Nouveau Réalisme (New Realism) refers to an artistic movement founded in 1960 by the art critic Pierre Restany and the painter Yves Klein during the first collective exposition in the Apollinaire gallery in Milan. Pierre Restany wrote the original manifesto for... [more]
Contemporaries of American Pop Art, and often conceived as its transposition in France, New Realism was, along with Fluxus and other groups, one of the numerous tendencies of the avant-garde in the 1960s. It was dissolved in 1970.
The first exposition of the "Nouveaux réalistes" took place in November 1960 at the Paris "Festival d'avant-garde. This exposition was followed by others: in May 1961 at the Gallery J.; in New York in 1962; and at the Biennale of San Marino in 1963 (which would be the last collective show by the group). The movement had difficulty maintaining a cohesive program after the death of Yves Klein.