Yves Klein

IKB 67



1961, RE 6



1961, ANT 95, Anthropometry



1960, Monotone Symphony




Yves Klein was a French painter who lived from 1928 to 1962. His best known work comes from the mid-1940's to his death. These are his monochrome paintings, which began in 1946. He is particularly known for his “blue period”, during which he patented a pigment he called International Klein Blue, and worked almost exclusively in this color. He painted panels purely in this color, using different techniques for applying the paint, first using rollers to create perfectly flat surfaces. But he experimented with this, and other ways of applying the paint, like using natural sponges, and using these to build reliefs onto his panels. This experimentation led naturally to his anthropometries, which began in 1958. In these, he used the bodies of women to apply paint to his canvases—he would instruct them to cover their skin with the paint, and then make a stamped imprint of themselves on the large, upright canvases. In other works he coated plaster replicas of famous Greek sculptures with the International Klein Blue pigment, and produced a musical equivalent of his monochrome paintings, first in 1947, then in variant forms thereafter for different performances in different galleries.
He died at the age of 34 after having a series of three heart attacks in less than a month in 1962.

So, to give a sense of the ideas behind the monochrome works, we have an excerpt from Klein's own words, from his lecture at the Sorbonne in 1959.
(from book)

That was an extract from Yves Klein's lecture at the Sorbonne, from 1959. This provides an idea about his monochrome works, two of which are shown online at newexpressionist.blogspot.com. There are visible there IKB 67, a flat, deep blue panel with some ridges of texture, and RE 6, a relief with sponges. In IKB 67 there are uneven horizontal ridges, which bend and meet with each other into points in places, and fade in and out in others, rising and descending again, and remain temporarily parallel at other points. Upon close examination the ridges look like some sort of geological formation, something that could happen in nature, perhaps by the movement of wind through sand—though in the end there is not an idea that definite about it, only a good sense of the naturalness of the textural elements. There is a similar sense about RE 6, too—when looking at a reproduction of this work, one could imagine looking at a satellite image of a foreign planet. Little fragments and particles dust the surface in an irregular fashion like rocks and pebbles dusting a planet's surface. It is unclear from simply looking how this was formed; it may be that it is the result of forming the surface by applying the paint with sponges, though there are pieces scattered about that seem too large for that, more like sticky pieces of the pigment, dropped around like dust. Of course, the most prominent element of the relief is the scattering of sea sponges. They are round, rough, and completely soaked with paint, so their texture blends quite well with that of the panel, like boulders on a planet's surface, and of course the color is completely uniform. The only variations are the shadows from the textural elements. And the color, being this very deep, very saturated blue that one would have a difficulty finding in nature, is indeed the main point of this work, as Klein articulated in his 1959 lectures.


His exploration of the aesthetics of a pure space was not confines to this use of color, though. He also explored the use of pure empty space in works such as the Void, and the Zones of Immaterial Pictoral Sensibility. The Void came first, in 1958. Its full title was “The Specialization of Sensibility in the Raw Material State into Stabilized Pictorial Sensibility, The Void,” and in this, an empty space was put on exhibition at the Iris Clert gallery. The space was kept flat white, except for a blue curtain over a the entrance to the gallery, a window which was painted blue, and a cabinet—the only object not removed from the gallery. From 1959 onward, the Zones of Immaterial Pictoral Sensibility occurred-- this has been termed a kind of performance piece, though that description does not seem to suit it entirely properly. In this piece, Klein would exchange areas of empty space in Paris for gold. In both works, the buyer would get a certificate of ownership of the space. In the Zones of Immaterial Pictoral Sensibility though, if the buyer agreed to set fire to the certificate, half the gold would be thrown into the river, and this would restore the natural order that had been upset by the selling of the empty space. This relates to the monochrome works in the idea of experiencing objects entirely in their absence, or in the fleeting imprints made upon them. It's more like the white canvases of Robert Rauschenberg, in which the viewer's shadows and reflections made up the art work—but there is also the aspect to it that is more like Klein's own monochrome works: as those were about appreciating the aesthetic of the pure color, the Void and the Zones of Immaterial Pictoral Sensibility are about the aesthetic appreciation of an empty space.

A more obvious parallel to Klein's monochrome paintings is his Monotone Symphony. The piece was first composed in 1949, three years after the beginning of his monochrome paintings. It is written to consist of 20 minutes of a single sustained tone, followed by 20 minutes of silence. Since 1949 it was realized in various different versions. The first was with an exhibit of International Klein Blue paintings at the Iris Clert Gallery in 1957, produced by tape.

In another, on March 9, 1960, at the International Gallery of Contemporary Art in Paris, Klein conducted a performance of the piece by a ten piece orchestra. Before going any further in talking about this performance event, here is a one minute excerpt from this performance.

This went on for 20 minutes, followed by 20 minutes of a strict silence. At the gallery, as this was happening, the visitors had all arrived in formal wear, and simultaneous with the performance of the Monotone Symphony, an Anthropometry painting was produced. The two elements of this performance can be seen together in some of the photographs. The orchestra is arranged seated along one of the walls with an International Klein Blue painting behind them. In front of them, there is paper laid out across the floor, on which the International Klein Blue paint is spread. The panel on which the Anthropometry work is being produced is set upright along a wall at the left. There is a series of steps along the edge of this wall, which allows the models to reach different heights along the panel. In the photograph that I've shown online, one imprint is already visible, and two models are shown. One is still covering herself with paint, and another is standing on one of the steps, about ready to create the imprint of herself. Yves Klein is between these two events—the making of the anthropometry and the line of instrumentalists, so that he can conduct both of them. For the anthropometry paintings, he needs only to instruct the models on where to position themselves; he does not need to touch even a drop of the paint.

The name for the Anthropometry paintings comes from an old scientific practice of the early 20th century, used primarily in tracking criminals. A variety of bodily measurements were taken, like stature, length and width of head, and lengths of left middle and little fingers. There were 12 total measurements, selected by Alphonse Bertillon, after he took a variety of anthropometric measurements over time, and found these most consistent over the duration of a person's life. The practice of using anthropometric measurements was more efficient and effective than the use of photographs, as even one piece of information would very much reduce the number of pictures one would have to sift through. But, it ultimately fell out of favor, becoming obsolete with the rise of fingerprinting. Klein's Anthropometries are more like larger fingerprints, being imprints of the entire body. These, the selling of empty spaces, and the monochrome works were all continued until the artist's death in 1962.