Arman American-French, 1928-2005

Arman was born Armand Fernandez in Nice, France in 1928. He was inspired by Vincent van Gogh to sign his work with his first name only and a printer’s spelling mistake in 1958 led him to go by Arman.

Arman was a founding member of the Nouveau Réalisme group in 1960 alongside artists including Yves Klein and Jean Tinguely. Originally concerned with abstraction, Arman was very influenced by the emergence of Pop Art, and Nouveau Réalisme is often understood as a French equivalent of this movement.

His most famous works are the Poubelles series, or ‘dustbins’ - which presented piles of rubbish within vitrines as a critique of consumerism - and Accumulations. The latter series formed assemblages of objects like musical instruments, paintbrushes, and alarm clocks, inspired by Dadaist artists like Marcel Duchamp to elevate the everyday into high art.

Arman’s work appears in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Tate Gallery in London and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

He died in New York in 2005, having become an American citizen in 1973.