Marcel Alocco
(French, b. 1937)

"Brouillage Deterioration Vertical No. 13", 1969

oil on canvas
signed, titled and dated on stretcher.
Unframed.
23-1/2" x 28-3/4"

Provenance: Galerie Alexandre de la Salle, Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France, August 1970; Estate of Thomas B. Lemann, New Orleans, Louisiana.

Notes: Ecole de Nice was a product of cultural and social change in postwar France, reflective of international shifts from nationalism to internationalism and cultural pluralism, from tradition to a culture of youth. Cote d'Azur labeled itself as a place of freedom, health, and youthfulness and young artists thrived on its shores. Nice became a creative center without rules or dogma, denouncing the material excesses of the bourgeoise and rejecting Paris as a center of visual arts.

Many critics tried to shape the identity of Ecole de Nice, but it is in fact difficult to understand the movement as a whole since it is a conglomeration of many movements, such as Fluxus, Le Nouveau Realisme and Support, Surfaces. Gallerist Alexander de la Salle helped to institutionalize the movement with his major exhibition that took place in Venice, 1967. The cover of the 1967 exhibition catalogue paid a homage to Yves Klein iconic blue paintings. Some of the artists included in the exhibition are Marcel Alocco, Pierre Pinoncelli and Arman, all featured in our October auction and part of the Thomas Lemann collection. De la Salle stated it was the first movement in France that has sustained itself outside of Paris. Decades later, in an interview with Laura Caprini for an exhibition 1960-2010, Fifty Years of School of Nice at the Retif Museum in Vence, Alexandre de la Salle defined the Nice School: "It's a regional movement. They are from the sea, from the south, from the hills that tumble down to the Mediterranean. It is not a school in the literal sense because everyone has remained immutably frozen in himself! Their common thread is this belonging to a set of people who do not go to school but who meet and who have, nevertheless, a lot in common: the abandonment of the canvas for almost everyone, the accumulation of small objects that are used to do something else, a kinship with the new realism as well as an effervescence of words and writings."

Before de la Salle's major exhibition, the term "Ecole de Nice" first appeared in print in August of 1960 in an article by Claude Riviere published in Combat, a Parisian journal. She was reporting on the artistic scene along the French Riviera. She noticed a group of artists in Nice that embodied the spirit of the Mediterranean region and posed a question "Why not an Ecole de Nice?". The artists were Yves Klein, Martial Raysse, and Arman, amongst others. Yves Klein strived to liberate color from line, and broke down boundaries between painting, sculpture and performance art with his "Anthropometry", a series of paintings using nude women as paint brushes. Arman, who had first emerged as a lyrical abstract painter, a dominant style in France, soon rejected the style and began making sculpture inspired by the concept of the readymade preoccupied with the consequences of mass production.

Arman described "Ecole de Nice" as an embodiment of a spirit "without complexity". In 1965, Marcel Alocco devoted an issue of his art and poetry journal Identites to the movement. He asked the artists to identify the school's chief characteristics. Some called it an extension of "Ecole de Klein", and some saw it as open-ended: a tendency for "Ecole de Nice" to see everything as possible art and to question art itself.
Pinoncelli, a painter, performance artist and an iconoclast - and once an assistant to Yves Klein - was a disciple of the Dada Movement and ultimately became most known for urinating in Marcel Duchamp's urinal at the Centre Pompidou in 2006.

Although some would consider the end of the school in 1997, when Alexandre de la Salle mounted his last exhibition of the "Ecole de Nice" artists, the region is still at crossroads of new developments in the visual arts.

Art and Visual Culture on the French Riviera, 1956-1971, Rosemary O'Neill
Vence-Pratic.com
Virginie GUFFROY, "What is Nice School?" 31 May 2021

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