Jean Tinguely

Jean Tinguely – Studies at the Basel art academy, work as a window dresser

Jean Tinguely was born in Freiburg in Üechtland on 22 May 1925, the only child of stock clerk Charles Célestin Tinguely and maid Jeanne Louise Tinguely-Ruffieux. Shortly after his birth, the family moved to Basel where Jean grew up near the central train station, watching the trains arriving and leaving with childhood delight – this love of movement would later have a lasting influence on his work. From 1941 to 1944 he took an apprenticeship as a window dresser, after which he attended the Basel Kunstgewerbeschule on the suggestion of his master Joos Hutter. It was here that Jean Tinguely first became involved in modern art, which he described in retrospect as both a blessing and a shock. He also met his first wife Eva Aeppli, whom he married in 1951. Whilst earning a living for many years as a freelance window dresser, he experimented with sculptural wire frames on which he hung objects and motors. He moved to Paris in 1952 with his wife where he continued to decorate display windows, whilst his wife sewed fabric dolls. They were also helped by their mutual friend Daniel Spoerri, but these years were characterised by hardship. 

The first automatons: not perfect, but always moving

From an artistic point of view, the Paris years proved extremely fruitful for Jean Tinguely, producing his famous kinetic reliefs and sculptures at great speed and so it followed that he was given his first solo exhibition of his automatons at Galerie Arnaud in 1954. From the beginning, Jean Tinguely was not concerned with the perfect function of his constructions, but with a dynamic, flexible realisation of his flowing inspiration. The Swedish art historian Pontus Hultén pointed out that it was precisely the mechanical disorder that fascinated the artist, the unpredictable play of chance. With his sometimes discreet, sometimes spectacular machine sculptures, Tinguely filled numerous exhibitions and made a name for himself. He formed an inspiring friendship with Yves Klein, undertaking various projects together, as well as with the French-Swiss artist Niki de Saint Phalle, who eventually became his second wife in 1971. 

Artistic portrait of the machine age

Jean Tinguely wanted to make movement visible with his art, for he positioned himself in the age of movement. However, whilst the movement around him was always directed at a particular goal, he was concerned with the act of movement itself with his sometimes huge machines. When, with his later wife Niki de Saint Phalle, he had feminine and masculine sculptures smash into each other with gleeful force, the game deliberately did not have a winner, only the joy of the game itself. Jean Tinguely also utilised numerous found objects for his work that he collected from various locations and assembled into a planned chaos. Tinguely understood his art as an artistic portrait of the machine age and at the same time as critic of the exuberant production of useless objects with which society is virtually flooded. Jean Tinguely died on 30 August 1991 in Bern.