The Yoav Harlap Collection
From Tel Aviv, an exhilarating collection of European and American avant-garde art


By Robert Brown

PIERRE RESTANY, THE ART CRITIC and founder of the 1960s movement Nouveau Realism, wrote of Yoav Harlap's collection that although he did not know the Tel Aviv collector personally, through his remarkable collection of European and American avant-garde art, he had found an 'accomplished glance about the truth of the world.' By this, Restany meant that had he not merely found in this collection, a vision close to his own-a shared understanding of the unique aesthetic that he, in the early 1960s, had been among the first to discern -but also an extension or expanding of it. Surprised by both the breadth of the range of the collection and yet also by the common thread running through it, Restany wrote that the impression the Harlap Collection generated in him was both 'exhilarating and at the same time reassuring.

At the heart of the collection is the aesthetic of Nouveau Réalisme, the movement that Restany, along with Yves Klein, Jean Tinguely, Arman, Francois Dufrêne, Raymond Hains. Martial Raysse, Daniel Spoerri and Jacques de la Villeglé founded in Klein's apartment in Paris on October 27th 1960. Marking a reaction against the then prevailing current of abstract art which these artists saw as a deliberate evading of reality perhaps brought about by the trauma of the Second World War, the Nouveau Réalistes, like their name-sakes in Italian cinema, sought to reintegrate art with the objects and mass-produced material of modern-day life.

In America, this turn away from abstraction and back towards an engagement with the images and things of modern reality had been closely paralleled by the work of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns and was also being taken up by a younger gang. For a time these artists were also dubbed 'New Realists' or 'Neo-dadaists', before later, and more permanently, coming to be known as 'Pop' artists. Crossing many international and even temporal boundaries, it is the fresh and common approach to making art from the things and images of modern life shared by this radical generation of artists in the early 1960s that the Harlap Collection asserts time and again.

Spanning an incredible range, from a series of seminal early works by nearly all the Nouveau Réalistes to subtle icons of 'Pop' art by Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol and Tom Wesselmann, the collection intermingles the multiple imagery of the quintessential Italian Nouveau Réaliste Mimmo Rotella with the seemingly abstract spatial and materialist explorations of Lucio Fontana and Piero Manzoni and even extends to more contemporary takes on the reality of urban living made by 1980s street artists Jean- Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring.

Yet, throughout, the whole collection remains a fascinatingly cohesive entity that not only allows but reveals each of its works entering into a dialogue with the other. Arranged sparingly throughout the clean, open modernist architecture of the house, echoes of one 'Realist' school or aesthetic are found and articulated next to another. The intense psychedelic hues of Andy Warhol's 1964 painting Four colour flowers, for example, humorously finds its echo in Robert Indiana's multicoloured and untitled painting of the word 'four' painted a year later. A giant sculptural pink tube of paint by Claes Oldenburg finds is own echo in the pink lips and smoking cigarette of Tom Wesselmann's, Study for Small Smoker No. 4., while the sun, sea and sex of Wesselmann's large 1967 Great American Nude No. 88, has its own cheeky counterpart in Mel Ramos' more voyeuristic Peeka-boo,Raven No 3 painted in 1964.

Humour, dialogue and a fascination with the material objects of modern consumerist culture are to be found everywhere, but what emerges most from this fascinating cross section of New Realist art, is how it shows the reality of modern urban consumerist culture to be itself an artifice or even abstraction. Though they were reacting against abstract art's evasion of such reality as a subject-matter, the filling of their work with the sheer wealth and multifaceted nature of the objects of daily life reveals this world of endless production and waste also to be a mere surface.

From the slick surfaces of pictorial advertising to the ephemera and waste of materialist culture, the art of these 'New Realists' shows that such a plethora of objects and imagery is itself an artifice, an abstract, immaterial realm. The overtly fake artifice of Warhol's cosmetic coloured flowers demonstrates this in one way as much as Yves Klein's monochrome blue pigment paintings sought to demonstrate it in another.

Klein hoped to mystically awaken his audience with his cult of the monochrome, using a single colour, as he put it, to 'stabilise' the diffused energy of the universe and, hopefully, transfer an understanding of its innate 'immaterial nature' into the mind of the viewer. Klein's 'adventure' with immateriality is represented in the Harlap Collection by two seminal works, IKB 119 of 1959 and a fire painting of 1961.

Followers of Klein, such as, Arman, Niki de Saint Phalle, Spoerri, Hains and Dufrêne also demonstrated the artificial or even abstract surface of the consumerist world of mass-produced objects with their exploded objects, 'shot at' paintings, 'trapped' table-top pictures, and stripped layers of advertising posters and billboard hoardings. Where Klein had evoked the mystical void, they sought to awaken a similar mystical understanding of the transcendental nature of reality by exposing the incredible variety and 'fullness' of the modern world.

As Pierre Restany declared in his 1961 treatise Forty degrees above Dada, these artists responded to the world as if it were itself 'a painting'. For them it was, 'the large fundamental work from which they appropriate fragments of universal significance. They allow us to see the real in diverse aspects of its expressive totality. And through these specific images the entire sociological reality, the common good of human activity, the large republic of our social exchanges, of our commerce in society is summoned to appear.'

With an eloquence of precision and clarity, the Yoav Harlap Collection demonstrates this vision, repeatedly asserting itself in art throughout four decades of creativity.


Robert Brown is Head of Research and Education in the Modern, Post-War and Contemporary Art Departments, Christie's London


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