Yves Klein: A Master of Blue

Was Yves Klein a genius, a put-on — or both? A new show does its best to make us all believers

  • The Menil Collection, Houston. © 2010 ARS, New York/ADAGP, Paris. Image courtesy The Menil Collection, Houston

    Hiroshima, c. 1961.

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    Tangled Up in Blue
    It was after his return from Japan, while attempting to run a judo school in Paris, that Klein exhibited his first monochromes. Though he made them in several colors, including pink, orange and gold, by 1956 he had committed himself mostly to blue. It became not just his signature color but his obsession. For him it didn't simply symbolize the eternal; it was somehow the gateway to entering it. He declared a "blue revolution" aimed at transforming consciousness. He developed a means of suspending intense ultramarine pigment in a binder that allowed the pigment to retain its powdery texture on canvas, then patented it under the name International Klein Blue. (The combination of metaphysics and marketing was pure Klein.) He soaked big sponges in the stuff and attached them to canvases slathered in blue. He also mounted the sponges individually on metal rods like objects of veneration. At one of his openings, he even served cocktails laced with a chemical that turned everybody's urine blue. What a swell party that was.

    At the Hirshhorn show, which was organized by chief curator Kerry Brougher and Philippe Vergne, director of the Dia Art Foundation, there are whole galleries given over to Klein's monochromes, which have an undeniable, almost pulsing intensity. But none of them really holds your attention for very long. True to his word, Klein wasn't interested in the optical or structural satisfactions that a painting can offer. He wasn't attempting the tightly wound play of line, form and color that gives Ellsworth Kelly's monochrome panels their visual tension and snap. He was so indifferent to the kind of delicate brushwork that imparts a surface flutter to Robert Ryman's all-white paintings that he eventually took to applying his paint with rollers to remove any evidence of the artist's touch. If you don't share Klein's yearning for the ineffable — or his conviction that paint might be one way to arrive there — being in a gallery surrounded by his glowing blue monochromes can be like visiting the chapel of a faith you don't belong to.

    Until Andy Warhol, it may be that no artist, not even the publicity-crazed Salvador Dalí, was more preoccupied than Klein with getting before the cameras. So the cameras were rolling on March 9, 1960, when he staged a public performance in which nude female models coated themselves with his patented blue paint, then bumped and rolled against white canvas. While this went on, Klein demurely stood back in black tie and white gloves. For an artist who was supposed to be in touch with the future, it's funny he didn't realize how sexist — and worse, corny — the whole thing would look in just a few years, a stunt the Rat Pack might have tried if they had gone to art school. And yet some of the pictures produced by that very contrived method are strangely effective. In Untitled Anthropometry , the bodies — in this case, Klein and his future wife — form a line of plump silhouettes, like the handprints in neolithic cave paintings, the blunt traces of perishable mammals. Then there's Hiroshima, a convocation of pale human silhouettes that weirdly summons the ghosts of people vaporized by the atomic bomb.

    Klein's experiments with his "living brushes" eventually brought him to the attention of Paolo Cavara, a filmmaker about to embark on the leering "shockumentary" Mondo Cane , a grab bag of exotic cultural practices, animal slaughter and cleavage. But Klein didn't know what he was getting into when he agreed to be filmed by Cavara at work with his nude models. He thought the film would launch him onto the world stage. Not until the night of its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May 1962 did Klein see the entire film, which, he was horrified to discover, made him just one more act in a global freak show. Mortified, he returned to his hotel room and suffered a heart attack. Over the next three weeks, he had two more. The last was fatal.

    Klein had finally achieved the eternal, in that way we all do eventually. And from there he has certainly gained his share of immortality. But who knew better than he that the void can be an ideal base of operations?

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