Filmed between 1993 and 2000, these interviews are a valuable eyewitness account of the genesis of Nouveau Réalisme and all it represented in the context of immediate postwar period. All four of these artists were among the founders of the movement, having signed the manifesto in 1960 and 1961. With simplicity tinged occasionally with prankishness, they describe the experiments which made their urban, industrialized environment the source of a new form of artistic expression.
The compression of César, The poster shredding of Hains and Villéglé, and the "trap paintings" of Spoerri are each powerful and radical demonstration of Nouveau Réalisme, which Pierre Restany, the art critic who launched the movement, considered "embody the optimistic metaphor of European consumer society."
Lasting from the late 1950s to the mid-1960s, New Realism was part of an overall drive to renew artistic forms and themes in a booming consumer and industrial society, in reaction to the immediate post-war period: Neo-Dada, Pop Art, Fluxus, Zero Group, New Realists... Klein, Hains, Villeglé, Tinguely, César, Arman, Spoerri, Raysse, Dufrêne, Rotella, Niki de Saint Phalle, Deschamps, Christo - dubbed the "New Realists"* by the art critic Pierre Restany - held many group shows and happenings. They integrated scraps of the everyday urban industrial world into their works (fences, barrels, plastic items, rubbish, cars or traffic signs...) -- Compressions by César, Accumulations by Arman, scraped and slashed posters by Hains and Villeglé, Assemblages of ordinary plastic items by Raysse, Trap-Pictures by Spoerri, sculptures that self-destruct by Tinguely, Shootings by Niki de Saint Phalle... - in a truly radical approach which has now been forgotten.
