Living with Legends

Former Hotel Chelsea resident and pioneer of "New Realism," Armand Pierre Fernandez died Saturday.  (Source: The Daily Telegraph, Oct. 24, 2005) View selected works. NYTimes obituary.

ARMAN, the French-born American painter and sculptor who died in New York on Saturday aged 76, was closely associated with the New Realist and Pop Art movements, and made a career out of turning the contents of dustbins into "assemblages"; numerous museums and collectors paid large sums for his burned rubbish, broken violins, combs, taps, smashed typewriters, spoons and door handles, and last year an auction of 400 of his works fetched some 2.8 million euros….

  By then, Arman was regarded as a founding father of the Nouveaux Ralistes, and had been living in America (inevitably, in the Chelsea Hotel) since 1963. Robert Rauschenburg taught him English and he became a citizen in 1973, changing his name to Armand Pierre Arman.