In his "Mémoires accumulées" (Belfond Publishing, 1992), Arman talks to Otto Hahn about the origin of his "Allures d'objets": "Otto Hahn : how did you start with the object? Arman: A reflection by Yves Klein helped me a lot. Seeing my abstract works, he said to me: "You are a good painter. But there are ten thousand good painters in the world. "I understood the lesson: I started to look like objects.

 

Otto Hahn: On what date? Arman: 1958. I would take a jug, a bottle, a necklace of pearls; I would paint them with paint and roll them on the canvas. The object inscribed its shape and trajectory. Then I arrived at a second step: "accidents". (...) The term "object appearance" comes from the vocabulary used by the GRM (Groupe de Recherches Musicales). Under the direction of Pierre Schaeffer, inventor of concrete music, students collected sounds. For example, they would take an opaline lampshade and make it ring. They recorded the tone and transformed the speed of the vibrations. They called this music "the look of objects".

I kidnapped that word to use it. The distortion of the sound impression went hand in hand with the distortion of the pictorial impression. When I unwound my objects soaked in ink, I printed their appearance. I used eggs, a shoe, ball bearings, bottles, springs... I took anything that could leave an interesting trace. "(Quoted by Denyse Durand-Ruel in "Arman, Catalogue raisonné I, 1954-1959", Paris, Editions Cudemo, 2005, p. 104).