Eva Aeppli (1925−2015)

Born in Zofingen on 2nd May 1925, Eva Aeppli grew up with her parents and three siblings in Basel. There, she attended the Rudolf Steiner School, which her father had co-founded. During the Second World War she attended courses at Basel’s School of Arts and Crafts and created her first fabric figures and glove puppets, which she sold through various outlets.

She and Jean Tinguely met at the School of Arts and Crafts, their daughter Miriam was born on 27th January 1950 and they married on 10th May 1951. Two years earlier Aeppli had begun what was to be a long and close friendship with Daniel Spoerri, whom the newly-weds followed to Paris. There Aeppli began producing fabric pictures and charcoal drawings, most of which were of people, many of them gaunt figures in a gloomy setting.

She created the first of her Les Livres de Vie, which eventually would comprise fifteen volumes, in 1954. These scrapbooks containing invitations to exhibitions, photos of friends, letters, tickets, drawings, notes and documents of all kinds, including a draft will, paint a vivid picture of Aeppli’s network of friends and fellow artists during this period. They also form the common thread in a life that in all other respects was one of constant change.

Aeppli separated from Tinguely in 1960, when she moved to Omaha, Nebraska, to live with her new husband, the American lawyer Samuel Mercer. The years that followed saw the creation of her second major block of works: large-format paintings done in oil on canvas, most of them showing numerous heads – skulls, but also stylised faces. They are morbidly redolent of death-bed portraits and of the photographs of mounds of corpses familiar to us from war zones and concentration camps.

Aeppli created her first textile sculptures – life-size figures with hauntingly expressive faces and long, slim hands – in the mid-sixties. She also produced single figures seated in armchairs like silent sentinels keeping watch over the world. Her fascination with astrology led her to create a range of figural groups, the first of which, called The Ten Planets, was exhibited at the 1976 Venice Biennale. All that she retained of those figures, however, was the heads, which in 1990 she had cast in bronze. Aeppli went on to produce still more groups of heads made of fine fabrics and subsequently cast in bronze – heads whose physiognomies capture deeply felt emotions.

Her last group of works dating from 1990 and 1991 consists of sculptures created together with Tinguely: morbid figures like the Hommage à Käthe Kollwitz (Kunstmuseum Solothurn). She also collaborated with other artists like Jean-Pierre Raynaud and Daniel Spoerri. Eva Aeppli died on 4th May 2015, just two days after her ninetieth birthday.

Roger Bordier on Tinguely’s Works on View at the Exhibition ‘Le Mouvement’

‘His animated works are, after Calder’s mobiles and for that matter in an altogether different direction, the most important achievement with respect to movement and the transformable work. They open a very vast field to present experiments, and one can say that Tinguely has indeed laid the basis for a new art adapted to the classical formula of the painting. Its elements, rounds and bars, move smoothly, pass in front of one another, create and recreate ceaselessly new figures thanks in particular to the use of a special small electric motor. These elements, too, are set in motion differently, they don’t rotate at the same rate, the transmission by rubber further increases the possibilities of irregularity of speed, et cetera. (…)

Since then he has again turned to the conquest of the three dimensions by obliging these same reliefs to occupy the whole space. From this point of view his most curious achievement up to now is the Sculpture méta-mécanique automobile which can be wound up like a child’s toy and moves all by itself, gaily waving in all directions and never in the same way (thanks again to that refusal of synchronous movement) its rods, circles, semi-circles, et cetera with their yellow, red, white colours. Tinguely has in short produced an abstract mechanical dance, and this is an application about which we shall have more to say.’

Yves Klein (1928–1962)

The painter, sculptor, and performance artist Yves Klein is best known for his monochrome paintings, many of them painted in bold, radiant, ultramarine. Klein grew up in Paris and Nice. He was not only an artist, but also a successful judoka.

After numerous stays abroad, including in Great Britain, Spain, and Japan, he settled in Paris in 1955 and there made the acquaintance of the art critic Pierre Restany. So fond was Klein of the blue that he obtained by combining ultramarine pigment with a resin binder that in 1960 he had it patented as International Klein Blue (I.K.B.). In 1957 he began staging happenings – sometimes accompanied by music – called Anthropometries, in the course of which female models were painted with his signature blue paint and then imprinted themselves on large sheets of paper.

The goal that Klein had set himself was that of ‘immaterial sensibility’. His exhibition ‘Le Vide’ (‘La Spécialisation de la sensibilité à lʼétat matière première en sensibilité picturale stabilisé’) at the Galerie Iris Clert in 1958, like his Leap into the Void of 1960, likewise attracted considerable attention. He also experimented with the elements fire, water, and air. It was in this context that he created his Cosmogenies, which were influenced by wind and rain, as well as his fire paintings.

Klein was a member of the Nouveaux Réalistes, a group that came into being in Paris in 1960. He was also part of a close-knit network of European artists that included members of the ZERO group as well as various Italian artists such as Piero Manzoni. In 1958 and 1959 Klein worked on the interior design of the music theatre in Gelsenkirchen built by the architect Werner Ruhnau, for which he developed monumental, blue sponge reliefs. Klein died prematurely of a heart attack in 1962.

Pontus Hultén (1924–2006)

Pontus Hultén was born in Stockholm in 1924. After studying art for a year in Copenhagen, he switched to the University of Stockholm, where from 1945 to 1951 he studied art history and ethnography.

He went on to work for museums and exhibitions in Sweden and Paris, as well as producing various films. Hultén was appointed director of the new Moderna Museet in Stockholm in 1959 and remained there until 1973. He then became the founding director of a whole succession of museums and institutions of renown: the Musée Nationale d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou (1973–1981), MOCA, Los Angeles (1981–1982), the Institut des Hautes Etudes en Arts Plastiques, Paris (1983–1992), the Palazzo Grassi, Venice (1985–1990), the Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Bonn (1990–1994), and the Museum Jean Tinguely, Basel (1995–1997).

Hultén was the curator of some of the twentieth century’s ground-breaking exhibitions: he was involved in the organisation of ‘Le Mouvement’ of 1955 at the Galerie Denise René and of ‘Bewogen Beweging’ of 1960–1962 at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Moderna Museet in Stockholm, and the Louisiana in Denmark, and he also curated the shows ‘HON – en katedral’ of 1966 at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, ‘The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age’ of 1968 at the MoMA, New York, and ‘Futurismo e futurismi’ of 1986 at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice. Together with Jean Clair, moreover, he curated the first retrospective of the works of Marcel Duchamp, which opened at the Centre Pompidou in 1977.

Hultén opened the museum to experimental exhibition formats as well as pioneering the idea of a peripheral programme of readings, film screenings, and concerts. He cultivated personal contacts to numerous artists, promoting their careers early on, and following their development thereafter. He also possessed a large art collection of his own, which a year before his death he gifted to the Moderna Museet. Those parts of Hultén’s archive that concern Jean Tinguely are now housed in the archive of the Museum Tinguely in Basel.

Nouveaux Réalistes

It was the French art critic Pierre Restany who persuaded the group of artists who had gathered in Yves Klein’s apartment on 27 October 1960 to form an avant-garde group committed to Nouveau Réalisme. The group’s manifesto, designed by Yves Klein and executed in the colours blue, pink, and gold, was signed initially by Arman, François Dufrêne, Raymond Hains, Yves Klein, Martial Raysse, Daniel Spoerri, Jean Tinguely and Jacques Villeglé, later to be joined by César, Christo, Gérard Deschamps, Mimmo Rotella, and Niki de Saint Phalle. In terms of artistic praxis, the Nouveaux Réalistes were a heterogeneous bunch, what they had in common was their incorporation of found materials and everyday objects into works of art. These ranged from the poster designs of the Affichists (Dufrêne, Hains, Villeglé) to the use of objets trouvés in the collages and assemblages of Arman, Spoerri, de Saint Phalle, and Tinguely. ‘Nouveau Réalisme = a new approach to the capacity to perceive the real’ – proclaimed their slogan. Their aim was to set themselves apart from abstract art by returning to the reality of everyday life, their ultimate goal being a synthesis of art and life. Their ‘actions-spectacles’ were intended to provoke spontaneous, direct involvement on the part of their audiences. The neo-avant-garde movement ended with the celebration of its tenth anniversary in Milan in 1970.

Niki de Saint Phalle (1930–2002)

Niki de Saint Phalle, daughter of a French father and an American mother, grew up mainly in the United States. After leaving school she worked initially as a model, but at the age of eighteen ran away with Harry Mathews. The couple married and moved to Paris, where they lived from 1952. They also had two children together. De Saint Phalle’s first paintings, which had everyday objects integrated into them, date from 1953.

De Saint Phalle and her husband first met Eva Aeppli and Jean Tinguely in 1956. In 1960, after divorcing Mathews, Niki de Saint Phalle moved into Tinguely’s studio on the Impasse Ronsin. The two artists were henceforth a couple, but married only in 1971.

De Saint Phalle first attracted notice in artistic circles with her ‘shootings’, which she herself called Tirs, of 1961. These were plaster reliefs with objets trouvés and bags full of paint built into them, which the artist shot at with a rifle in skilfully staged ‘shootings’, some of which were public.

From 1963 Niki de Saint Phalle and Tinguely lived in Soisy-sur-École near Fontainebleau. It was there that she began producing figures and reliefs of women and monsters, executed as assemblages made of papier-mâché, often with woollen yarn glued onto them. The first Nanas made of wool and fabric also date from this period. De Phalle at first described these figures as symbols of happy, liberated women, but later cast them rather as precursors of a new, matriarchal age.

Her first retrospective took place at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1967, the year in which she began making figures out of polyester. De Saint Phalle later incurred serious respiratory problems as a result of her inhalation of polyester vapours and dust while making these works.

De Saint Phalle and Tinguely worked together not only on large-scale projects like Dylaby, Hon, and Le Cyclop, in which several artists had a hand, but they also created numerous works involving just the two of them. Their Le Paradis fantastique, for example, was a French government commission for Expo 67 in Montreal, while their Fontaine Stravinsky in Paris was unveiled in 1983. Tinguely also provided the technical know-how for de Saint Phalle’s projects Jardin des Tarots, Le Golem, and Le Dragon, as well as helping her with setting up. De Saint Phalle began building her Tarot Garden, the apogee of her work with walk-in installations and sculptural ensembles, in 1979. She would continue working on it for a further fifteen years before it was finally opened.

The artist suffered recurrent bouts of pulmonary disease as well as rheumatoid arthritis. She died in California at the age of seventy-one in 2002.