Arman Armand Fernandez (1928-2005) "violins" Four-color Engraving Ea 1/1, Nice School

 Arman Armand Fernandez (1928-2005) "violins" Four-color engraving Ea 1/1, Nice school
Arman or Armand Fernandez, born November 17, 1928 in Nice and died October 22, 2005 in New York, was a French painter, sculptor and visual artist, also known for his “accumulations”.
He was one of the first to use manufactured objects directly as pictorial matter, representing for him the natural and multiple extensions of the human hand that undergo a continuous cycle of production, consumption and destruction.
Biography
Arman in 1967 in Nice.
The only son of Antonio Fernandez, a furniture and antiques dealer of Spanish origin who had lived in Algeria, and Marguerite Jacquet, from a farming family in the Loire region, the young Armand showed an early aptitude for drawing and painting [réf. souhaitée].
After passing his baccalauréat, he studied at the École des arts décoratifs in Nice (now the Villa Arson), then at the École du Louvre. He met Yves Klein and Claude Pascal at the judo school they attended in Nice in 1947. He hires Elena Palumbo Mosca as an au pair to look after his children1. Together with these two friends, he became interested in Eastern philosophies and Rosicrucian theory.
At the end of 1957, Armand, who signs his works with his first name in homage to Van Gogh, decides to abandon the “d” in Armand and officializes his signature as an artist, in 1958, on the occasion of an exhibition at Iris Clert's.[ref. wished].
In October 1960, he held an exhibition entitled “Le Plein”, in which he filled the Iris Clert gallery with discarded objects and the contents of selected garbage cans. This exhibition was a counterpoint to “Le Vide”, organized two years earlier at the same gallery by his friend Yves Klein
That same month, under the guidance of art critic Pierre Restany, Arman became, along with Yves Klein, one of the founding members of the Nouveaux Réalistes group (proclaimed by Restany: “new perceptive approaches to reality"), alongside François Dufrêne, Raymond Hains, Martial Raysse, Daniel Spoerri, Jean Tinguely and Jacques Villeglé, later joined by César, Mimmo Rotella, Niki de Saint Phalle, Gerard Deschamps and, in 1963, Christo. [ref. wished]
From 1961, Arman developed his career in New York, where he lived and worked half the time, alternating with his life in Nice until 1967, and then in Vence until his death. In New York, he stayed first at the Chelsea Hotel until 1970, then in a loft in the SoHo district and, from 1985, in his apartment building in TriBeCa.
At the end of 1989, Arman was awarded the Légion d'honneur by French President François Mitterrand.
Three years after his death in New York, some of his ashes were brought back to Paris in 2008 for burial in the Père-Lachaise cemetery (division 11, a few meters from Frédéric Chopin)2 [source insufficient].
Throughout his life, Arman was also a passionate collector of everyday objects (watches, weapons, pens...) and objets d'art, in particular traditional African art, of which he was a connoisseur, and an appreciated and recognized specialist [réf. souhaitée].
He is represented by Galerie Templon in Paris and Brussels.