SUCCÈS DE Biblical " S C a N D a L E
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AnnMarie Perl Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/thld/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/thld_a_00051/1610821/thld_a_00051.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 SUCCÈS DE SUCCÈS "SCANDALE" and Biblical scandal : Yves Klein's 12 Perl What appears so striking in retro- invoked this contemporary fashion spect about the French artist Yves otherwise. Popular culture, especially Klein’s legendary Parisian debut its supposedly most vulgar varieties, performance of the Anthropome- had long provided modern artists tries in 1960 is how disparate were with inherently contentious source its shortly successive waves of material and the means with which to reception—and not without cause. challenge the dominant conventions The event was designed by Klein: to and institutions of art. 3 In contrast appeal to the beau monde invited; to the art world and the larger pub- to expose the conceits of art world lic, the beau monde applauded this that this beau monde patronized; debut performance as “l’art,” viewing Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/thld/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/thld_a_00051/1610821/thld_a_00051.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 and to introduce Klein and his artistic it as scandal in the tradition of the project to a much larger audience. historic avant-garde. “Yves Klein est Only the art world was genuinely un des rares contemporains,” wrote scandalized in the aftermath of the a journalist, delivering the verdict debut, refusing to recognize what of the social set in the mainstream Klein had created as art: Georges weekly magazine L’Express: “capables Mathieu, then the leading young de concevoir un ‘scandale’ digne de la French painter, dismissed it as belle époque surréaliste, et de réussir “comportement,” while the art critic son exécution, alors que Mathieu, avec Claude Rivière viewed it as “d’élé- ou sans jabot de dentelle, Dali, avec ments [d’exhibition] annexes à l’art.” 1 ou sans rhinocéros, s’essoufflent à Likewise, over the course of the next vouloir estomaquer avec une pareille year, Klein would most often serve ‘force de frappe’.” 4 The French fin-de- in the mass media as self-evident siècle expression “succès de scandale” proof of the modern artist’s deprav- ity, which, it is worth emphasizing at the start, did not dissuade Klein from in 1960 pursuing a project in late 1960 with Alain Bernardin, the king of Parisian 1 Georges Mathieu, “Le Bloc-Notes de striptease. 2 Even more, such a proj- Georges Mathieu,” Arts, March 9, 1960, 2. ect arguably appeared as a logical Claude Rivière, “Exhibitions, requins et vampires,” Combat, August 29, 1960, 9. next step, given Klein’s ongoing inter- ests and that the debut itself had 2 “César, Duchamp et les visions d’art,” Arts, Dec. 7, 1960, Press Albums of the featured three naked young women, Yves Klein Archives. sponging themselves with paint and, under Klein’s direction, pressing 3 As Klein wrote in a manifesto of 1960: “I shout it out very loudly: ‘KITSCH, THE their wet, colored bodies against CORNY, BAD TASTE.’ This is a new notion white paper supports. Although there in ART. While we’re at it, let’s forget would be neither stripping nor teas- ART altogether!” Yves Klein, “Truth ing at the debut, Klein deliberately becomes reality,” in Klein, Overcoming the Problematics of Art: The Writings of Yves Klein, trans. Klaus Ottmann (Putnam, Conn: Spring Publications, 2007), 189. 4 J.-L. B., “Vernissage: Yves Klein,” L’Express, no. 458, March 24, 1960, 39. Anthropometries debut performance of Perl 13 contains the beginnings of an expla- arts, to effectively become perform- nation for the divergence of opinion ing artists; indeed, the adaptability that still structures the interpretation of large-scale gestural abstraction to of Klein. Was Klein guilty, as Hal Foster dramatic presentations of painting has written, of turning “Dadaist prov- for the camera can largely account ocation” into “bourgeois spectacle?” 5 for this French and American period At stake in the answer is not only the style’s success. 7 Showmanship, which critical judgment of Klein or the mean- was encouraged in France and sup- ing of his best-known artwork but also pressed in the United States, would, the identity of what has come to be over the course of the early postwar called the neo-avant-garde, of which period, enter modern art—an historical Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/thld/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/thld_a_00051/1610821/thld_a_00051.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 Klein is a prime exponent. 6 process, in which Klein’s debut per- As it denotes in a single phrase formance would be critical. Formally both artwork and reception, the term entitled “Anthropométries de l’Époque “succès de scandale” emphasizes the bleue” (Anthropometries of the Blue profoundly social character of mod- Period), Klein’s debut would parody ern art. It has particular relevance to the modern male artistic subjectivity, performance, in which people encoun- descending from Picasso, in which ter art as a select group. In 1960, when artistic virtuosity was demonstrated, the Anthropometries debuted, there increasingly ostentatiously during was no medium by the name of per- the postwar period, through physical formance within modern art. However, virility. Depending upon much older, during the early postwar period, gendered stereotypes of artistic pro- several long- and short-term factors duction, this male quality-cum-force had conspired to pressure modern would be emphasized in contrasts with artists, who were engaged in the fine its apparent opposite: namely, the gentle, obliging, malleable bodies of 5 Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The women, whether mimetically depicted Avant-garde at the end of the century or more indirectly invoked. Klein’s Blue (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1996), 11. Period was, of course, a mockery of 6 Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant- Picasso’s famous, early, near mono- Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: chromy. Klein’s ecstatic version not University of Minnesota Press, 1984). only recast Picasso’s bohemian orig- Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “The Primary Colors for the Second Time: A Paradigm inal, stressing its religious elements, Repetition of the Neo-Avant-Garde,” but also, in recalling Picasso’s origins, October, Vol. 37 (Summer, 1986), 41-52. Hal directed attention toward how far Foster, “What’s Neo about the Neo-Avant- Picasso himself had come from the Garde?,” October, Vol. 70 (Fall, 1994), 5-32. mythic, dilapidated Bateau-Lavoir of Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “From Yves Klein’s Le Vide to Arman’s Le Plein,” in Buchloh, Montmartre. Almost sixty years later, Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry: in 1960, Picasso was still very much Essays on European and American Art active, but by then a celebrity and a from 1955 to 1975 (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Communist, living in a storied castle in Press, 2000), 257–283. the south of France (in a contradiction 7 The argument that follows is fully elabo- not lost on contemporaries). Indeed, rated in: AnnMarie Perl, The Integration Picasso was painting for the cameras, of Showmanship into Modern Art: Dalí, as superlatively quickly and faultlessly Picasso, Georges Mathieu and Yves Klein, 1945–1962, Thesis (Ph. D. in History of Art)—Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, 2014. 14 Perl as ever, oftentimes in nothing but - shorts, with a new young female companion in attendance, serving the painter as muse, model and audience. (Paris: At the same time, moreover, such rather primal chest thumping was also being taken to a new, almost caricat- ural extreme by Mathieu. During the 1950s, Mathieu’s live and televised Au-delà du Tachisme Tachisme du Au-delà performances of painting featured the young, slim, chic French painter excit- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/thld/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/thld_a_00051/1610821/thld_a_00051.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 uration,” 159. 1963), Julliard, professional and artistic relationshipbetween Mathieu and Klein in the late1950s and early 1960s, see work cited6. footnote in edly squeezing tube after tube of paint non-fig la de “Anagogie Mathieu, Georges On the increasingly competitive personal, directly onto the canvas in repeated 8 9 explosions, whose ferocity simulated orgasm, a metaphor that Mathieu had fashionable and the noble, modeling employed as early as 1948 to describe himself also after Mathieu’s dandyism. painting as the transcendental expe- Nevertheless, Picasso still painted rience of release, of losing control, like a magician—following the figure after an intensely concentrated of praise ever more literally—and effort. 8 The debut performance of the Dalí resorted to buffoonery, neither Anthropometries would be, on one really transforming their working hand, a burlesque of Mathieu’s presen- processes. Although Jackson Pollock tations of painting, which by contrast and Mathieu had developed new left Mathieu spent and sweaty, his metaphors for painting, Pollock as a face and clothes covered with errant Western or Native American shaman, squirts and splatters of paint—and, on with his ritualistic Navajo sand paint- the other, a polemical refusal of the ing on the ground, and Mathieu as traditions of not only virtuoso painting a French medieval knight, painting but also art-object making and appre- with brushes as long as swords, both ciation altogether. The second would remained beholden to these meta- be the true scandal of the debut: Klein phors. For Klein, as for others, during would dramatize the early Christian the mid to late 1950s, Mathieu initially origin story of icon painting and thus served as a model; an early alliance, reveal contemporary art as idolatrous; however, as Klein adapted Mathieu’s the debut would be a proto-Conceptu- model and challenged his supremacy, alist call for iconoclasm. developed into a major rivalry, Mathieu When faced, as other modern and Klein becoming each other’s pri- artists of the postwar period, with the mary targets.