Ben Vautier, Artist Whose Specialty Was Provocation, Dies at 88

Ben Vautier, a French artist and agitator who often worked under the moniker Ben, and who as a core member of the anti-art collective Fluxus blurred the boundaries of high and low, art and life, while adhering to the credo “Everything is art,” died on June 5 at his home in Nice, France. He was 88.

He died by suicide shortly after his wife, Annie Vautier, a performance artist he married in 1964, died of a stroke, his children, Eva and Francois, posted on social media. “Unwilling and unable to live without her,” they wrote, “Ben killed himself a few hours later at their home.”

Theirs was an intense, if tangled, relationship. “We called her “Sainte-Annie,” Mascha Sosno, a friend, was quoted as saying in a recent article on the France Info website.

“It was difficult to live with him,” she added. “They argued all the time, but in fact they adored each other, and he was inseparable from Annie, too.”

Forever looking to provoke, Mr. Vautier found a kindred spirit in 1962 when he met George Maciunas, who spearheaded the avant-garde Fluxus movement of the 1960s, which included Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik and other artists, and which drew from the iconoclastic Dada movement of the early 20th century.

Fluxus, as articulated in Mr. Maciunas’s 1963 manifesto, was intended as a revolution, a call to comrades to “promote living art, anti-art, promote non-art reality,” while purging the world of “dead art, imitation, artificial art.”