Tools As Art: The Hechinger Collection

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Jean Tinguely, Tools '85, 1985
metal, hardware
36 x 24 in

Jean Tinguely was born in Fribourg, Switzerland, in 1925 and died in Bern, Switzerland, in 1991. Best known for his whimsical motorized constructions, he was also a painter, a draftsman, and a designer of stage sets. From 1941 to 1945 he took classes at the Basel School of Fine Arts, and in 1945 he made his first constructions, executed in wood, paper, and wire. He also produced a series of "edible" pieces made out of grass. In 1953 he moved to Paris, where he was a principal participant in the city's postwar art scene. In the late 1950s he joined the Nouveau Réalisme movement, which also included Yves Klein, Arman, and theorist Pierre Restany, exhibited at the Iris Clert Gallery in 1958. His clattering machines from this period, among the major examples of kinetic art, typically unite wheels, electric motors, bathroom fixtures, welded girders, and scap-heap scavengings, mocking the trappings of consumer society. In 1960 he captured the attention of the art world with his self-destructing mechanical piece, Homage to New York, which destroyed itself in the garden of the Museum of Modern Art. In 1961 and 1962 he participated in "happenings" with Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and his wife, French artist Nike de Sant-Phalle. Throughout his life he continued to execute large-scale commissions, including the fountain outside the Centre Pompidou in Paris (in collaboration with his wife) and a gargantuan sculpture in the Fontainebleau Forest. A 1990 show in Moscow featured a seventeen-foot-high piece called Altar of Western Affluence and Totalitarian Commercialism.