The Swiss artist Daniel Spoerri died in Vienna on November 6 at the age of 94. He was one of the most inventive and innovative creators of the second half of the 20th century.my century, and his influence was considerable on many artists who followed him.
He was born on March 27, 1930 in Galati (Romania) under the name of Daniel Feinstein, to a Jewish father who converted to Protestantism and became a pastor and a mother of Swiss nationality. In 1939 the family moved to the city of Iasi. Romania was then governed by General Antonescu, at the head of a fascist and anti-Semitic regime. On June 27, 1941, during the Iasi pogrom, which left more than 12,000 Jewish victims, his father was murdered. In 1942, thanks to her Swiss nationality, his mother managed to leave Romania with her children and reach Zurich, where Daniel, converted into Spoerri as a precaution, was welcomed by one of his uncles, the rector of the university.
After years of chaotic schooling and hitchhiking around Europe, he began studying dance in Zurich in 1949, which he continued in Paris from 1952, until becoming principal dancer at the Bern Opera in 1954, a position he held until 1957. But, in Paris. , he had decisive meetings, including that of the Romanian poet Ghérasim Luca, and for a time he shared the life of the couple then formed by the artists Jean Tinguely and Eva Aeppli, Swiss like him. In Bern she met the surrealist Meret Oppenheim and, as director, set up The bald singerby Ionesco, and the world premiere on stage of Desire caught by the tailby Picasso.
Leftover food
His notoriety earned him a two-year commitment to the theater in Darmstadt (Germany) in 1959 – enough to live on, in other words – but this year was especially the year of his installation in Paris, in August, at the Hôtel Carcassonne, rue Mouffetard . , became famous for his long stay there, attracting his friends. Among the latter, in addition to Tinguely, there are also Yves Klein and Robert Filliou. They are witnesses of his beginnings as an artist: a piece of plastered wall detached and presented as a painting, and assemblages of rubble. He exhibited them in December 1959 in Edouard Loeb’s gallery.
The rest is known. On October 27, 1960, under her full name Spoerri-Feinstein, she signed the manifesto of new realism in Yves Klein’s apartment. There, in addition to the critic Pierre Restany, are Hains, Villeglé, Dufrêne, Arman, Raysse and Tinguely, who defends the presence of Spoerri against Hains’ reluctance. He would have said: “Spoerri’s painting is like this table. It stays, that’s all. It doesn’t beautify. He doesn’t take anything away. » These phrases are so accurate and prophetic that one wonders if they were said this way or were they “improved” for the memory of Spoerri. In fact, they exactly define their theory and practice. Fix objects, whatever their type, to the surface where they are placed, without intervening. Spoerri puts them together and flips everything from horizontal to vertical. He calls them “trap paintings.”
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