The New Realism

In the mid 1950s artists in Europe and America began to reject the autonomy of Abstraction. Motivated by the post-war rise in consumerism and mass production, artists such as the Paris-based Nouveau Réalists sought alternative forms of expression that engaged directly with the grittiness of modern life. Calling for 'new approaches to the perception of the real', artists such as Arman, César, Martial Raysse and Jean Tinguely found a new expressive vocabulary through the use of found objects or 'readymades'. Raysse collected plastic consumer goods, enclosing them in totem-like containers stacked one on top of the other. César visited scrap yards, selecting pre-compressed car parts to present in specific configurations. Using actual objects rather than their representations, the group made a 'direct expression of a whole sector of modern life, that of the city, the street, the factory, of mass production'. Responding to the waste of consumerism, the Nouveau Réalists paradoxically also acted to preserve it. Contemporary consumer products were encapsulated for posterity or transformed into astute assemblages.

Whilst in many ways maintaining a stance similar to the Nouveau Réalists, their American counterparts, the Neo-Dadaists and later the Pop artists, took a more celebratory approach to their immediate urban environment. John Chamberlain, like César, used found car parts, although he presented them as things of beauty, playing with the painterly quality of their brightly coloured surfaces. Fascinated with mass production, Pop artists such as Andy Warhol and Claus Oldenburg concerned themselves with ideas of abundance and replacement - however many cans of soup are consumed, there will always be more on the supermarket shelf

Robert Rauschenberg Almanac, 1962, Oil, acrylic and silkscreen on canvas support: 2443 x 1524 mm painting

© Robert Rauschenberg/VAGA, New York and DACS, London 2002