Large Blue Anthropometry [ANT 105] | Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

In his brief, seven-year artistic career—cut short by his premature death in 1962—Yves Klein created a heterogeneous and critically complex body of work that anticipated much of the art of the succeeding decades, from Conceptual art to performance art. Although Klein began by creating monochrome canvases in the mid-1950s, he abandoned the specificity of the pictorial in favor of a conception of art as independent of any particular medium or technique. A postmodern artist ahead of his time, Klein conceived of art that was invisible, composed the Monotone Silence Symphony (Symphonie Monoton Silence), imagined an “air architecture,” presented his actions in public, turned to photography, and commissioned “documentation” recording his more ephemeral works. His program focused less on the particular skill of the artist and more on the artist’s ability to put forth a mythic presence generating works in every genre: “A painter has to create only one masterpiece—himself, constantly—and to become a kind of atomic battery, a kind of generator of constant radiation that impregnates the atmosphere with all of his pictorial presence, which remains fixed in space after he passes through it.”[1]

Anxious to break with all forms of expressionism, Klein had, practically from the outset of his career, “rejected the brush,” which he felt was “too psychological,” in favor of rollers, which were more “anonymous” and enabled him to “create a ‘distance’ between [himself] and [his] canvases.[2] Between 1958 and 1960 he perfected a technique that allowed him to expand on this idea: he used nude models as “living brushes” (pinceaux vivants) that created marks and impressions under his supervision. The Anthropometries, as they would be branded by Klein’s friend, the critic Pierre Restany, maintained Klein’s insistent separation between the work and his own body, and also allowed him to revive the nude without resorting to traditional means of representation. Klein presented a demonstration of the technique at the Galerie Internationale d’Art Contemporain in Paris on March 9, 1960, attended by approximately one hundred guests. As musicians played Klein’s Monotone Silence Symphony, the tuxedo-clad artist directed the actions of three nude models, who spread paint on their torsos and thighs and pressed or dragged their bodies on sheets of white paper. In addition to one “corporeal monochrome,” the resulting paintings comprised both simple static impressions and dynamic traces of bodies in motion.