Les Nouveaux Réalistes

Les Nouveaux Réalistes (The New Realists) was an avant-garde collective founded in Paris in 1960 by critic Pierre Restany and artist Yves Klein, united by a manifesto declaring their shared approach of appropriating reality directly into art. The group included artists such as Arman, Jean Tinguely, Niki de Saint Phalle, Raymond Hains, and others who rejected traditional painting in favor of accumulations, torn posters, assemblages, and performative destruction. Their work anticipated Pop Art and Fluxus, influencing decades of conceptual and object-based art practices.