"May all that emerges from me be beautiful." –– from a plea and offering made by Yves Klein to Saint Rita of Cascia (seen above)
I was certain that the Yves Klein retrospective at the Hirschhorn would be a missed opportunity. No plans to be in DC, and while I consider Klein to be one of my favorite human beings to ever grace the planet, I saw another retrospective at the Centre Pompidou a few years ago and thought that luck enough. Yesterday I decided to come here for little more than twenty-four hours, woke up, had breakfast and drove downtown and saw the show. One of the great benefits of being born in Washington, D.C. and raised in a suburb "inside the Beltway" is easy access to the world's most dazzling collection of free museums. As a child, I visited them often and responded to action and color more than anything. Klein has always been an icon in my eyes, and today's "With the Void, Full Powers," (Camus, describing Klein's work) does him complete justice. As we discussed the show afterward, I realized what it is about his work that resonates with me most –– as an artist, he is philosophical without being ambivalent.
The first interaction is a short silent film depicting Klein, clad in a dark suit, as he gestures toward a white wall with import. From there, the show fully blooms with a wall of his monochromes. Most of the work in the show, which can be considered representative, is in private collections rather than the public domain. Then the gallery opens up into paintings and sculptures in International Klein Blue, the intense shade he created and trademarked as his own. Drawn towards them as though by a magnetic force, I felt the waves crashing through me and the cool expanse of the clear sky. "Wood tray with dry pigment" spread inside of it in a rough, smooth tilt, is like exploring a new planet.
Many letters, drawings, artist's books and other ephemera enhance the show, including a piece of paper on which the artist scrawled in a loose, confident hand: "In regard to my attempt of the immaterial, impossible to give you a photograph." I tried to decide if the correspondent was of professional or personal relationship to Klein, and then gave up. What boundaries can we place on anyone or anything, when all is enveloped (and represented by) "the indefinable," to quote him quoting Delacroix?
Much has been made about the artist's composed happenings, which convey an electric thrill fifty years later in films shown in the exhibition: Klein in a tuxedo, the showman bowing with a flourish before debonair musicians, nude women striding in and confidently swathing his hue, before pressing themselves onto canvas before rapt onlookers. "Untitled Anthropometry" (1960) is a longtime jewel in the museum's collection and it was elating to behold the joyous union of elements that presaged its existence. And the carefully documented and methodically destroyed exchange of his "immaterials" for gold, tossed somewhere where it could not be retrieved, like the Seine. Only experience lingers.
The lesson of Klein's work has always seemed to me on a personal level to look, really look. The most moving example today was the collection of sponges, which he confessed to finding "seductive" as a result of their ability to be so easily impregnated with fluids (that might be a direct quote, I didn't copy it down). They were an ordinary tool in his artistic process until one day he realized they were something much more powerful, and exalted them accordingly. They also nicely dovetail the merging of the natural world, the concrete, with abstract forms and representation.
"Air Architecture," (1961, Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo) nearly closes the show and is one that I hoped would be in private hands just so I could daydream about the house. A sexy manifesto hand-written by the artist on a blue field punctuated by writhing female forms and palm trees, it includes the phrase "Man is so free..." and crackles with promise and sensual potential. Like us.
you are truth in beauty baby
Posted by: lu | August 19, 2010 at 07:42 PM