Yves Klein
At the Tate Liverpool through March 5
One of the great figures of postwar European art, Yves Klein (1928-1962) was a leading proponent of the avant-garde Nouveau réalisme movement, an effort to find radical new ways of seeing and of defining art. A retrospective at the at the Tate Liverpool through March 5 offers many of his best-known works: his monochromes, which led to the development of his own signature color, a kind of lapis lazuli–ultramarine blue known as International Klein Blue (IKB), below. The sponges he used to create these monochromes would sometimes be put together as Reliefs (see the pink example, below). His Fire paintings were coated with a material that would trace the path of a blowtorch he applied to them (see below). And then there were his Anthropometries: in a sensational art event that prefigured the popularity of performance art, Klein had nude models painted with his International Klein Blue roll around on massive sheets of paper. The patterns they created (see image and video above and at bottom) became the work of art. At heart Klein was a showman, as the “Leap Into the Void” photograph, below, documents. He died of a heart attack at the age of 34, but the joy and sexiness of his art comes through timelessly.
Watch how Yves Klein’s Anthropometries came about, using naked models:
