César (César Baldaccini)

born 1921 in Marseille, died in Paris on June 12, 1998. The French sculptor and object artist César was born as César Baldaccini. From 1935 to 1939 he studied at the Marseille Academy of Art, and from 1943 to 1947 at the academy in Paris. Among other artists, he meets Pablo Picasso, Germaine Richier, and Alberto Giacometti, and even lived in the same house as Giacometti. At the end of the 1940s, César completed his first sculptures made of plaster and iron. In the traditions of Picasso and González, from 1956 onward César welds pieces of scrap metal to imaginative, figurative or partially figurative sculptural works. From 1960 onward, during the Nouveau Réalisme period, he created his «Compressions dirigées» (car chassis or metal objects of all kinds crushed in hydraulic presses). In the 1960s, influenced by Pop Art, César also worked with colorful plastics and created from these ironic, fetish-related objects using molding techniques.