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Lot Essay
In the early 1960s, Yves Klein created nearly two hundred body-imprinted paintings called Anthropométries, a term coined by the artist's friend and critic Pierre Restany. Ant 135 incorporates this use of women's bodies as "living paintbrushes" as well as the use of blowtorches to burn the paper, a technique further explored in Klein's Fire Paintings of 1961-62. Combining two of the artist's working methods that "trace" his actions, Ant 135 reveals the artist's tendency to foreground the process of creation in his work.
To create the Anthropométries like the present example, Klein covered selected areas of his model's bodies with his signature blue paint and directed them to press their painted body parts onto large sheets of paper. For the Fire Paintings, the artist wielded a blowtorch to scorch and transfigure the surface of chemically treated paper. The resulting image in both cases is a tangible trace, whether of a body or of fire, and a corporeal documentation of a performance.
In many of the other works in this series, the image is visibly made from a single imprint of one body. But to make all the marks in the present painting would have necessitated more than one model or would have required the model to reposition herself for different pressings. With evidence of multiple bodies or impressions, combined with the varied textures of the paint imprints and irregularly burnished areas, this work evokes the action that lies behind its creation, something Klein so effectively captured in both his Anthropométries and Fire Paintings.
To create the Anthropométries like the present example, Klein covered selected areas of his model's bodies with his signature blue paint and directed them to press their painted body parts onto large sheets of paper. For the Fire Paintings, the artist wielded a blowtorch to scorch and transfigure the surface of chemically treated paper. The resulting image in both cases is a tangible trace, whether of a body or of fire, and a corporeal documentation of a performance.
In many of the other works in this series, the image is visibly made from a single imprint of one body. But to make all the marks in the present painting would have necessitated more than one model or would have required the model to reposition herself for different pressings. With evidence of multiple bodies or impressions, combined with the varied textures of the paint imprints and irregularly burnished areas, this work evokes the action that lies behind its creation, something Klein so effectively captured in both his Anthropométries and Fire Paintings.