In 1955 Coetzee joined the Stadler Stable, an avant-garde art group in Paris. The owner of Stadler Gallery, Rodolphe Stadler (1927-2009) saw great merit in avant-garde art and exhibited works of several artists of this type of genre. A year later in 1956, Coetzee painted a typewriter simply titled 'Art Autre', (named after Michel Tapié de Céleyran's 1952 book title, Un Art Autre) and exhibited it at his solo exhibition at the Stadler Gallery in 1961. When he exhibited at the Randse Afrikaanse Universiteit in Johannesburg during 1987, Coetzee could not find the original typewriter and thus recreated it. Other well-known Pop artists such as Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008) and Claes Oldenburg (1929- ) copied Coetzee's non-traditional example and created similar well-known typewriters in the 1960s.