Martial Raysse, one of the major artists of the second half of the 20th century, is the only French nouveau réaliste for whom the term "pop" is as apt as it is for Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein in the US, Sigmar Polke in Germany and David Hockney in Britain.
Had he enjoyed the support of collectors and museums in his home country, in the same way as the above did, he would not have had to wait till the age of 78 for the Pompidou to stage a retrospective of his work . However grand and marvellous the exhibition may be, such recognition comes scandalously late. It has certainly been an uphill struggle for French artists in France over the past 50 years. Indeed, there was a time in the 1980s when Raysse was regarded as passé in the Paris art world.
Yet there are few artists for whom the word modern is more fitting. Raysse finds his ideas, subjects and methods in the present. From the outset, his principles were clear. In 1957 he assembled objects made of plastic, groceries, bottles and brushes, turning them into reliquaries for the consumer society, which philosopher Roland Barthes was analysing at that very moment in Mythologies.
He went on to colour photographs, recycle paintings and portraits, drawing on advertising cliches and film erotica. His irony, dexterity and exuberance soon reached a peak of intensity. Raysse, in this guise, was like Ingres revisited by Godard, with the Grande Odalisque and Pierrot le Fou daubed in colour, or the Bain Turc re-enacted at St Tropez. Neon tubes proved ideal for drawing the outline of a mountain, writing "Snack" in the middle of a painting, or composing a parody sign.
Raysse Beach, in 1962, was an "installation" before the word existed in artistic parlance, with real sand, fake swimsuit adverts, a real jukebox and a dolphin rubber ring, 30 years before Jeff Koons started using inflatable toys. Raysse made his first stab at film-making in 1964, with an updated version of the tale of Susanna and the Elders. Two years later, he produced Jesus Cola, followed by Camembert Martial in 1969 and the prodigiously inventive Grand Départ, with faded, diluted colours and a soundtrack in several languages, part of which was scrambled.
It was the story of a guru, a hippy environmentalist community, fear of the end of the world and departure for some otherworldly paradise. It was topical then and it still is. But Raysse was neither a chronicler nor a realist and increasingly espoused allegory, symbol and myth. Several actors in the Grand Départ wore animal masks and the women were draped in toga-like tunics, unless, of course, they were naked.
At the same time he cut shapes out of Perspex, reduced the face to just a few graphic signs, and scattered others, representing crosses or stars, in the surroundings. In so doing he made the connection between pop art and Minimalism, both of which were by-products of contemporary western society and much less contradictory than many claimed.
Raysse was one of the few French artists of the period to be genuinely international. He worked in Nice, Paris and Los Angeles, showing in the US, Italy, Germany and Japan. He could have yielded to success, and gone on doing a particular brand of art and selling it at high prices. Instead, seized by doubt, he stopped. "I was a well-known painter," he said in 1972. "Now, I'm a penniless film-maker. Having decided to use the techniques of my time, I started from scratch. And to what a reception ..."
He failed to produce a film to equal the prophetically named Grand Départ. So he began again. He shunned big cities and galleries, and broke with his earlier life. The devil became a hermit. Things that might be guessed at before – his taste for allegory, his love of fables – became more apparent. Ancient myths invaded the paper which he painted, tore up and pieced together again. In his world each figure – nymph, minotaur, monster, sage or loony – had one or more meanings, playing a part in various symbolic systems.
In the mid-1980s he produced his first large-scale distempers on canvas and his first bronzes . The titles and subject matter – The Spring, Childhood of Bacchus, George and the Dragon – showed Raysse staking a claim as a renovator of big paintings, picking up the legacy of Poussin. But it is not what we see in the final part of the exhibition, devoted to the last two decades.
Whether he paints, generally using acrylics, draws, sculpts or reuses various objects and debris, he displays qualities far removed from classicism: a sense for burlesque and parody, a penchant for outrage and satire, a bitter, sacrilegious humour. Much more in tune with Shakespeare than Racine, closer to Dix and Picabia than to Poussin, he peoples his works with buffoons and clowns, outrageously made up women, lecherous old men, dizzy drunks and downcast divinities.
La Fin des Haricots (End of the Road) is a burlesque version of Leda and the Swan, with a shameless, impotent old man standing in for the former. Poissons d'avril (April Fools) brings together Lars von Trier loonies or George Romero zombies with a backdrop of flowers. It is also a throwback to Grand Départ, much as his current portraits of young women are reminiscent of the way he played with female images in the past.
The frieze, Ici Plage, is the 2012 version of Raysse Beach. It features a crowd of flirts, exhibitionists, fashion victims and pitiful philanderers. On the right-hand side a character in pink trousers hiding behind an umbrella is running away; on the left, a women is trying in vain to hide behind a fence; in the background a man is disembowelling a corpse. This is no beach, more like the first circle of hell.
At times it is hard to look at these crude paintings, with their chromatic dissonances, brutal attitudes and expressions. But the violence with which the subject matter is addressed makes sense. Raysse does not hesitate, not now or in the past. There is no compromise, nothing to temper his fury. He takes his idea as far as it will go, and his idea is that humankind is a tragicomical masquerade. It is hard to fault him on that point.
Martial Raysse is at the Pompidou Centre, Paris, until 22 September
This article appeared in Guardian Weekly, which incorporates material from Le Monde