
I'm not an intellectual. I like to touch. It's my hands that make my head work.
César
I'm not an intellectual. I like to touch. It's my hands that make my head work.
César
César (César Baldaccini) 1921–1998
César was born César Baldaccini, in Marseilles, France, in 1921. He studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Marseilles from 1935 to 1939 and at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris from 1943 to 1948. In a career lasting nearly five-decades César had countless gallery exhibitions and major museum retrospectives, including one as part of the Venice Biennale in 1995 and another at the Jeu de Paume in Paris in 1997. César is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Modern in London, Centre Pompidou in Paris, the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Korea, and numerous other public and private collections. César died in Paris in 1998.
Spending his entire career in Paris, César was among the most prolific of European artists that did not adopt New York as their post-war home. A maverick of materials, César pioneered sculptural applications for scrap-metal, car bodies, plastics, and later molten crystal. A member of the artist collective Nouveau Réalisme, the artist was a central fixture in a group founded on the principle desire to relink art and life in the burgeoning age of mass-production. His earliest sculptures from the early 1950s were fashioned from welded bits of scrap-metal, and quickly developed a following for their interpretive, brutalist depictions of insects, animals, nudes and other biology. In the ‘60s, and for the remainder of his career, the artist began utilizing a compressor to crush automobiles into dense packet-like rectangles, tactics for which he received great praise. César found his work to be contrary to his classical education and instead related it to the world of factory labor and reclaimed materials. In the mid-60s César adopted plastics, making figural molds, and later pouring them with polyurethane which would expand and solidify. A fixture of latter twentieth century art practices, César used the ready-made as a springboard into unknown realms of sculptural investigation through the properties of materials and their yet-unknown uses.
Auction Results César (César Baldaccini)
Le Pied
estimate: $20,000–30,000
result: $25,000
Compression
estimate: $15,000–20,000
result: $15,000
Telephone
estimate: $3,000–5,000
result: $5,938
Le Pouce
estimate: $6,000–8,000
result: $5,313
Oscar
estimate: $5,000–7,000
result: $5,000
Le Sein pendant
estimate: $3,000–5,000
result: $4,375
Expansion
estimate: $2,000–3,000
result: $2,750
Vue de Montmartre
estimate: $2,500–3,500
result: $2,500
Index
estimate: $2,000–3,000
result: $2,210
Venus de Milo découpée
estimate: $500–700
result: $1,250
Untitled
estimate: $300–500
result: $813
Arrachage-Lithographie
estimate: $500–700
result: $813
Arrachage-Lithographie
estimate: $500–700
result: $500
Arrachage-Lithographie
estimate: $500–700
result: $375
Compression necklace sculpture
estimate: $4,000–6,000
Compression
estimate: $15,000–20,000
Expansion
estimate: $7,000–9,000
A silver and gold pen
estimate: $1,000–1,500
Mao
estimate: $2,000–3,000
Combustion d'allumettes
estimate: $15,000–20,000
Arrachage-Lithographie
estimate: $500–700
Compression necklace sculpture
estimate: $5,000–7,000
Expansion (from Mémoire de la Liberté)
estimate: $2,500–3,500
Après la Fête
estimate: $5,000–7,000