In 1956, just a few weeks after his first major solo exhibition at the Galerie Denise René in Paris, Jean Tinguely took part in a one-night-only Spectacle empirique at the Théâtre des Trois Baudets, a variety theatre in Montmartre run by one of the era’s premier showmen, Jacques Canetti. Six of Tinguely’s ‘paintings’ were staged, denominated thus in the event poster, and in the event program (figs. 1–2). To see Tinguely’s works described as ‘paintings’ might strike us as odd, since Tinguely went on to achieve renown during his lifetime for his sculpture, not his painting. His painting has been considered by scholars as, at most, a secondary component of his art.¹ Crucially, however, at both the art gallery and the variety theatre in 1956, Tinguely’s works were presented as ‘paintings’.

This striking historical fact helps account for the mystery of their presence—and Tinguely’s own— onstage that night as part of Canetti’s Spectacle empirique (fig. 3). This event, which took place on 3 December 1956, has barely been mentioned in the literature on Tinguely.² It has not been analysed in any depth, perhaps because art historians lacked the documentation, or perhaps because Tinguely’s paintings, as well as the artist, seemed out of place on the stage—the other artists were performing artists—or perhaps because this event seemed like an outlier within his oeuvre, with no larger significance or consequence. What I would like to establish here is the period logic and impact of Tinguely’s foray into the entertainment world as a painter, which was done with the ‘authorization’ of the Galerie Denise René, according to a note in the event program, from the perspectives of Tinguely, Canetti, and Tinguely’s fellow artists, including painters and non-painters, friends and foes.

For Tinguely, I argue, the event was decisive: first, the variety-theatre venue recontextualized his works, underscoring their resonances with Futurism and Dada, instead of their debt and belonging, first and foremost, to the currents of geometric abstraction and Kinetic art championed at the Galerie Denise René, and especially the techno-optimism of Victor Vasarely; second, while this event introduced Tinguely and his paintings to a large non-art-world audience for the first time, it highlighted their specifically art-critical impulse, without however eclipsing their philosophical ambition.

Tinguely had already shown abstract-drawing machines in an art gallery in Paris in 1956 (fig. 4). But earlier that year, major spectacles of romantic, humanist painting, both onscreen and onstage, figurative and abstract, had obtained a new cultural prominence. Pablo Picasso’s appearance in Henri-Georges Clouzot’s film Le Mystère Picasso and that of Georges Mathieu on the stage of the Sarah Bernhardt Theatre in Paris can be taken as exemplary. The excitement of these spectacles stemmed from the charismatic presence of the artists; their incredible speed and ease of execution; their heroic assumption of the risks of artistic failure and public humiliation; society’s own psychic investment in the nobility of painters and painting, the ur-medium of art; and the suspense and dramatic irony of the appearance of the finished painting. Significantly, in both of these major, prior spectacles of 1956, the paintings were destroyed; the creation of the painting in public was the work of art, not the resulting object. These were performances of painting, and performance tests, that substantiated the very high social status of virtuoso artists, while also exposing the artists to public scrutiny, criticism, and doubt.

The new spectacles of painting were so widely seen and intensively discussed in Paris, France, and abroad that even the non-art-world audience gathered in the small Montmartre theatre could not have failed to appreciate Tinguely’s newest satirical critique, titled Méta Mecanique Sonore: an obviously art-historically referential and amateurishly cobbled together art-machine of countless components and intricate complexity that could go on churning, gear spurring gear spurring gear spurring gear, end-less-ly, that is, for its own sake, without progress or product, and forever, or at least as long as the painting remained connected to the electric outlet (fig. 5).3 This was a self-reflexive grande machine in the nineteenth-century tradition of the French Salon that Tinguely submitted to the Salon des réalités nouvelles of 1955 after having been specially invited to contribute.4 It was a sarcastic pun on that self-serious, labour-intensive, large-format type of didactic history painting (such as Thomas Couture’s The Romans of the Decadence, Salon of 1847) long mocked by artists identifying themselves with modernism. Tinguely’s grande machine poked fun at his own artistic ambition, as well as at the salon as an antiquated institution.

The spectators in the theatre might not have known about this painting’s salon origins, but the event program advertised the high cultural status, artistic character, and commercial value of Tinguely’s works in its acknowledgement of the Galerie Denise René. On the stage, as well as at the salon and the gallery, this machine registered as a painting, but in a primarily rhetorical manner, and only barely. Indeed, the oil that could have been abundantly applied—for instance, to lubricate the machine’s gears—was likewise missing from the surface of the painting.⁵ Altogether, the work exposed the weaknesses of the medium of painting in general—especially painting’s silence, stasis, flatness, and conventionality—without taking advantage of the medium’s many strengths. Tinguely’s painting in matte black and white possessed none of the sumptuous lustre, luminosity, chromatic range, and intensity that painting, especially oil painting, can produce. Not that such visual effects could have been visible from the auditorium of the theatre: the spotlights on the stage had the effect of heightening the tonal contrast between the white cardboard cutouts and everything else, which was pictorially unified by Tinguely using black paint, even as the spotlights also revealed the three-dimensionality and discreteness of the found objects against the black background (figs. 3, 5).

The very same work is now in the collection of the Kunsthaus Zürich, titled Relief méta-mécanique sonore I (fig. 6). It remains resolutely anti-painterly, an affront to our society’s enduring aesthetic and psychological investment in brilliant colour, expressive brushstroke, and the aura of paint. Its pair, produced in the same year and titled Relief méta-mécanique sonore II Relief méta-mécanique, is conserved at the Museum Tinguely in Basel (fig. 7). The one in Basel differs slightly in terms of content and composition: it has one less bottle, one less can, and a funnel and a saw instead; the same number of white-painted shapes are also larger in absolute and relative terms and more dominant. Still, the overall visual impact is similar. This is painting done—as the art historian Robert Pincus wrote of the American artists Edward and Nancy Kienholz—‘on a scale that competes with the world’.⁶ Notably, this includes, I would argue, the rival attractions of the cinema, theatre, and new cinematic and theatrical painting exemplified by Picasso and Mathieu. The wide horizontal format, the incorporation of motors and machine-made objects, the grisaille, the lack of a central compositional focus, the even distribution of simultaneously kinetic visual stimuli, the invisibility of their power source, the unknowability of its logic, indeed, its probable absurdity, all encourage the spectator to think allegorically about this panoramic painting. The prefix meta is in the title.

That these paintings, when electrified, changed appearance while also producing sound must have prompted the viewer to spend time with them and search for the consonance of sight and sound. Although the paintings can no longer be activated and displayed in motion for conservation reasons, there is a video of Relief méta-mécanique sonore II Relief méta-mécanique in motion on the website of the Tinguely Museum (video).⁷ Because of the complexity of the composition, both artistically and musically, and the limits of human perception, the most a viewer can catch at any moment is the sight of one sound being made at the point of contact between one object and another. Even if the viewer remains fixated on that focal point, however, the next sight and the next sound are inevitably different: the teeth of the gears are handmade and irregular, the gears differently sized, the objects imperceptibly wear each other down. It is therefore impossible to see that same first sight of sound again in both principle and experience despite the expectations of repetition and sameness that the plethora of circular, rotating gears generates. Tinguely has long been compared by art critics and historians to Heraclitus, the ancient Greek philosopher of flux.⁸ These paintings are like Heraclitus’s famous river, into which a person cannot step twice. They are enigmatic thought experiments that require first-hand observation and produce an insight about instability that we recognize from Heraclitus. From the standpoint of Heraclitus’s river, Tinguely’s contribution is to extend the realm of inquiry beyond the natural world and human condition to include the man-made machines that have altered the environment and humanity.

Third—to return to my argument about the event’s impact on Tinguely’s trajectory—while painters such as Picasso and Mathieu were performing spectacles of painting, this event elevated Tinguely’s own status beyond that of a ‘mere’ painter, or even sculptor, and regrouped him with a number of young, up-andcoming, multitalented performing artists: Alexandre or Alejandro Jodorowsky, a mime who was also a poet; Michel Magne, a musician who was also a composer, and a highly controversial one at that; and Jean-Michel Rankovitch, an actor who was also a playwright. All had resisted the disciplinary and professional specialization enforced by formal education and the market.

While grouped with performing artists, Tinguely did not realize his painting from start to finish on the stage in the manner of a Mathieu or Picasso. Though he appeared onstage, he disappeared offstage, when the lights dimmed for the spectacle, in which the painting starred alone (figs. 3, 5). It was his painting, not he himself, that moved like an acrobatic action painter, while its black-and-white palette and iconography of bottles and cans recalled Cubist painting and sculpture and its progeny, only to emphasize their abstraction from the fundamental, determining reality of mechanization, and, worse perhaps, their obfuscation of it. The celebration of the virtuoso painter in spectacles of more-or-less conservative painting—conservative in terms of materials, techniques, and preconceptions—made it harder to see the myriad ways in which most other people in the industrializing world were being denied the right to self-realization through creative work. Tinguely was refusing to participate in that particular charade in his capacity as a painter and—I will add—as an anarchist.

Tinguely forced a general reconsideration of what painting was and what a painter did, practically and intellectually. In 1959 Yves Klein would describe how Tinguely’s drawing machines had rendered abstract art obsolete, as the invention of photography had realism in the nineteenth century.⁹ It is usually Klein’s influence upon Tinguely that is emphasized in art history, but I think the direction of influence was greater the other way around.

Lastly—to complete this argument about this event’s impact on Tinguely—this appearance onstage gave him a new professional experience, skill set, and network of contacts, which were the envy of his peers in painting and became a resource for a couple of lucky painter-friends, including Klein. At the very end, I will conclude with two further theatrical acts, which I think should be seen as the outcome of this event.

To return to our survey of perspectives: Canetti, for his part, conceived of Spectacle empirique from the start as a one-night-only event. Curiously, unlike the other shows he put on in his theatre, this one was not advertised in the press. On the contrary, it was indicated in the newspapers that the theatre would be closed that evening.¹⁰ This fact makes it even more surprising that his theatre of around 225 seats ended up being more than half full that night.¹¹ Many members of the audience were especially invited, and some must have seen the posters plastered throughout Paris. These posters were not produced by Canetti—as was his practice for his properly publicized spectacles—but rather made at the direction of the aforementioned daring composer Michel Magne, with whom Canetti had already collaborated.¹² Canetti was not only the founder and director of the Théâtre des Trois Baudets; he was also a music executive first at Polydor and then at the Phillips record label, where Magne had just released a record of songs he had written about Paris.¹³

Magne, then only twenty-six years old, was already notorious in Paris for two recent works: a concert of infrasound music at the Salle Gaveau in 1954, and his Symphonie humaine at the Palais Chaillot in 1955.¹⁴ Magne was then experimenting with new instruments and recording technologies and discovering the physical effects of infrasound, or low-frequency sound below the range of human audibility. At the first concert, no one could hear the sound, which was completely inaudible, but people could soon feel it in their heads and stomachs. The audience was suddenly stricken with vertigo, stomach pain, and the urge to run to the toilet. When people tried to leave, Magne had the exits blocked by his brother and his brother’s rugby team, generating a screaming, fighting pandemonium within the auditorium, where the Lettrist Isidore Isou and the legendary director Abel Gance rose to Magne’s defence. The second concert was grander, involving 110 musicians and 200 chorists, and even more provocative. Magne induced migraines in the audience, an irate critic reported, and played recordings of Hitler’s speeches backwards to make Hitler ‘swallow his tongue’, as Magne had heard his father curse during the war.¹⁵ Hitler’s voice was instantly recognizable, but his words nonsensical. Still, they stung at the Palais Chaillot, where only fifteen years earlier Hitler had famously had himself photographed—with his favourite architect and sculptor at his side—on his triumphal tour of the city after the Nazi defeat of France (fig. 8).

While Canetti and Magne might be unfamiliar figures to us now and seem far afield from the debates and concerns of the art world, they were extremely innovative and influential, as well as the key figures behind the scenes at the Spectacle empirique. Taking their perspectives into account makes it possible to see Tinguely’s paintings in new, historically contextualized and logical ways. Why did Canetti and Magne embrace Tinguely’s paintings at the event they orchestrated?

Spectacle empirique must have been Canetti’s term. Canetti did not have any special interest in visual art. He was passionate about music, particularly the chanson française, the old-time, nostalgic, specifically French, popular, poetic song, sometimes more spoken than sung, which Canetti helped to revive during the 1950s and brought to the stage at the Théâtre Trois Baudets. It is noteworthy that his ‘theatre’ was not classed among the city’s theatres, cabarets, or music halls in the newspapers, but among the chansonniers. ¹⁶ This genre of theatrical entertainment, combined with its location in Montmartre, recalled the long-gone, world-famous, and much-imitated cabarets artistiques of the 1880s such as the Chat Noir, where the performers, like the audiences, were mostly artists.¹⁷ This was also the model that Hugo Ball had in mind at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich.¹⁸ Canetti’s revival of the chanson française, as well as his foundation of a Montmartre variety theatre, can be seen as part of reconstruction campaign that the historian Rosemary Wakeman has described on the level of French state urban policy as ‘nostalgic modernism’.¹⁹ Canetti was remaking, as much as one private individual and one establishment could, the Paris—symbolic and actual—that the Nazis had threatened to destroy.

Paris was a ‘magic island’, as the critic Harold Rosenberg wrote in 1940, shortly after the Fall of Paris; more than merely the capital of a country, it was ‘the Holy Place of our time’, ‘the International of culture’, modernism and modernity itself.²⁰ Paris had been the refuge of artists, intellectuals, bohemians, persecuted foreigners and exiles, seeking freedom, enlightenment, and like-minded community—including the Bulgarianborn, English-raised, and Austrian-, German-, and Swiss-educated Canetti, who was born Jewish and forced to leave Germany when the Nazis rose to power.²¹ He made his home in Paris, like countless other refugees, enrolling in HEC, the grande école business school, but not finishing his studies because he became besotted with the music hall and landed a dream job at Polydor. After the Fall of Paris, Canetti fled first to the ‘Free Zone’ and then to Algiers, where he created a troupe of singers: the Théâtre des Trois Ânes (Theatre of Three Donkeys), which toured North Africa, raising money for Combat, the Resistance based in non-occupied France. When Canetti returned to Paris, searching for a Montmartre venue for his theatre, he was defending, as he had done during the war, the cosmopolitan, modernist utopia of Paris that Rosenberg and others feared could not survive the Occupation.

Although I described Canetti as a showman at the start, he was the opposite of an egoist, and art, not profit, was his primary concern. He held the public from which he had come in high esteem, as a lover and connoisseur of music. His theatre instantiated the image of Paris as a centripetal ‘magic island’, as was the case at the Spectacle empirique, where of the performers only Rankovitch was a native Parisian; Tinguely was from Switzerland, Jodorowsky from Chile, and Magne from Normandy. All had been drawn to Paris for the same, enduring reasons: the desire for fearless artistic experimentation and social and intellectual freedom and community.

At the theatre, Canetti had his own artistic agenda: to elevate the minor, or folk, tradition of the chanson to the status of art. Canetti insisted upon calling his performers ‘artists’.²² Many of them such as Georges Brassens, Jacques Brel, Guy Béart, and Serge Gainsbourg would become stars of a very particular sort: they were auteur-compositeur-interprètes, songwriter-composer-singers, who wrote their own lyrics, composed their own music, and performed their own songs. Canetti later wrote that he was always attracted by ‘the artists composing themselves what they represent’.²³ Although Canetti did not identify as a Marxist—or a capitalist for that matter—he was staunchly opposed to the divisions of labour enforced by the corporate music industry, which he would eventually quit to start his own label. His championing of the auteur-compositeur-interprète preserved the integrity of the artist, while his theatre gave artists a platform from which to reach audiences and audiences a place to see artists live, counteracting the then increasing physical distance and the weakening of relations between artists and their audiences. Due to the explosion of new recording technologies, first electrical and then magnetic tape, it was becoming difficult to distinguish between recorded music and live broadcasts and attract audiences to come to the theatre, and pay for the theatre, when they could listen to ‘live’ or as-good-as-live music on records and the radio. Canetti was betting on the compatibility of live and recorded music, and the importance of artists in an age dominated by technology.

What did Canetti mean, then, by Spectacle empirique, the title that I have adopted for this essay? I think he wanted to challenge the conventional spectacleversus-art dichotomy and raise the status of spectacle, as well as intervene, quite possibly, in the newly fashionable discourse of spectacle. Since 1954, the literary critic Roland Barthes had been popularizing his structuralist, Marxist, and capitalized notion of spectacle to describe contemporary myths.²⁴ Soon enough, the Situationists would follow Barthes, arguably likewise underestimating the critical potential of spectacle and the critical capacity of spectators.²⁵ Spectacle empirique, by contrast, insisted on the experimental, experiential, revelatory, and social nature of spectacle, which connected different people to one another, and people to reality. Indeed, in such a modern, urban culture, spectatorship had always been the condition of participation in culture, whether art or music or theatre.²⁶

In Tinguely’s painting, Canetti and Magne probably saw an outstanding example of high art that experimented with non-musical sound, could command a stage without pandering to audience expectations or potentially serving as state or party propaganda, and that, moreover, confronted the same problems of the commodification and mechanization of art and artists that they were reckoning with in their work. To generalize about the three, one could say: their reaction to the machine’s dominance was not to refuse the machine but to enlist it, to better understand what only humans could do, and needed, to be fully human.

Tinguely’s paintings must have resonated with Canetti, for they would be featured again, only two weeks later, as part of the tenth anniversary celebration of the Trois Baudets. On this occasion, Canetti mounted Hi Fi: an old-fashioned variety show created by the young dramatist François Billetdoux that emphasized the disadvantages of the modern technology of the telephone.²⁷ Tinguely was included as part of Canetti’s line-up, his name appearing on the theatrical marquee, to the bottom left of the main spectacle. In her review of the celebratory event in Le Monde, Claude Sarraute recognized Canetti as ‘the [Daniel-Henry] Kahnweiler of the post-war chanson’.²⁸ Tinguely went unmentioned, but the presence of his paintings, and his inclusion within Canetti’s stable of artists, probably prompted the metaphor, given also the reputation that Canetti had earned during the last decade as a visionary supporter and promoter of aesthetically new and difficult artists. Once again, Tinguely’s paintings appeared with Magne’s music.²⁹ But this time as one of a number of acts surrounding Hi Fi, an ironic and comedic critique of ‘the noisy invention of [Alexander] Graham Bell’, as Sarraute wrote.³⁰ When the performers took their final bow, each person held one end of a telephone, rather than one another’s hands.³¹ The device that promised to connect people, Hi Fi revealed through a series of sketches and songs, was actually depressing, aggravating, alienating. Most French people agreed: in 1956, only eight percent of all households had a telephone.³² As historian Chantel de Gournay observed, ‘Paris spurns the telephone’.³³ At this theatre, unlike at Galerie Denise René, Tinguely’s paintings stood out as artworks that critiqued the pretences of painting and the machine from within, as well as humanity’s own self-sabotaging techno-optimism.

Let me now quickly conclude with two further theatrical ‘acts’: first, a forgotten failure, and second, a spectacular success. First, shortly after Spectacle empirique, Yves Klein sought to mount his own spectacle—a thirty-five-minute monochrome-and-monotone spectacle—and turned to Tinguely for help, no doubt because of Tinguely’s unique expertise within their artistic circle. Tinguely became Klein’s ‘manager’.³⁴ Tinguely employed the Anglicism and tried to stage and sell Klein’s spectacle around town: first to Canetti at the Trois Baudets. Canetti quickly said no. Then to Guénia Richez at La Fontaine des quatres saisons, an elegant, bourgeois cabaret theatre in the seventh arrondissement. No, she said. Finally, Tinguely asked Bruno Coquatrix to lend him the Olympia, the historic music hall, for one evening. No, he responded.³⁵ Maybe they refused because Klein—in the manner of Magne—wanted to shackle the spectators to their seats.³⁶ Tinguely might have failed Klein, but, as a ‘manager’, Tinguely demonstrated that a painter was not a solitary genius with a magical hand but a social creature with professional contacts, who helped his fellow artists implement their works.

Tinguely was more successful when Niki de Saint Phalle turned to him for help in accomplishing her idea of the Shooting Paintings.³⁷ He helped Saint Phalle assemble her first relief paintings and obtain a rifle from a nearby fairground shooting gallery.³⁸ When these paintings—stuffed with everything from spaghetti to eggs—were shot, they exploded, producing works that resembled the trendiest abstract paintings (fig.  9). Saint Phalle was not the only painter using weapons to make art in this style at that time, but she was the only one who shared her firepower, her creative power, with everyone else, including amateurs, among whom she counted herself. Except, of course, for Tinguely, whose then recent Métamatics—more robust, self-standing versions of the earlier drawing machines—encouraged people to make their own paintings (figs. 10–11).

In conclusion: one reason, I think, it is difficult to recognize Tinguely as a painter is because of everything he did—both in his own work and with others—to destroy that figure of authority and artistic identity. Although we hold Tinguely in high regard today as a sculptor, we might do well to recall Ad Reinhardt’s famous definition of sculpture from around this time as ‘something you bump into when you back up to look at a painting’.³⁹ When Tinguely advertised his Métamatics as ‘sculptures that paint’, it was arguably just another way of diminishing painting’s authority over us all.

1. See, for example, Marina Isgro, ‘Modernism in Motion: Jean Tinguely’s Meta-Mechanical Reliefs, 1954–59’, Art Journal 79/2 (2020), 6–23.
2. For references to the event, see Christina Bischofberger, Jean Tinguely, Catalogue Raisonné: Sculptures and Reliefs, 1954–1968 (Zürich: Edition Galerie Bruno Bischofberger, 1982), 54, 313; Pontus Hultén, Tinguely: Centre Georges Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne, 8 décembre 1988–27 mars 1989 (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1988), 380; Heidi E. Violand, ‘Jean Tinguely’s Kinetic Art or a Myth of the Machine Age’, PhD diss., Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, 1990, 49; and Stephanie Jennings Hanor, ‘Jean Tinguely: Useless Machines and Mechanical Performers, 1955–1970’, PhD, University of Texas at Austin, 2003, 28–29.
3. I concentrate on the sole ‘painting’ listed on the event program for which I have been able to find photographic documentation of its presence onstage. There is no reason to think that the other five works were not presented as announced on the program, but it is impossible to know how they were staged in the absence of further evidence.
4. For the facts that Tinguely was invited to contribute to the salon and submitted this work, see Violand, Jean Tinguely’s Kinetic Art, 45, 48.
5. Sandra Beate Reimann points out that Tinguely did not oil his machines and even gave instructions never to oil or grease his works. I am grateful to her sharing her knowledge with me.
6. Robert L. Pincus, On a Scale That Competes with the World: The Art of Edward and Nancy Reddin Kienholz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).
7. I am grateful to Angelica Tschachtli and Franca Candrian from the Kunsthaus Zürich for sharing the relevant exhibition history of Relief méta-mécanique sonore I.
8. Calvin Tomkins, ‘Profiles: Beyond the Machine’, The New Yorker, Feb. 10, 1962, 45. Violand, Jean Tinguely’s Kinetic Art, 66.
9. Yves Klein, Overcoming the Problematics of Art: The Writings of Yves Klein, trans. Klaus Ottman (Putman, CT: Spring Publications, 2007), 78.
10. ‘Les Programmes du lundi 3 décembre 1956’, Le Monde, 4 December 1956, 12.
11. Gérard Delassus, email message to author, 7 February 2025. Delassus is a friend, collaborator, and technical and musical assistant of Michel Magne. On the event program, Delassus is identified as ‘chef de bruiteurs’, or lead sound engineer. All translations are by author unless otherwise stated. I am deeply grateful to Delassus for conscientiously searching his memories and for answering my many questions about this now remote event only when he thought he could do so accurately.
12. Magne asked Gérard Delassus to create the poster. Delassus, email message to author, 7 February 2025.
13. See Renée Caron chante Michel Magne. n° 1 / orchestre sous la direction du compositeur, Philips (France), 1956 Bibliothèque nationale de France, département Audiovisuel, E-11050. Françoise Sagan is the author of the text.
14. My descriptions of these events rely upon the incredibly moving and beautiful graphic novel by Yann Le Quellec, Thomas Cadène, and Romain Ronzeau, Les Amants d’Hérouville: Une histoire vraie (Paris: Delcourt, 2021), which is based on the autobiography of Michel Magne, L’amour de vivre (Paris: Alain Lefeuvre, 1980), with the participation of Marie-Claude Magne and Magali Magne.
15. Le Quellec, Cadène, and Ronzeau, Les Amants d’Hérouville, unpaginated.
16. See, for instance, the listing in Le Monde, 31 December 1956, 6.
17. See John Houchin, ‘The Origins of the “Cabaret Artistique”’, in ‘French Theatre’, special issue, The Drama Review: TDR 28/1 (Spring 1984), 5–14.
18. See the reference to Aristide Bruant in Hugo Ball, Flight Out of Time (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 51.
19. Rosemary Wakeman, ‘Nostalgic Modernism and the Invention of Paris in the Twentieth Century’, French Historical Studies 27/1 (Winter 2004), 115–44.
20. Harold Rosenberg, ‘On the Fall of Paris’, Partisan Review 7/6 (November–December 1940), 440, 441.
21. The facts of Canetti’s life are drawn from his autobiography: Jacques Canetti, On cherche jeune homme aimant la musique (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1978).
22. Canetti, On cherche jeune homme, 140.
23. Canetti, On cherche jeune homme, 140.
24. Roland Barthes, Mythologies [1957], trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Noonday Press, 1972).
25. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle [1967], trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone, 1995).
26. Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (New York: Vintage Books, 1978).
27. The show ran from 18 December 1956 to 14 March 1957 for a total of eighty-seven performances. See Pierre-Marie Héron, ‘Œuvres de François Billetdoux: une chronologie’, Komodo 21/4 (2015), https:// komodo21.numerev.com/articles/revue-4/3019-oeuvres-de -francois-billetdoux.
28. Claude Sarraute, ‘Les Trois Baudets font Hi ... Fi!’, Le Monde, 19 January 1957, 12.
29. Jacques Canetti, Mes 50 ans de chansons françaises (Paris: Flammarion, 2008), 111.
30. Sarraute, ‘Les Trois Baudets font Hi ... Fi!’, 12.
31. See the photograph of the event accessible in the digitized database of Getty Images with Editorial Number 1412880675.
32. ‘Un peu plus d’un million de logements sont pourvus du téléphone en France’, Le Monde, 31 March 1956, 10.
33. Chantal De Gournay, ‘Paris Spurns the Telephone’, trans. Liz Libbrecht, Réseaux: The French Journal of Communication 2/2 (1994), 223–33.
34. Interview of Jean Tinguely by Dominique de Menil, ‘Jean Tinguely: Un superbon camarade’, in Jean Yves Mock and Véronique Legrand, Yves Klein: 3 mars–23 mai 1983, Musée national d’art moderne (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1983), 256. This story of Tinguely as ‘manager’ is drawn from this interview.
35. Tinguely and de Menil, ‘Jean Tinguely: Un superbon camarade’, 256.
36. Klein’s scenario was not realized in real life, but it was published in Yves Klein, ‘Sensibilité pure’, Dimanche, le journal d’un seul jour, 27 November 1960, 1–2, four pages on newspaper paper, Yves Klein Archives. Published in English in Klein, Overcoming the Problematics of Art, 106–7.
37. Niki de Saint Phalle, ‘Dear Jean’, in Hultén, Niki de Saint Phalle (Bonn: Kunst-und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland; Ostfildern: G. Hatje, 1992), 160.
38. Saint Phalle, ‘Dear Jean’, 160.
39. Reinhardt quoted in Lucy R. Lippard, Changing: Essays in Art Criticism (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1971), 120.

Photo Credits:

Fig. 1: Photo: ADER, Paris

Fig. 2: Museum Tinguely, Basel

Fig. 3: Photo: Keystone-France/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images

Fig. 4: © Museum Tinguely, Basel, photo: Christian Baur

Fig. 5: Photo: Keystone-France/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images

Fig. 6: © Kunsthaus Zürich, photo: Franca Candrian

Fig. 7: © Museum Tinguely, Basel, photo: Christian Baur

Fig.8: https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Bun desarchiv_Bild_183-H28708,_Paris,_Eiffelturm,_Besuch_Adolf_Hitler .jpg&oldid=845240889

Fig. 9: © J. Paul Getty Trust, photo: Shunk-Kender

Fig. 10: © Museum Tinguely, Basel, photo: Serge Hasenböhler

Fig. 11: Museum Tinguely, Basel, photo: Hans O. Rudberg

© 2025, ProLitteris, Zurich for the reproduced works by Jean Tinguely

AnnMarie Perl is a historian of modern and contemporary art. Her research focuses on the relationship between modern art and the overall culture in different and related national contexts, especially those of France and the United States. Her first book project, Showmanship: The Spectacularization of Painting in the US and Europe, 1920s–1960s, examines artworks that were dismissed as ‘spectacle’.

This contribution is published in conjunction with the conference ‘Jean Tinguely Revisited: Critical Rereadings and New Perspectives’, held from 20 to 22 March 2025.

Keywords

Performative painting

Spectacle empirique

Kinetic and mechanical art

Art and technology

Post-war avant-garde

Tinguely Studies, December 2025

Scholarly online journal

Published by Museum Tinguely, Basel

www.tinguely.ch

ISSN 3042-8858