Jean Tinguely

Sculptor and painter

• Born: May 22, 1925
• Place of Birth: Fribourg, Switzerland
• Died: August 30, 1991
• Place of Death: Bern, Switzerland

• Education: Kunstgewerbeschule (Basel's School of Arts and Crafts)
• Significance: Tinguely pioneered kinetic works of art. He was fascinated by machinery, including what makes things move, and introduced movement to his works. He also created self-destructing machines as art. He was highly influential during the late twentieth century.

Background

Jean Tinguely was born in Fribourg, Switzerland, in 1925, to Charles Célestin Tinguely and Jeanne Louise Tinguely-Ruffieux. The working-class family soon moved to Basel, where he grew up in the countryside. As an only child, he spent a great deal of time alone while his father worked as a storekeeper and his mother worked as a maid. When he was fifteen, Tinguely found an apprenticeship with a storefront window designer for the Globus department store. He lost this apprenticeship, but he found another with decorator Joos Hutter.

With Hutter's encouragement, Tinguely began attending Basel's School of Arts and Crafts, Kunstgewerbeschule, where he discovered modern art. He counted among his inspirations Marcel Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters, and Dadaism, an anti-establishment art movement.

Tinguely completed his studies in 1945 and his mandated military service with the Swiss Army in 1944 and 1945. He and his girlfriend, Eva Aeppli, lived in various places, including a condemned building. He began creating sculptures made of wire during the late 1940s, including pieces for window displays in Basel and Zurich. In 1952, having married in 1951, the couple moved to Paris without their young daughter. He eked out a living creating window displays, while she made and sold rag dolls.

Life's Work

Tinguely's fascination with wire continued to develop. Artists of the Dada movement often relied on found objects, or objet trouves. In his early work, Tinguely also used found objects. He sometimes added motors to set the pieces in motion.

His work began appearing in exhibitions such as International Happenings; ZERO, a largely minimalist group founded by Otto Piene; and nouveaux réalisme (new realism), a modern art group that also exhibited works by Christo, Raymond Hains, Martial Raysse, and Niki de Saint Phalle. Tinguely had his first solo exhibition at the Galerie Arnaux in 1954.

The artist's interests in movement melded with his related passion for motorcar racing. He found that simply adding movement to his sculptures was not enough; he wanted them to move themselves and even bring about their own destruction. The sculptures were increasingly performing for viewers. In 1959 at the Biennale de Paris, he installed a machine that created multiple abstract paintings. He was working to capture the dissonance between industrialization and human creativity. In 1960, he debuted Homage to New York vat the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The white painted sculpture was 23 feet by 27 feet (7 meters by 8 meters) and included found items from garbage dumps in New Jersey. Tinguely spent three weeks assembling it. He set his machine in motion on March 17 in the sculpture garden. Its ropes, pulleys, levers, gears, and other moving parts worked at a furious pace, breaking apart and catching fire. Tinguely noted that even the smoke from the burning machine was part of the sculpture. When the twenty-seven-minute performance ended, the museum gathered the fragments that remained and placed them into its permanent collection. Tinguely said he found it liberating that his creation lived only in the minds of those who had witnessed it. Tinguely followed Homage to New York with several other self-destructive pieces.

Tinguely became known for his black-painted sculptures. He created the first influential piece, Heureka, for the Swiss Expo in Lausanne in 1963 and 1964. He later disassembled Heureka and used parts of it as the base of new black works. He called these smaller moving sculptures that resembled war chariots Chars. He further developed his ideas of moving sculptures later in the decade with the Bascules. The swinging pendulums of the Bascules resembled acrobats swinging on trapezes. He created a black, wall-mounted relief, Requiem pour une feuille morte, for Expo 67 in Montreal, Canada. His 1974 Chaos No. 1 featured a ball track and conveyor belt that constantly fed iron balls to the mechanism.

Tinguely collaborated at times with his second wife, Niki de Saint Phalle. He and Saint Phalle worked together to create Le Paradis fantastique, a sculpture garden exhibited at Expo 67. Saint Phalle's most well-known sculptures were her voluptuous women. Many of the colorful figures in Le Paradis fantastique were mounted on Tinguely's black sculptures, creating a sharp contrast between the black, industrial metal and the brightly colored, rounded figures.

The artist added musical elements to his works beginning in the late 1970s. He called these Méta-Harmonies. He increased the magnitude of his works with huge, walk-in mechanisms. The 1987 Grosse Méta-Maxi-Maxi-Utopia, for example, included ninety-four sculptures in one building.

In his later years, he confronted mortality through his sculptures. He included animal skulls in works beginning in 1981. His Fontaine Jo Siffert pays tribute to a racing driver who died driving, while Lola T 180—Mémorial pour Joakim B., which includes both animal bones and racing car parts, memorializes racing driver Joakim Bonnier. He built Mengele—Dance of Death (1985), composed of charred wooden beams and melted metal pieces, after a serious illness. His 1990 sculpture Le Safari de la Mort Moscovite was built onto a Renault 4 chassis. The drivable work contains a scythe—a symbol of death—and many skulls.

Impact

Tinguely was a significant artist of the nouveaux réalisme (new realism) movement. His found-object sculptures sought to give items new meaning. His machines also invited the audience to interact with the art, which was a departure from centuries of standing back and simply observing. Tinguely strongly influenced other artists, including Arthur Ganson and Michael Landy, as well as performance artists.

Personal Life

Tinguely met Eva Aeppli at the Kunstgewerbeschule. He married the fellow painter and sculptor in 1951. Their daughter, Miriam, was born in 1950. The couple separated in 1960. He later married Niki de Saint Phalle. In 1969, he had a son, Milan Gygax, with Micheline Gygax.

Bibliography

"Biography Jean Tinguely." Museum Tinguely, www.tinguely.ch/en/tinguely-collection-conservation/tinguely-biographie.html. Accessed 5 Oct. 2024.

Igra, Caroline, editor. "Jean Tinguely: Artist Overview and Analysis." The Art Story, 2024, www.theartstory.org/artist-tinguely-jean.htm. Accessed 5 Oct. 2024.

"Jean Tinguely." Arts Intel Reporter, airmail.news/arts-intel/events/jean-tinguely. Accessed 5 Oct. 2024.

"Jean Tinguely – Machine Spectacle 1 Oct 2016 – 5 Mar 2017." Stedelijk Museum, p://www.stedelijk.nl/en/exhibitions/jean-tinguely-machine-spectacle" www.stedelijk.nl/en/exhibitions/jean-tinguely-machine-spectacle. Accessed 5 Oct. 2024.

"Jean Tinguely's Fire at MoMa: Lost Art." YouTube, uploaded by Tate, 3 Sept. 2015, www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DZGu6xDKbM. Accessed 5 Oct. 2024.

Kenney, Nancy. "Back from the Brink: Jean Tinguely’s Beloved Music Machine." Art Newspaper, 15 Nov. 2018, www.theartnewspaper.com/2018/11/15/back-from-the-brink-jean-tinguelys-beloved-music-machine. Accessed 5 Oct. 2024.

"Kinetic Art Movement Summary." The Art Story, www.theartstory.org/movement/kinetic-art/. Accessed 5 Oct. 2024.

Ravo, Nick. "Jean Tinguely, Playful Sculptor of Scrap Contraptions, Dies at 66." New York Times, 1 Sept. 1991, query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D0CE3DC1E3FF932A3575AC0A967958260&mcubz=0. Accessed 5 Oct. 2024.

Tinguely, Jean, and Michael Landy. "Homage to Destruction." Tate, 1 Sept. 2009, www.tate.org.uk/tate-etc/issue-17-autumn-2009/homage-destruction. Accessed 5 Oct. 2024.