Lévy Gorvy Dayan is currently exhibiting the legendary French artist Yves Klein, showcasing his engagement with body and performance. The presentation, titled "Yves Klein and the Tangible World", will be on display until May 25 in New York.
The exhibition has been organized in collaboration with the Yves Klein Foundation and features nearly 30 works from Klein's celebrated Anthropométries (1960–62), Peintures de feu (Fire Paintings, 1960–62), and a Sculpture tactile (Tactile Sculpture, conceived in 1957).
In addition, on May 1, the Gallery will present Klein’s Monotone-Silence Symphony at St. James’ Church, composed of a single note held for twenty minutes followed by twenty minutes of silence.
Executed for the first time at the Galerie Internationale d’Art Contemporain in Paris in 1960 before a seated audience, the Monotone-Silence Symphony was featured in “Anthropometries of the Blue Age,” in which the artist, in formal dress and white gloves, directed a group of naked models to perform as living brushes (as in Klein’s own words), pressing their blue-painted bodies against large sheets of paper mounted on the wall.
This practice of employing nude models aimed to leave discernible imprints that served as “mark[s] of the immediate”, the Gallery says.
One of the most important pieces of the show is the monumental blue and gold Anthropométrie sans titre (ANT 101, 1960), exhibited for the first time in the United States since the 1960s, in which floating imprints of human models and plants compose an intricate, ephemeral landscape.
Peinture de feu sans titre (F 80), burnt cardboard from 1961 made by exposing the carton to body imprints made with water and then to the alchemy of fire, results in an alluring surface of elongated forms.
Klein's Fire Paintings gained the attention of the Zero Group in Germany where he was shown since 1957 promoted by gallerist Alfred Schmela in Düsseldorf.
But when Klein arrived in the United States in 1961, the reception was less warm.
As Thomas MacVilley reported in 1982,“the New York School was arrayed against the fading hegemony of the School of Paris, and Klein, with his fanciful personae and self-ordained titles—Champion of Color, Proprietor of Color, Painter of Space—looked like Paris come slumming again. New York artists virtually boycotted his show of monochrome paintings in International Klein Blue (his own patented formula of blue) at Leo Castelli’s gallery. The art press, which did not bother to investigate the wider context of his work, found him easy prey.”[1]
One year after, in 1962, Yves Klein died of a heart attack at the age of 34.
His legacy, a radical production of over a thousand works, numerous writings and photographs, testifies he consciously and rigorously pushed the limits of the traditional art establishment, inviting the viewer to join him while breaking down the boundaries of painting.
Colour is free - he wrote - it is instantly dissolved in space . . . And that is why, in my work, I refuse more and more emphatically the illusion of personality, the transient psychology of the linear, the formal, the structural. Evidently the subject I am traveling toward is space, pure Spirit. . . . By saturating myself with the eternal limitless sensitivity of space, I return to Eden. . . . “ Excerpt from The Monochrome Adventure, typescript in Klein archive, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.
Yves Klein, Anthropométrie sans titre (ANT 101) 1960
Dry pigment, synthetic resin, and gold leaf on paper mounted on canvas, 418 x 205 x 2.5 cm
Courtesy Lévy Gorvy Dayan. © The Estate of Yves Klein c/o ARS, New York / ADAGP
Yves Klein, Peinture de feu sans titre (F 80) c. 1961
Burnt cardboard on panel, 175 x 90 cm
Courtesy Lévy Gorvy Dayan. © The Estate of Yves Klein c/o ARS, New York / ADAGP
Yves Klein, Peinture de Feu Couleur sans titre (FC 3) c. 1962
Dry pigments and synthetic resin burnt on cardboard mounted on panel, 137 x 74 cm
Courtesy Lévy Gorvy Dayan. © The Estate of Yves Klein c/o ARS, New York / ADAGP
Yves Klein, Anthropométrie sans titre (ANT 83) 1960
Dry pigment and synthetic resin on paper, 141.5 x 200 cm
Courtesy Lévy Gorvy Dayan. © The Estate of Yves Klein c/o ARS, New York / ADAGP
[1] Yves Klein, Messenger of the Age of Space. By Thomas McEvilley. Artforum January 1982, Vol. 20, n. 5