French Artist Ben, Known For His Provocative Painted Writings, Has Died

With the sudden passing of Benjamin Vautier, better known by his alias Ben, on June 5, 2024, we take a look back on the life of one of France’s most popular and impertinent artists, heir to Marcel Duchamp and the European Dadaists, who achieved a form of universality through his painted slogans in distinctive cursive script that appeared on everything from pencil cases to stamps and notebooks. Having written “Living is loving”, he was unwilling and unable to live without Annie Vautier, his wife and an unwavering supporter of his work throughout their decades together. After she died of a stroke, Ben took his own life by firearm just hours later in their home in the hills above Nice, at the age of 88. As geniuses are never alone, Annie and Ben Vautier, married for six decades, will be remembered as an emblematic couple of 20^th-century art, inextricably linked with the city of Nice.

A born agitator, Ben embodied the role of the disruptive artist that society can’t do without. He observed, analyzed and proposed his point of view through hand-painted texts that have become so familiar yet lost none of their relevance, soliciting a response, deconstructing our reality and challenging our habits. His epigrams were a kind of brushstroke, getting straight to the point, yet deeply profound. He placed a throne-like chair on a pedestal bearing the words “he told the truth, he will be executed”, inscribed “this mirror tells the truth” on a mirror where viewers stare back at their own reflections, scrawled “self-portrait of the artist” on a toilet seat hanging on the wall, and made atrocious copies of other artists’ work like a Paul Cézanne Provençal landscape and scribbled “the poor man’s Cézanne” on it.

Every new word or gesture was part of Ben’s quest for truth. At the same time, he was always questioning himself. “When I do something, I always have doubts,” he said. “I’m never sure of anything, but truth and doubt go together.” Blessed with visionary insight, he was as much a provocateur as a philosopher of art. His work was a reflection on the meaning of life and on the role of art and the artist in society. Relating the joys and misfortunes of his quotidian with an innate sense of humor, he expressed his feelings, passions and obsessions, condensed into concise catchphrases. He loved women and his friends, and disliked sectarians and Parisians. Believing that art could only live and make sense through the fragile, oversized ego of the artist, he demonstrated a critical mind that didn’t hesitate to interrogate everything, including his own ego, among his favorite subjects.

“Firstly, I have it in front of me and in me,” he noted. “So I just have to ask myself questions and answer them. My interest in the ego ties in with my general theory on art that all life is survival and that the ego is a form of survival. Today, I have become a much bigger philosopher because I think there’s nothing alive that is without ego. My cat is an egoist and this plant is an egoist because everything wants to survive. If you look at nature, they spend their time fighting and eating each other. To find something new, an artist must look at what was done before and say, ‘What can I do that hasn’t been done before?’, and this is an egoistic exercise, but it’s also the same for an entrepreneur, factory worker, financier or journalist. Ego is there even if you’re not an artist. All have to have ego. I’m trying to explain the beginning of the universe because I accepted the idea that all artists, people, animals, plants and microbes are egoists, everything that reproduces itself is full of ego, but the world itself, the volcanoes are not full of ego, so where does ego stop? Must it be alive?”

Born in Naples in 1935 to a Swiss father and French mother, Ben’s great-grandfather was recognized as one of the great 19^th-century Swiss painters, known for his depictions of peasant life. His parents divorced when he was young and he moved with his mother to Izmir, Alexandria, Lausanne and finally to Nice in 1949. “I was born into a petit bourgeois family,” he recalled. “If I had been from a family of laborers, I most likely would not have become an artist. I had to make a drawing every Christmas for my father, so I used to draw a horse or boat because it was very easy to make, and send it to him every year. And once my father gave me a compliment.” Enduring a rather sad childhood, he was traumatized when his father left home with his brother. A poor student, he then dropped out of school at the age of 16 to work in a bookstore.

Embarking on his signature written paintings in 1958, for Ben, it was the meaning that mattered and not the esthetics of his letters. Due to their format, greatly reduced color and the signaling effect of writing, his early works have more impact as message signboards than conventional paintings, and he even hung some of them on the facade of Laboratoire 32, his used record store-art gallery in Nice, to distinguish it from the surrounding buildings. “At the time, I never made money from my art at all,” he disclosed. “I had to earn a living, so I had a shop in which I used to buy and sell records. My principle was you give me two records and I give you one, so my stock became bigger.” His store soon became a meeting place for all young people who were doing something new and a hub for artistic debates. “It was very good because it was alive,” he remarked. “Fighting, exchanging ideas and saying to people they stole your idea was being alive.”

Over the course of decades of creation, Ben became part of the collective imagination with his prophetic phrases, instantly recognizable, sometimes sardonic, sometimes candid. A master of aphorisms and epigrams, he transformed writing into painting, elevating script to the level of contemporary art. He explained what being free means, “We’re in a world where freedom is in danger. We’re not free. There are more and more restrictions. Artists should look for freedom because they must do something new that others haven’t done before. They will feel free at one point when they discover something new and show it, but freedom is very difficult – it has to be won. When I’m offered an exhibition, I think first what viewers would like, then what I could do that shocks them, surprises them and makes them never forget me.”

A public tribute to Annie and Ben Vautier will be held on June 13, 2024 at 10.30am in Nice at the reflecting pool of the Coulée Verte. Anyone wishing to pay their respects may come and lay flowers in front of their portraits. Registers for messages and drawings will be open on the esplanade to collect visitors’ testimonies.