411 Sansome Street
Financial District
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This bronze, done in 1986, titled Hermes and Dionysus-Monument to Analysis is by Arman. (1928-2005)
The French-born American artist Arman told an interviewer in 1968. “I have never been — how do you say it? A dilettante.” Arman’s vast artistic output ranges from drawings and prints to monumental public sculpture. His work—strongly influenced by Dada, and in turn a strong influence on Pop Art—is in the collections of such institutions as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Tate Gallery in London and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
Born in Nice in 1928, Armand Pierre Fernandez signed his early work with his first name only; he retained a printer’s 1958 misspelling of his name for the rest of his career. After studies at the Ecole Nationale des Arts Décoratifs in Nice, Arman went to Paris to study art history at the Ecole du Louvre.
Enamored by the artistic energy of New York in the ’60s, Arman moved into the Chelsea Hotel in 1967, and became an American citizen (adopting the official name of Armand P. Arman) in 1973.
Throughout his career, Arman remained passionately engaged with human rights issues important to him. For five years, he served as President of the New York Chapter of Artists for Amnesty International. In 1990, on the occasion of a major retrospective of his work that was to be the inaugural attraction at the Museum of Contemporary and Modern Art in his hometown of Nice, Arman made a major statement against religious prejudice. Only weeks before the scheduled opening, Nice hosted the convention of the Front National, a right-wing French political party whose guest of honor had been a German Neo-Nazi. The Mayor of Nice honored the F.N., and in the uproar that followed made anti-Semitic remarks. In protest, Arman cancelled the retrospective, and, as a consequence, waited until 2002 for his work to be exhibited in the city of his birth. Some friends had advised Arman not to mix politics with art. He responded, “If you are not willing to mix with politics sometimes, politics may one day mix with you—whether you want it or not.”
After passing away in 2005 his wife, Corice Canton Arman, formed the Arman P. Arman Trust, which handles his work today.
Hermes and Dionysus is part of the Embarcadero Center Art Collection. The collection was created by Embarcadero Center developer David Rockefeller and Embarcadero Center architect John C. Portman, Jr., who shared the vision of integrating fine architecture with fine art.
