The Cubists had already destroyed musical instruments—albeit only in the form of a pictorial motif—and with them a piece of the traditional order in which we live. Arman took a more radical path: He shattered or sawed real objects, including string instruments, and arranged the fragments on monochrome pictorial backgrounds. In the early 1960s, he belonged to the Parisian group of Nouveaux Réalistes around Yves Klein and the art critic Pierre Restany, who opposed the predominant abstract art and gestural painting with a new way of dealing with reality. The works were acquired for the Kunstsammlung by the Friends in 1983 and 1990.