Background

Pierre Restany was born on June 24, 1930, in Amélie-les-Bains, Pyrenees-Orientales, France. He grew up in Morocco.

Education

Pierre Restany attended the Lycée Henri-IV. He was educated at the Institut d’Études Politiques (English: Institutes of Political Studies), the University of Pisa, and Trinity College.

Career

Pierre Restany began his career writing for art magazines and was the Paris correspondent for the Italian magazine Vita from 1957 to 1962 and for the Prague publications Vytvame Prace and Vytvame Umeni from 1964 to 1968. Also during this time, from 1958 to 1968, he was the art critic for Combat in Paris and co-edited Plexus for five years during the 1960s.

While in Milan, he regularly wrote for Domus magazine. The 1960s saw Restany’s rise to prominence as a founder of the New Realism movement whose artists sought to express their vision of reality in new ways that lay somewhere between Dadaism and pop art; Restany felt that art should "create a language based on the industrial world of today."

Inspired in 1955 when he first met artist Yves Klein, Restany was the first to define and articulate the principles of New Realism, which encompassed the works of such artists as Jean Tinguely, Jacques de Villegié, Daniel Spoerri. Christo, and Raymond Hains. He opened his own gallery in Paris, Galerie J, to exhibit their works and participated in international exhibitions.

His writings also helped define the movement and include over sixty publications, among them F. Koenig (1960), Les nouveaux réalistes (1968), Yves Klein: le monochrome (1974), Les objets-plus (1989), Nouveaux realists anni '60: la memora viva di Milano (1997), Avec le nouveau réalisme, sur l’autre face de Part (2000), and his autobiography, Une vie dans l’art (1983).

Achievements

• Pierre Restany was an influential art critic who is most remembered as the champion of the French Nouveau Réalisme (New Realism) movement. He helped found the Domus Academy in Milan, a post-graduate research institute for fashion and design. He made a unique contribution to Domus magazine.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Botero

    (A study of the work of Latin American artist Fernando Bot...)

    1984
  • Dani Karavan

    (The public commissioned monuments and environmental sculp...)

    1992
  • Yves Klein: Le Monochrome 1974
  • Les objets-plus 1989
  • Nouveaux réalistes anni '60: La memoria viva di Milano 1997
  • SITE: Architecture as Art 1980
  • Karel Appel 1985
  • Lyrisme et Abstraction 1960

Views

In 1960, Pierre Restany coined the label Nouveau Realisme to describe a group of artists with a postmodern bent. By returning to "realism" as a category, he was referring to the 19th-century artistic and literary movement which aimed to describe ordinary everyday reality without any idealization. It is also thanks to Pierre Restany that New Realism was defended on the international scene in the face of an emerging American art form, Pop Art, and financially supported by a network of dealers and collectors.

Connections

Pierre Restany was married four times.

Spouse:

Josianne de Koche Restany

ex-spouse:

Aline Dallier

ex-spouse:

Jeannine de Goldschmidt-Rothschild

Acquaintance:

Yves Klein

References

• Contemporary Authors
  2011
• Pierre Restany: L'alchimiste de l'art
  1998