“Thank you Ben”, “Ben is not dead”, “Farewell friends”, “Ben, your departure is art”: more than a thousand people paid tribute this Thursday in a park in the center of Nice (Alps -Maritimes) to love and exuberance by greeting the artist Ben and his wife Annie. Last week, Annie Vautier suffered a stroke and died a few days later. In the hours that followed, Ben, known for his slogans written in handwritten letters on a black background, killed himself at the age of 88 in their house full of works of art on the heights of Nice.
To current versions of traditional songs, the two coffins, each covered with an Occitan flag, were placed side by side in front of a large photo of the couple kissing. A photo of the house took pride of place at the entrance to the park, behind plants installed in bidets or sinks, while many participants wore black t-shirts emblazoned with Ben’s famous “scriptures”.
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“Living with Ben is truly living”
“Annie, living with Ben isn’t easy. But Annie, you know, living with Ben is really living. Well, living with Annie is unexpected. But Ben, you proved it to us, living without Annie is simply hopeless. This is the love with which you have dazzled us,” greeted the mayor of Nice, Christian Estrosi.
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Bernard Blistène, honorary director of the Center Pompidou modern art museum, for his part paid tribute to an artist “whose work apes a naive freshness to remind us that there would always be time to transform the circus of our world “. The two coffins were then taken to be cremated in privacy, while everyone was invited to place a flower in front of the couple’s photo and sign registers.
How to keep your work going?
While the city’s museum of naive arts has just closed a vast year-long exhibition devoted to the artist, Christian Estrosi announced that a debate would be opened with the family to find where and how Nice can “continue to say in the world that [Ben est] alive “.
Born in Naples (Italy) in 1935, of Franco-Swiss nationality, Ben had lived in Nice since the age of 14 and founded the “École de Nice” there with Arman, Yves Klein and Martial Raysse. He was both an iconoclastic popular artist and a king of merchandise.
