Painting on, or as, Film — On Performativity — Walker Art Center

Each of these gestures speaks to Klein’s interest in the transitory nature of the present moment. For Klein, we are but sensate beings caught in the flows of time and space; it is art’s function to register what he called “the mark of the immediate.” Indeed, as the artist moved away from his monochromes in the late 1950s, he sought other ways of harnessing the materials of painting in the service of giving form to life’s evanescence. “After all,” Klein wrote in 1961, “my purpose is to extract and conclude the trace of the immediate from any incidence of natural objects—human, animal, vegetable, or atmospheric circumstances.” For one series of paintings, he worked outside on the banks of the River Loup, casting dry pigment onto wet reeds and dragging paper and canvas through the sand. With these works, which he titled Cosmogonies (a term that refers to philosophical inquiry into the origins of the universe), he attempted “to register the signs of atmospheric behavior by recording on a canvas the instantaneous traces of spring showers, of south winds, and of lighting.” For his Planetary Reliefs, Klein hurled stones at wet plaster, producing craterlike effects that index specific variables of force, mass, and acceleration. Even Klein’s Gold Paintings, with their loosely leafed surfaces, seem to flutter in response to atmospheric conditions. With these bodies of work, Klein forged a uniquely responsive art. Hung on walls, these paintings are out of their element. They are meant to be in the world, for they are coextensive with the natural materials, properties, and phenomena that brought them into being.

Klein’s most sensitive body of work, however, was a series of paintings he initiated in 1958 in which he used the human body as a “living brush.” He called these works Anthropometries, and by the time of his death in 1962, he had produced some 200 of them. Klein borrowed the term “anthropometry” from the social sciences, referring to the branch of physical anthropology concerned with the comparative study of human body measurements for the purpose of classification. Despite the term’s origin, Klein had a different mode of measurement in mind, for by covering the body in paint and pressing it against the canvas, he sought to register the fleeting presence of the body in time and space—to capture a moment of the body’s existence that could never be recaptured. But why the body?

Klein’s impulse to use “living brushes” first developed from his monochrome painting practice, which oddly enough required the presence of models in the studio. He did not employ them to pose; the monochromes did not purport to represent the figure as such. With these paintings, Klein did however aim to present stabilized immaterial sensibility for which the presence of a living body provided him the most tangible substitute. As Klein’s widow Rotraut Klein-Moquay recalls, “It was important for him simply to have someone else nearby when he went about his work with these immaterial energies.” In his 1960 essay “Truth Becomes Reality,” the artist writes:

“In the past, the painter used to go to the subject, working outdoors
in the countryside, both feet on the ground. It was healthy!

Today, easel painting has become completely academized, so much so
that it has imprisoned the painter in his studio face to face with the
atrocious mirror of his own canvas …

… In order not to retreat by shutting myself inside the
excessively spiritual regions of artistic creation, using the plain
common sense that the presence of the flesh in the studio would
benefit my incarnate condition, I consequently engaged nude models.

The shape of the human body, its lines, its colors of between life and
death are of no interest to me; it is the emotional atmosphere that I
value.

The flesh … !!!!”

If the presence of flesh came to inform how Klein sought to stabilize sensibility in his monochrome paintings, then it was only a matter of time until he would seek a more direct way to transpose the body’s vital energies into a painted state. He continues:

“One will easily understand the process: at first my models laughed at
seeing themselves transposed onto the canvas in monochrome, then they
became accustomed to it and loved the values of the color, different
for each canvas, even during the blue period where it was more or less
the same tone, the same pigment, the same technique. Then while
pursuing the adventure of the ‘immaterial,’ little by little, I ceased
producing tangible art, my studio empty, even the monochromes were
gone. At that moment, my models felt that they had to do something for
me … They rolled themselves in color, and with their bodies
painted my monochromes. They had become living brushes!”