A founding member of the Nouveau Realisme group, French artist Raymond Hains (1926-2005) was a perpetually restless innovator. In the 1940s he experimented with photograms and optical distortion; in the 1950s, he took torn posters from billboards and reprised them as paintings, pioneering an abstract realism, while also collaborating with the Lettrists; in 1960 he cofounded Nouveau Realisme alongside Klein, Spoerri, Tinguely and others, transposing construction hoardings into the gallery space and continuing his affichiste activities. In the '70s Hains worked with suitcases and narrative...