raysse, Christo, Daniel Spoerri, and Arman, among others, members believed direct and aggressive physical explorations and the use of discarded materials from everyday life in the tradition of Dada, achieved a more truthful understanding of modern society.

As the group proclaimed in the First Manifesto of Nouveau Réalisme, “if one succeeds at reintegrating oneself with the real, one achieves transcendence, which is emotion, sentiment, and finally, poetry.”

Leaps into the Void draws from the Menil’s strong holdings of work and material from the archives and collection that document the movement’s ephemeral aspects, perhaps most famously epitomized by Yves Klein’s “Leap into the Void.” The photograph by Harry Shunk, capturing the artist hurling himself from a Parisian rooftop, will be exhibited alongside other documents of the jump, including Klein’s publication emulating the Journal du Dimanche, which he inserted as a guerrilla intervention into newspaper stands on the streets of Paris.

Archival photo documentation of Jean Tinguely’s self-destructing sculpture that went up in flames in a square in Milan, to commemorate the ten-year anniversary of the founding of Nouveau Réalisme, will also be on display, alongside a 1966 film by Francois de Menil of the construction and deconstruction of HON, a monumental sculpture installed at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm by Niki de Saint Phalle, Jean Tinguely, and Per Olof Ultvedt.

Organized by Michelle White, assistant curator, the show will provide a unique chance to highlight the temporality of a lesser-known avant-garde movement. Actively engaged with other conceptual and performance-based ways of making art as they were emerging in the United States at that time, such as like Fluxus, Assemblage and Pop Art, Nouveau Réalisme was a brief but influential moment in the history of modern art.

Pictured: Harry Shunk Saut, detail dans le vide ( Leaps into the Void), 1960, Silver gelatin 10-3/4 x 13-7/8 inches The Menil Collection, Houston. Photo: Shunk-Kender © Roy Lichtenstein Foundation. (full image, below).