The French collage artist refused to accept the primacy of technology, rejected the art business and delegated the artistic process to others. Embracing the “poetry of the walls” with his work, he paved the way for Street Art.
In an age when abstract painting was dominant in (French) art, 23-year-old Raymond Hains (1926-2005) embarked on an artistic adventure and together with Jacques Villeglé (also 23) discovered the "poetry of the walls". The two regarded the billboards of Paris as though they were paintings. They witnessed others' art -- the anonymous rage of passersby, the work of poster distributors and advertisers, the vagaries of the weather -- and made it their own. The works are no longer merely objets trouvés, since time, anonymous action and something process-like are inscribed into them. "My works existed before me, before my involvement, but nobody saw them," said Hains. The friends' first joint work, and simultaneously the first such décollage known to art, is the piece "Ach Alma Manetro".
To produce it, in February 1949 the artists collected scraps of a poster advertising a concert they found near the restaurant La Coupole in Montparnasse in Paris and formed a collage of it on canvas in their studio. The work's title is formed from several torn words on the picture's lower edge: "Ach" from composer Bach's name, "Alma" as the concert venue, and "Manetro" composed of jumbled, strewn letters. Brimming with confidence, Hains elevated the work measuring 58 by 256 centimeters to the status of the new Bayeux Tapestry.
Created around 1070 and over 68 meters long, the Bayeux Tapestry, which is also called "The Tapestry of Queen Mathilde", is one of the most notable visual monuments of the High Middle Ages. The embroidery depicts how England was conquered by Norman Duke William the Conqueror (1027/28-1087). It might not be an ideal comparison, but if you consider the material used by the affichiste, the poster, as a visual testimony to its age, then this impertinence can perhaps be pardoned. However, for all that the attention of the public is slow in coming. It was not until 1957 that Hains and Villeglé got the chance to present their works in an exhibition. Entitled "Loi du 29 juillet 1881", it cited the law establishing but also regulating press freedom, including advertisements (posters) in public places. After this show the two artists, who by this time worked solo, regularly featured in exhibitions.
Raymond Hains and Jacques Villeglé met at the École des Beaux Arts in Rennes. Hains attended the sculpture course from 1945 onwards, but only stayed for six months -- did he find the instruction too dry? Initially Hains turned to photography, producing images with the help of lenses he fashioned from fluted and structured glass, the hypnagogoscope . The name of the lens is intended to appeal to the state of mind of daydreaming. Hains produced fractured, kaleidoscope-like images that follow in the tradition of Dada and Surrealism, but with their psychedelic moments also presage the art of the 1970s.
Through Villeglé, in 1948 Hains got to know the poet and painter Camille Bryen (1907-1977), who together with German artist Wols (1913-1951) would pave the way for Informalism. In a slim volume of poems called "Hepérile" Bryen had published a series of phonetic poems consisting of invented words and serving to break up language. Using the hypnagogoscope, Hains and Villeglé transformed the volume into a visual poem. The result: words that are completely fragmented and splintered, which they called "ultra-lettres", the first poem to "de-read" -- "le premier poème à dé-lire", as Camille Bryen put it.
Like many other artists, Hains and Villeglé were also influenced by the cut-outs of Henri Matisse. They produced a series of cut-outs, which they then filmed with the hypnagogoscope to make the film "Pénélope". Ultimately the entire undertaking, which shows even more clearly fragmented, splintered, kaleidoscope-like imagery than Hains' photographs, proved too time-consuming. It was not until 2001 that the film project could finally be completed, for an exhibition held at Centre Pompidou.
Hains described himself as an "in-action painter", a painter who did not allow his own technique or style to influence the image. A painter who declared found or purloined sections of torn posters as new, contemporary panel paintings; for whom the street became an extension of his studio: "Mon atelier, c'est la rue." His works followed the principle of objective chance, as pursued in Surrealism. From 1959 onwards Hains would collect poster fragments including their ground, be it wood or metal, and create a dialog between the pictorial ground and the paints applied to it.
Hains, who was famous for his play on words, used his décollages to deconstruct the authority of predominant debates, be it the abstraction prevailing in the West at that time or the colonial question in France. It is against this backdrop that he produced his 20-part series "La France déchirée" (France in Shreds) from 1950 to 1961. In the series Hains refers to the grim chapter of the Algerian War, which according to the official version of the time never happened. Algeria was seen by the French government as an integral component. And France could hardly wage war against itself. In 1961, one year before Algeria's independence, Hains displayed his series of political works while stoutly insisting that he had no desire to take a political stance. If France was not waging war in Algeria then there was nothing political about Hains' work "La France déchirée", n'est-ce pas?
At the same time Hains refused to sell the series, because France was not up for sale: "La France n'est pas à vendre." In rejecting the market in this manner he reconciled aesthetic and ethical requirements and posed anew the question about the significance of the artwork. Hains succeeded in lending his works true independence and critical force. Later the affichiste would ask if artists were not a kind of propaganda poster for their country: "L'artiste est-il une affiche de propagande pour son pays?"