Notebook

Notebook, 1993-

PEOPLE

César Baldaccini


French sculptor; born in Marseilles, 1921. The son of humble Italian immigrants, he studied first at the Academy of Fine Arts in Marseilles and, beginning in 1943, at the Beaux-Arts Academy in Paris. Lacking the funds to purchase marble, he made his early works by soldering scrap metal. That experience attracted him to scrap heaps, the "authentic quarries of modern society." His sculpture is akin to that of Picasso and Germaine Richier. In 1960, he showed a compressed automobile at the Salon de Mai, causing a sensation. He would later compress motorcycles, cardboard, and jewelry. After the Compressions came Expansions of polyurethane, which he poured in generous quantities over the floor. He also executed mechanical enlargements, by panograph, of his own thumb. César thought of himself in all seriousness as a traditional sculptor, enamored of work well done, at the opposite extreme from Dada.

Paris: Musée National Art Moderne
Marseilles: Musée Cantini
New York: Museum of Modern Art

[pp. 850-851]


[Ferrier, Jean-Louis, Director and Yann le Pichon, Walter D. Glanze [English Translation]. Art of Our Century, The Chronicle of Western Art, 1900 to the Present. New York: Prentice-Hall Editions. 1988.]









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