César Baldaccini was born in Marseille in 1921. While studying at the Marseille Academy of Art he befriended Picasso, Richier and Giacometti, his housemate. At the end of the 1940s, César completed his first sculptures made of plaster and iron. In the traditions of Picasso and González, César welds pieces of scrap metal to imaginative, figurative or partially figurative sculptural works. From 1960 onward, during the Nouveau Réalisme period, he created his «Compressions dirigées» (car chassis or metal objects of all kinds crushed in hydraulic presses). In the 1960s, influenced by Pop Art, César also worked with colorful plastics and experimented with these ironic, fetish-related objects using molding techniques.