Jean Tinguely valuation
Built machines out of scrap that do nothing, badly, and sometimes destroy themselves.
Jean Tinguely was born at Fribourg in Switzerland in 1925 and built kinetic sculpture from scrap metal, bicycle wheels, motors and junk — machines that move noisily and achieve nothing, which he set against the efficiency the century had been promising.
What a work by Jean Tinguely is worth
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Bio
Jean Tinguely was born at Fribourg in Switzerland in 1925 and built kinetic sculpture from scrap metal, bicycle wheels, motors and junk — machines that move noisily and achieve nothing, which he set against the efficiency the century had been promising. Homage to New York, assembled in the Museum of Modern Art's garden in 1960, was designed to destroy itself and did so, imperfectly, in twenty-seven minutes. He was a founder of Nouveau Realisme, married Niki de Saint Phalle, and built with her the Stravinsky Fountain in Paris and the Cyclop in the forest at Milly. He died in 1991.
These are working machines and that is the whole practical question. A Tinguely that no longer runs is a different object from one that does; motors fail, belts perish, welded scrap corrodes, and the question of what may be replaced without altering the work is a live one that the Museum Tinguely in Basel has done much to address. Maintenance history and any restoration record are central to a valuation. Drawings and prints are numerous and are the accessible part of the output.
Homage to New York, the Nevada desert and Basel
Homage to New York only partly destroyed itself in the Museum of Modern Art's garden in 1960, but Study for an End of the World No. 2, in 1962, did explode as planned, in the desert outside Las Vegas. He signed the founding declaration of Nouveau Réalisme in 1960 and made the Stravinsky Fountain in Paris with Niki de Saint Phalle in 1983. He died in 1991.
The Museum Tinguely in Basel, opened in 1996, holds a large collection and an archive, and for a machine the record of how it ran and what has been replaced is part of its history.
Basel, Julia Ris and Hon
Tinguely grew up in Basel. At fifteen he set off for Albania meaning to fight against Mussolini's forces, but was stopped at the border and held for three days. From 1941 to 1945 he studied under Julia Ris at the Allgemeine Gewerbeschule in Basel, where he came across the work of Kurt Schwitters and the other Dadaists. He married the Swiss artist Eva Aeppli in 1951 and moved with her to France the next year. The machines he made in the 1950s, which he called Métamatics, are generative sculptures that produce their own drawings.
In 1966 he built Hon, en katedral at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm with Niki de Saint Phalle and Per Olof Ultvedt, a reclining woman some 25 metres long that visitors walked into, with a goldfish pond, a screen showing Greta Garbo films and a soft drink machine inside. His fountains include the Carnival Fountain of 1977 in Basel, the Jo Siffert fountain in Fribourg and, with Saint Phalle, the Lifesaver Fountain in Duisburg. Heureka, of 1964, stands by the lake in Zürich, and Chaos I, of 1974, in Columbus, Indiana. Retrospectives have been held at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice in 1987, the Stedelijk Museum in 2016 and Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan in 2024.
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