Raymond Hains

Raymond Hains (9 November 1926 – 28 October 2005) was a prominent French visual artist and a founder of the Nouveau réalisme movement.

Raymond Hains was born on November 9, 1926, in Saint-Brieuc, Côtes-d'Armor, France.

He studied sculpture at the École des Beaux-Arts in Rennes for six months before leaving to travel to Paris.

While at school he met the artist Jacques de la Villeglé, whom he would later collaborate with.

Shortly after enrolling in the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Rennes, Hains decided to leave school and move to Paris.

There Hains began his apprenticeship with the photographer Emmanuel Sougez.

In 1946 he started creating his first photograms and solarizations on paper.

He then met André Breton, to whom he showed his work.

His first abstract photographs were taken by means of a circular reflector equipped with small mirrors, which multiplied and fragmented the subject matter.

For his first attempt, he used a copy of an Etruscan object and photographed it through the fragments of fluted glass.

He entitled it Trésor de Golcondo (Treasures of Golcondo).

One day, in the family's glazing workshop, he noticed some rejects of fluted glass splashed with paint - an accidental prism - and decided to use those latter for his photographs.

He had effectively developed a new kind of camera, the Hypnagogoscope (expression made of three Greek words : hypnos : “sleep”; agogos “one who leads” and skopein “to observe”).

The adjective hypnagogic, signifying “which immediately precedes sleep”, a state of drowsiness.

Hains’ use of hypnagogy enabled him to tear himself away from the usual tendency of photography to mimic: it deconstructed the light and transformed the image into abstract lines.

He made use of procedures adapted from pre-war Dada and Surrealism with hypnagogic abstract photographs, often produced with the help of distorting mirrors.

In 1948, he presented his first exhibition, Hypnagogical Photographs, at the Gallery Colette Allendy in Paris.

In 1949, Hains produced his first black and white short film: Saint Germain-des Prés Colombiens.

In 1949 Hains and Jacques Villeglé began to use torn posters to create Paintings.

They collaboratively produced a series of works, using torn concert posters and advertisements taken from around the city, in a process known as décollage.

Their first work was titled Ach Alma Manetro, named after words that emerged from the chaos of the strewn letters.

From 1950 to 1954, he created several more movies, including Pénélope, Loi du 29 juillet 1881 and Défense d’afficher.

Together with Jacques Villeglé, they adopted the process of visual distortion, adding grooved glass to the camera and producing abstract films inspired by Henri Matisse's watercolor cut-outs.

In 1950, he devoted himself to creating a representation in plastic of the written output of the Lettrist movement, shredding letters with the fluted lens.

This photographic process of deformation fell within a modern aesthetic initiated by Stéphane Mallarmé, further pursued by Guillaume Apollinaire, and later by the Lettrists.

In 1952, he published Graphism in Photographs: When photography becomes the object in the fifth issue of Photo Almanach Prisma, where he explained that manipulating the image enabled him to make the subject abstract.

This text served as his own personal manifesto, where he questioned the generally accepted notion of realism and affirmed, citing Apollinaire, his conviction of the necessity for the artist to invent new realities.

In 1953, Hains published Hépérile éclaté in collaboration with Villeglé.

The phonetic poem Hyperile written by Camille Bryen, pioneer of lyrical abstraction, was exploded into an Ultra-Lettrist presentation: a poem not intended to be read.

In 1954, François Dufrêne introduced Yves Klein to Hains in front of Le Dôme Café, on Boulevard Montparnasse.

Composer Pierre Schaeffer added onto a film of theirsvhis own music in 1959, and named it Etude aux allures.

Hains attended Lettrist performances, particularly appreciating the work of François Dufrêne, Isidore Isou and Gabriel Pomerand.

In 1960, he signed, along with Arman, François Dufrêne, Yves Klein, Jean Tinguely, Jacques Villeglé and Pierre Restany, the Manifesto of New Realism.

In 1976, the first retrospective exhibition dedicated to Hains’ work was organized by Daniel Abadie at the National Center of Art and Culture (C.N.A.C.) in Paris.

Hains named the show, which was the last one to be displayed at the C.N.A.C., La Chasse au C.N.A.C. (Hunt at the C.N.A.C).

For it, Daniel Spoerri organized a dinner entitled La faim au C.N.A.C. (Hunger at the C.N.A.C.).

In 1997 Hains was awarded the Kurt Schwitters Prize.

In 2001, the Centre Georges Pompidou devoted a retrospective exhibition to Raymond Hains in Paris called La tentative (The Endeavour).

Galerie Max Hetzler has been working with the estate of Hains, led by Thomas Hains, since 2014.

In 2017, Hains was selected as an artist for the main exhibition of the 57th Venice Biennale.