On our children’s kits, on so many everyday objects and even in our imaginations, Ben had left his mark, made of freedom and poetry, of apparent lightness and overwhelming depth. With his death, France loses one of its most popular artists, inseparable from the city of Nice, heir to Marcel Duchamp and the European Dadaists, who achieved a form of universal through his calligraphy.
“I always wanted to do something new,” was the mantra of the man born Benjamin Vautier, who bore the same name as his great-grandfather, an illustrious 19th-century Swiss painter. Born in 1935 to an Irish mother and a Swiss father, Benjamin Vautier grew up in the storms of the Second World War, from Naples to Izmir, from Alexandria to Nice. After studying at the Parc Impérial, Benjamin Vautier employed his tireless curiosity and erudition, first in a bookseller then in his own shop, rue Tonduti de l’Escarène in Nice, where books, papers, records, and the most diverse objects.
In the artistic ferment of the post-war period, the place gradually became a meeting point for the future figures of the Nice school: César, Arman, Martial RAYSSE. Marked by this “new realism”, driven by a mixture of ambition and irony, Ben, his artistic name, began research work, between parodies and provocations, with a first series of fruit drawings. “At home, meaning counts more than your reproductions of bananas,” his friend Yves Klein prophesied. Beginning a quest for truth, Ben then forged his path in the wake of Marcel Duchamp and conceived art as a pure mental decision, signing the most diverse objects, according to what he called “appropriations”. In 1959, Ben invented “living sculptures”, of passers-by whom he declared works, which he signed at random. Close to the Fluxus movement alongside George Maciunas, Ben established himself through these spectacular artistic gestures, such as the signature of all the objects at the Nice flea market in 1963. A tireless creative force, his destiny and his work highlighted into question the very figure of the creator and the artist. This power of doubt, of destruction, of romantic self-hatred, was always in the background of his work.
With indisputable generosity and flair, Ben never forgot his first vocation as a smuggler. In 1965, he transformed his shop into an exhibition space, “Ben doubt of everything”, in which he exhibited his friends of the avant-garde, from Martial RAYSSE to Bernar VENET via Christian Boltanski, or the proponents of “free figuration”, such as Robert COMBAS or Hervé DI ROSA. From his workshop in the heights of Nice, in Saint-Pancrace, a house renamed after his children’s nicknames, Malabar and Cunégonde, Ben multiplied the media, from cinema to photography, from the distribution of leaflets to debates through the sending of letters . Exhibited in France and around the world, accompanied by Daniel TEMPLON’s gallery, Ben never stopped examining himself, reinventing himself, challenging himself, transforming his places of life, his passions, his inner demons into artistic propositions.
Over the course of these decades of creation, he entered the collective imagination with his cryptic phrases, recognizable among all, sometimes mocking, sometimes candid. A signature, a writing, an opening to doubt, which challenged, and which added, in our French language, beauty to the walls and picture rails of the world. The Maillol Museum in Paris dedicated a retrospective to him as a summary, or manifesto, “Everything is art”, in 2016.
The President of the Republic and his wife bow to the memory of an artist who, from the hills of Saint-Pancrace in Nice, constantly pushed back the boundaries, to better write, in French, disaster, insolence and beauty. They send their heartfelt condolences to his children and his loved ones.
