ArtQuake: The Most Disruptive Works in Modern Art by Susie Hodge

Author:Susie Hodge [Hodge, Susie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: art, history, Modern (Late 19th Century to 1945), Individual Artists, General, popular culture, Social Science, Monographs
ISBN: 9780711254770
Google: r6cSEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Frances Lincoln
Published: 2021-10-26T00:16:49.946523+00:00

UNEXPECTED ABSURDITY

UNTITLED ANTHROPOMETRY (ANT 100), YVES KLEIN

1960

During the early 1960s, Yves Klein (1928–62) used naked women to make his Anthropometry paintings, which were produced as elaborate performances in front of an audience. Both of Klein’s parents were painters, and many of his early paintings were created using single colours. By the late 1950s, these monochrome works were almost exclusively in a deep, rich ultramarine that he eventually patented as International Klein Blue (IKB). As a devout Catholic, Klein associated the colour blue with spirituality and wisdom; in Christianity, blue symbolises heaven, eternity and truth and in Christian art, the Virgin Mary is customarily shown wearing blue, often made from the expensive pigment lapis lazuli, reflecting her role as the Queen of Heaven. Klein used IKB in almost all his work, from performance and installation to sculpture and painting.

Marking a shift from painting being something that happens with a brush, Klein’s Anthropometry events influenced the painting and Performance art that followed. While his first Anthropometry paintings were created, an audience dressed in formal evening wear watched and blue cocktails were served. In a bow tie and black dinner jacket, Klein conducted a ten-piece orchestra in his personal composition of The Monotone Symphony, which he had written in 1949. It was a single continuous note played for twenty minutes, followed by twenty minutes of silence. When the music began, Klein conducted three naked female models to roll in the IKB paint that had been placed on giant pieces of paper on the wall and floor area, opposite the orchestra. When the music stopped, the women pressed or laid themselves on the paper, or were dragged across, creating imprints of parts of their bodies. Klein called them ‘living brushes’, and treated them as collaborators in his work.

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