ARTS Yves Klein and Rotraut, Museo d’Arte, Lugano, Switzerland
When he was 18, Yves Klein wanted to sign the sky. This juvenile impulse anticipates the French avant garde painter’s later conviction that the path to transcendence lay through a single colour: blue. It also reveals him as a precocious conceptualist. (His blue sky moment came in 1946 when most serious artists were poised to explore postwar existential angst through informal abstraction.)
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| An untitled painting (1960) in the ‘Anthropometries’ series |
The most significant of these is “Peintures”. Published by Klein in 1954 during a trip to Madrid, this is a collection of monochrome papers, each inscribed with their measurements and a city’s name, as if they are catalogue entries for paintings – although no such canvases exist.
The “Peintures” mark the beginning of Klein’s mature period, which lasted from 1955 until his death aged 34 in 1962. Yet, unlike most of his postwar avant garde peers, he left behind no juvenile figurative experiments. That his father was a figurative painter may account for his precocity. With no formal art training, Klein spent his youth on the Côte d’Azur, where the indigo light inevitably affected his artistic sensibility. A passion for judo, meanwhile, introduced him to the spiritual philosophies of the east
The main Lugano show opens with a gallery of his first “Monochromes”. Painted between 1955 and 1957 in emerald, mustard, vermilion, white, raspberry and his not-yet signature ultramarine, the tablets float before the eyes in a surreal, mystic geometry. Such meditative, magnetic power brings Rothko to mind, yet the American’s canvases were composed with different-hued layers. In recognising what he described as the “extraordinary, autonomous life” of pure pigment, Klein’s genius is more comparable to Lucio Fontana’s perceptions about the possibilities of infinite space. (The Italian artist was among the first buyers of Klein’s blue monochromes.)
Klein was unhappy with the reception that these “Monochromes” received. When they were shown in Paris in 1956, spectators saw them as a single, Mondrian-like unity of contrasting shapes and colours.
In order to avoid such decorative interpretations, Klein decided to stick to a single hue. Our first major encounter with International Klein Blue (IKB) – the mix of brilliant ultramarine pigment and synthetic resin that he patented – comes not with one of the canvases but with a tableau of Klein’s sponge sculptures. Ideal conduits for his searing, lapidary shade, these foaming, fathomless, marine organisms justify Klein’s declaration that blue, unlike other colours, “is beyond dimensions”.
As for the iconic IKB monochromes, their charisma here is greatly reduced by the perspex travel cases which collectors are loath to let curators remove. As a result, the entire room, including one’s own image, is mirrored in their depths. More potent is the big tray of IKB pigment. Gazing down from the mezzanine floor at the velvety, tonal variations is like viewing the marbled surface of an ocean from a clifftop – a pure, moving visual experience. Yet paradoxically, the sapphire depths also make it an emblem of Klein’s theory that painting “is not a function of the eye” at all. Instead, it is a threshold to the infinite; a material doorway on to immateriality.
Klein’s championing of the immaterial has often been read as a quest for nothingness, silence or absence. In fact, as his Madrid “Peintures” suggest, he was seeking a territory beyond the visible, a spiritual presence he once described as an “architecture of the air”.
Such metaphysical explorations were part of the 1950s artistic zeitgeist and paved the way for 1960s minimalists such as Robert Ryman. But Klein’s decision in 1958 to hold a gallery show consisting of entirely empty rooms still caused a sensation.
A year later, he was selling “zones of immaterial pictorial sensibility” – purely imaginary concepts – for bars of gold. As soon as the buyer burnt the receipt, Klein threw half of the gold into the Seine, a happening eloquently documented in Lugano by photographs of the protagonists huddled on the chilly river bank.
On first consideration, the event seems to anticipate ironic postmodern critiques of the relation between art and money such as Damien Hirst’s diamond-encrusted skull. In fact Klein’s gesture was a statement of belief in the spiritual value of his voids and in the transformative power of the imagination.
Klein’s riverside adventure is usually eclipsed by the fame of his 1960 “Anthropometries” performance when he asked nude models to cover themselves in blue paint and roll about on white paper in front of an audience. Anyone with even a hint of feminist sensibility will find this spectacle, on video here, more than a little grotesque. Yet the paintings are beautiful; rotund, blue-swathed limbs and torsos whose archetypal, calligraphic energy recalls the dancers of Matisse.
Not all Klein’s works were visual winners. The creation of his “Fire Paintings” with a blow torch and a water spray is terrifically exciting on video but the finished cardboard panels, their surfaces charred and soaked into random, formless patterns, prove that there are limits to the power of the spontaneous gesture. His plaster casts of figures sprayed with pigment also fall flat.
Yet anyone who doubts Klein’s genius should consider the “Triptych of Krefeld” (1961), which dominates the room that is supposedly devoted to his wife’s work. Saturated in ultramarine, gold and a glowing fuchsia that is identical to that beloved of Beato Angelico, the three panels are clearly intended to evoke the sacred masterpieces of the Italian Renaissance. Fascinatingly, even without the presence of the iconic figures, they still possess an uncanny, resonant aura.
Is Klein reminding us that all art, even that that seems the essence of the figurative, is ultimately conceptual? Or is it simply that no colour is ever truly neutral, least of all his favourite Madonna blue?
Continues until September 13
