A tour de force executed at the height of Yves Klein’s revolutionary eight-year career, Anthropométrie sans titre, (ANT 149), 1958 is a compelling and concise expression of the female form rendered in the artist’s signature International Klein Blue. Performative and provocative, the work results from the imprint of a nude model’s painted body, pressed against a sheet of paper. By cropping the composition in on the model’s midsection and thighs, Klein focuses Anthropométrie sans titre, (ANT 149) on the body as flesh, desirable and desiring; Anthropométrie sans titre, (ANT 149) emphasizes the emotional eroticism of the human form in a brilliant monochrome trace.ⁱ The present work first belonged to Klein’s photographer, Frédéric Barzilay, who documented the artist’s innovative practice.

“Now, what a miracle, the brush returned, but this time it was alive.”
—Yves Klein

Raised by painters who worked within the abstract l’art informel and Post-Impressionist styles, but having received no formal training himself, Klein revolutionized the medium beyond its pre-war avant-garde. Claiming that the new, post-war world needed a new man, Klein rejected brushes as “too excessively psychological,” opting to instead use paint rollers that provided distance from artist’s hand.ⁱⁱ The Anthropométries marked a major advancement in Klein’s conceptual development, fully separating the artist’s hand from the work. Klein began his Anthropométries in 1958 as private experiments before staging an inaugural performance for the opening of the new Galerie internationale d’art contemporain in Paris on March 9, 1960. Executed during the experimental first year of the Anthropométries, the present example celebrates the liberated physical action. As declared by Klein, “my pictures represent poetic events, or rather, they are immobile, silent, and static witnesses to the very essence of movement and life in freedom, which is the flame of poetry in the pictorial moment.”ⁱⁱⁱ

 

Klein pioneered a performative new type of practice by relinquishing his formal artistic tools. Reinventing the conventional artist-model relationship, Klein used nude women as “living paintbrushes” to apply paint to substrate. Klein meticulously directed the positions and movements of the blue-coated women as they made their traces onto paper, relishing "it was the flesh itself that applied the color to the canvas, under my direction, with a perfect precision, allowing me to remain constantly at an exact distance of ‘x’ from my canvas.”^iv As he witnessed Klein creating these works, critic Pierre Restany recalled, “The marks thus left on the paper represented the central part of the body, breasts, abdomen, and thighs, in the manner of an anthropomorphic sign. I could not help exclaiming: ‘These are the anthropométries of the blue period!’” in reference to the study of human body measurements. Restany continues, “Yves, who had been waiting for just this, jumped up in triumph. He had his title: Anthropométries.”^v

 

 Klein’s blue period began the year prior to creating Anthropométrie sans titre, (ANT 149), in 1957, solidifying the artist’s longtime fixation with the ultramarine hue. Klein even claimed, according to the artist Arman, “The blue sky is my first artwork,” referencing a moment during his youth in which he wrote his name across the sky in Nice.^vi The heavenly color has long been associated with the divine, not in the least due to the elusiveness of obtaining and using blue pigment. Since 1956, Klein had been experimenting with a polymer binder to stabilize and preserve the texture and appearance of ultramarine pigment; notoriously difficult to work with, the tone can easily lose its incandescence, dulling and darkening when mixed with linseed oil. With the help of Parisian art supply store owner Édouard Adam, Klein developed his signature International Klein Blue in what has become a mythologized moment in 20^th century art history. In 1960, he successfully patented his IKB formula in an unheard-of thought experiment in “owning” a color, setting a precedent followed by the likes of Anish Kapoor, who acquired the rights to Vantablack in 2016, and companies such as Tiffany & Co. that have trademarked their signature colors.

“Blue has no dimensions... It ‘is’ beyond the dimensions of which other colors partake.”
—Yves Klein

Klein’s Anthropométries redefined the possibilities of artmaking. Broaching the material and immaterial realms, Anthropométrie sans titre, (ANT 149) is imbued with cosmic energy amongst the smears and smatters of International Klein Blue. From an artist intrigued by the possibility of overcoming the effects of gravity, the tactile, immediate impression of flesh achieves a radiant sense of levitation.

 

 

ⁱ Yves Klein, “Truth Becomes Reality,” in Overcoming the Problematics of Art: The Writings of Yves Klein, Thompson, CT, 2007, p. 182.

ⁱⁱ Pierre Restany, “Testimonial of Pierre Restany on Yves Klein,” 1981, online; Klein, ibid., p. 183.

ⁱⁱⁱ Klein quoted in Denys Riout, Yves Klein: Expressing the Material, Paris, 2004, p. 29.

^iv Klein, “Truth Becomes Reality,” p. 183.

^v Pierre Restany, “The Nouveaux Réalistes Declaration of Intention,” trans. Martha Nichols, ed. Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz, Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art, Berkeley, 1996, p. 307.

^vi Arman quoted in Thomas McEvilley, “Conquistador of the Void,” in Yves Klein, 1928–1962: A Retrospective, exh. cat., Institute for the Arts, Rice University, Houston, 1982, p. 28; Klein, “Truth Becomes Reality,” p. 181.