(Nice 1928–2005 New York)
Hay Pierrot!, 1966, guitar, sliced, in synthetic resin on black background, 122 x 92 x 15.5 cm, (PP)

Photo certificate:
Archivio delle opere di Arman, Dante Vecchiato,
Galleria d’Arte, Padua, with artist’s signature
Archives Denyse Durand-Ruel, archive no. 193
Photo certificate issued by the artist

Provenance:
Dante Vecchiato Galleria d’Arte, Padua
Tornabuoni Arte, Florence
Private Collection, Italy

Exhibited:
Monteriggioni (Si), Gioco, due giornate di Suoni, immagini e materiali, Teatro delle Metafore, Villa di Basciano, 8 and 9 January 1983, exhibition catalogue page 95 with ill.;
Florence, Maestri della pittura moderna, opere scelte, Tomabuoni Arte, 7 December 1985 – 20 February 1986, exhibition catalogue page 51;
Florence, Maestri Contemporanei, antologia scelta, 1994, Tornabuoni Arte, 4 Dezember 1993, exhibition catalogue page 25 with ill.

Arman received his first artistic training in Nizza, where he was born, and where he also met Yves Klein, his future colleague and friend, before moving to Paris in 1949. After an initial approach to art along the lines of the French painting tradition, in the 1950s he experimented with the techniques of “cachets” and “allures” before joining the Nouveau Réalisme in the following decade, a movement that placed timeworn everyday objects at the centre of a work of art as symbols of consumerist society. After these first experiments based on the tenet of accumulation and the idea of destruction, he created the so-called “colères”, works made up of musical instruments smashed to pieces and applied to panels or inserted in display cases. Hay! Pierrot! constitutes one of the first examples of these works, in which artistic creation results from the destruction of a manual product that thus loses its former function in order to assume a new, exclusively aesthetic one.

From the dedication on the photograph
(“Amicalement pour G.V….”) we can infer the meaning Arman himself attributed to his work Hay! Pierrot! The title, too, suggests that this work was not executed by chance, but following a precise inspiration (maybe a song?), and that was later chosen in order to be dedicated to a friend or, at least, a person to whom he was tied by friendship or affection. Therefore, the present work does not constitute a serial work or a work like many others, but rather something especially meaningful in the artist’s mind...