Jean-Jacques Beaume

Born in 1943, Jean-Jacques Beaume's creative work was largely inspired by the 1960s. Art turned into a vehicle for ideologies and other agendas, with Pop and Minimalism appearing concurrently as the most significant art movements of the decade.

Pop Art in New York city embraced the culture of mass media and mass consumerism, with Artists such as Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Tom Wesselmann getting stimulated by television, comic strips, billboards and other products of the rise of Capitalism for their artworks.

On the other side of the country, the West Coast in California, the first features of what would be known as Conceptual art were developing. Minimalism developed the crucial idea that art should subsist in its own reality, and not try to represent the real world. Born of a desire to eradicate all pre-established conceptions about art, Minimalism became a radically progressive movement, highly influential worldwide, with artists such as Frank Stella, Donald Judd and Dan Flavin as key actors. Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland and Helen Frankenthaler were artists who sought to explore further some of the most fundamental ideologies of Abstract Expressionism, while eliminating the emotional and highly personal aspect it would often associated with it.

This led to the creation of Color Field painting, deeply relating to Minimalism. The iconic contemporary art movements that echoed through the wave of radicalism of the 1960s also had their own distinctions and scopes, particular to different areas or countries. Spatialism, for example, was established in Italy by Lucio Fontana and Piero Manzoni, and its ideologies embraced by the Zero group in Germany. Across Europe, the philosophy of Existentialism deeply influenced artists such as Francis Bacon and Alberto Giacometti, who sought to depict the raw human emotions often associated with reflections on death and the lingering anxiety of the meaninglessness of life.