French Artist Ben, 88, Dies By Suicide After His Wife's Death (2024)

French Artist Ben Vautier was a great artist which is no more between us. Benjamin Vautier, known as Ben, was born on 18 July 1935 and died on 05 June 2024, a French visual artist. A member of the anti-art movement Fluxus blurred the boundaries of high and low, art and life while adhering to the credo “Everything is art,” he died by suicide hours after the death of his wife of 60 years, and Ben Vautier died on June 5 at his home in Nice, France. He was 88. He married in 1964 and died of a stroke, his children, Eva and Francois, posted on social media. “He was unable to live without his wife,” they wrote, “Ben killed himself a few hours later at their home.”

Early Life Of Ben Vautier

Benjamin Vautier was born to a French family on 18 July 19.5 in Naples, Italy. He was the great-grandson of the Swiss painter Benjamin Vautier (1929-1898). Their parents are a Swiss father and an Irish is a French mother. His parents divorced when he was young, and his father took custody of his brother. He left them as a child “ I think I must have been traumatized because I made a kind of wall.” He added, “he never talks about his child.”

He was a poor student, he told Forbes, “so my mother put me to work in a bookshop,” which also became home after he moved into the attic when he was about 16.

They have a relationship he called her “Sainte-Annie,” Mascha Sosno, a friend, quoted as telling in the article on the France Info Website.

She added, “It was difficult to live with him.” They argued all the time, but they adored each other and he was inseparable from Annie, too.”

When he met George Maciunas, he forever looked to provoke, Mr. Vautier found a kindred spirit in 1962, George Maciunas, who spearheaded the avant-garde Fluxus Movement of the 1960s, which included Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, and other artists, and which drew from the iconoclastic Dada movement of the early 20th century.

As both a visual and performance artist, Mr. Vautier certainly did his part, with works that straddled the line between conceptual art and punchline. At the Documents Art Festival in Kassel, Germany in 1972, he famously strung a banner that read “Kunst 1st Uberflussig” (“Art Is Auperfluons”) across the top of the August Fridericianum Museum.

He strove to show art could be found in daily life, and ordinary objects, as with the series of “Tas,” In which he piled dirt and garbage into lots and signed them as if they were masterpieces.

Starting in the 1960s, Mr. Bautier gave staged performances he known as the “gestes”(gestures) that could seem like particular jokes to the audience.

Audience Piece No.8 (1965), guests were informed that the next piece was to be presented in a Special area. They apparent concert from the same year in “Piano Concerto No.2 for Paik,” a pianist fled the stage before playing a note and the orchestra chased him in hot pursuit, trying to drag him back.

He drew inspiration from Marcel Duchamp’s dictum “Everything in life is art.”

We were no lengthy looking for the aesthetic form of art, but we were questioning art,” He said in an interview in 1973. That’s why they are interested in these attitudes that call themselves anti-art, non-art, life is art, an anonymous art,” he said even he added,” If I do believe that these are hypocritical and, on the whole, impossible attitude.”

Mr. Vautier was most famous for his ”ecritures,” or written paintings, often generated in white handwritten letters scrawled on a background.

Despite the decree in the Fluxus manifesto to “purge the world of bourgeois sickness” and “ professional and commercialized culture,” His work ended up on tote bags, toothbrushes, and other ordinary items.

“On our kids pencil issues, on so many everyday objects, and even in our dreams,” President Emmanuel Macron of France said in a statement after Mr. Vautier’s death. “Ben left his mark, made of freedom and poetry, of apparent lightness and very large depth.”

There World War II broke out, Ben followed his mother on an itinerant life, living for periods in Turkey, Egypt, and Switzerland before settling in 1949

One of Mr. Vautier’s best-known works is “Le Magasin de Ben”, an installation, now the property of the Pompidou Center in Pari, which began as a shop in Nice where he bought and sold secondhand records and cameras.

But it was before, in the bookshop, where his creative idea first began to crystallize. “I remember my first artistic background was opening up books and if I found something new, I used to cut it out and stick it in my room,” he said, “so I used to spoil all the books, then try to sell them.

Death Cause Of Mr. Ben Vautier

Mr. Vautier was great artist died of Suicide by firearm on 5 June 2024, at the age of 88, after his wife had fled from a stroke the previous evening.