Comic relief

ArtForum, Summer, 1995 by Nan Rosenthal

What did differ somewhat was the installation. At the Hayward this was generally very well done, particularly for an audience of young people being introduced to Klein's work for the first time. Martin Caiger-Smith, the exhibition organizer there, and the architect Paul Williams, of Stanton-Williams, who has had a lot of experience designing installations for the Hayward's challenging concrete interiors, transformed the entire space, both lower and upper galleries, with ramps, scrim, and seemingly tintless white paint, a cold white reminiscent of the interiors of European artists' studios in the late '50s and '60s. Stich's notion of reconstructing a number of Klein's original installations is almost impossible to achieve, however, and thus questionable as a project. The documentary evidence is limited, the testimony of witnesses is sketchy and often at variance, and the kind of wall-by-wall installation photography that is standard in museums today was not done even for the 1961 retrospective that Klein himself designed for the Haus Lange in Krefeld, although some useful photos of this show do exist. In addition, some lenders to the Hayward refused to permit the removal of Plexiglas coverings, which create a kind of visual death for the look of dry, unbound pigment that Klein sought.

That said, the first room - as opposed to vitrine - in the Hayward show succeeded quite winningly in re-creating what I believe to have been the scale and atmosphere of Klein's second one-man exhibition, "Yves: Propositions Monochromes," at the Galerie Colette Allendy, Paris, in February 1956. This show contained ten or so monochrome panels from 1955 and 1956, in different colors - red, green, white, blue, yellow, black, orange, violet, etc. - and in a great variety of rectangular shapes, from square to vertically elongated to landscape format. Few if any were in the more classic five-to-four proportion of height to width that Klein came to favor the following year and for the rest of his career, whatever the actual size of the panels.

Like Klein's later monochromes, most of these early examples were made by stretching thin muslin over wood panels or composition board, the corners of which were rounded. Often Klein fixed four sides to the panels to create what are in effect shallow boxes. The panels sometimes have wood brackets on their backs so that they jut slightly forward from the wall into the viewer's "real" space. The paint Klein used, developed for him by a Montparnasse retailer of chemicals and art supplies, was an early version of the "International Klein Blue" paint he later patented. It consisted of dry pigment, a transparent binder (an industrial polymerized vinyl acetate usually used by manufacturers of maps and books), and solvents (alcohol and ethyl acetate). The formula was not water soluble and dried very quickly, as Klein's "living brushes," the models who, in 1960, covered themselves with IKB and imprinted their bodies on stiff paper to make Klein's "Anthropometries," learned. Klein applied the paint to the front and sides of the early panels with housepainters' rollers of differing naps, so the factures vary a great deal.

Klein later complained in writing about the first Allendy show that viewers did not place themselves in the presence of the color of each individual picture but instead "reconstituted the elements into a decorative polychromy."(1) In effect, as Klein described it, they made the show into a three-dimensional painting, a relational geometric abstraction. It was this, he wrote, that "provoked my Blue Period."(2) It was a habit of Klein's to discuss issues about his work in terms of his version of audience reaction to it, but his complaint about the response to the Allendy show was also his way of separating himself from the painters of geometric abstraction active in Paris at the time. With the exception of the art of kinetic sculptor Jean Tinguely, a great buddy of Klein's beginning around this time, the work of many of these artists lacked irony and other forms of humor. To the extent that they were interested in such historical precedents as Marcel Duchamp's Bicycle Wheel of 1913, for example, it was that work's capacity to move that intrigued them, not its wry conceptual status as an assisted readymade. Klein's art objects, on the other hand, as well as his theatrical activities and his abundant writing, often contained a great deal of humor, although it is mostly overlooked by apologists such as Stich in the current show's catalogue, and also by neo-Marxian criticism of the past decade.

Klein's humor, particularly his play with the conventions of the art world, surfaced in his first public work, the booklet Yves Peintures, of 1954. It certainly reappeared in the very title - "L'Epoca Blu" (The Blue Period) - of his January 1957 show at the small Galleria Apollinaire in Milan. This show of ten ultramarine monochromes, virtually identical in size (roughly 30 by 22 inches) and in their lightly textured facture (made with a housepainter's roller), was a sensuous, literal, explicit challenge to the ideology of art informel painting. It was comparable in its way to what Robert Rauschenberg's Factum I and Factum II of 1957 proposed about American Abstract Expressionism - that the works of that school were potentially repeatable, rather than the products of an existential moment. Hung forward from the wall and painted on their sides, Klein's panels coexist both as exemplars of pictorial depth and as solids in the space of the observer. The latter effect is also articulated later by Klein's sponge relief panels of 1960 and 1961, arguably his most original and formally compelling objects. In these the sponges project forward from their grounds and in some cases project laterally beyond the edges of the same curve-cornered rectangles.(3)