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AnnMarie What appears so striking in retro- invoked this contemporary fashion spect about the French artist Yves otherwise. Popular culture, especially Perl 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 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 SUCCÈS DE SUCCÈS 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 "SCANDALE" “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- and 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. Biblical 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 scandal 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 Yves Klein's debut performance of 12 Perl Perl 13 contains the beginnings of an expla- arts, to effectively become perform- as ever, oftentimes in nothing but - nation for the divergence of opinion ing artists; indeed, the adaptability shorts, with a new young female that still structures the interpretation of large-scale gestural abstraction to companion in attendance, serving the of Klein. Was Klein guilty, as Hal Foster dramatic presentations of painting painter as muse, model and audience. (Paris: has written, of turning “Dadaist prov- for the camera can largely account At the same time, moreover, such ocation” into “bourgeois spectacle?” 5 for this French and American period rather primal chest thumping was also At stake in the answer is not only the style’s success. 7 Showmanship, which being taken to a new, almost caricat- critical judgment of Klein or the mean- was encouraged in France and sup- ural extreme by Mathieu. During the ing of his best-known artwork but also pressed in the United States, would, 1950s, Mathieu’s live and televised Au-delà du Tachisme Au-delà du Tachisme the identity of what has come to be over the course of the early postwar performances of painting featured the called the neo-avant-garde, of which period, enter modern art—an historical young, slim, chic French painter excit- uration,” Julliard, 1963), 159. relationship professional and artistic Klein in the late between Mathieu and in 1960s, see work cited 1950s and early footnote 6. Klein is a prime exponent. 6 process, in which Klein’s debut per- edly squeezing tube after tube of paint Georges Mathieu,“Anagogie de la non-fig personal, On the increasingly competitive As it denotes in a single phrase formance would be critical. Formally directly onto the canvas in repeated 8 9 both artwork and reception, the term entitled “Anthropométries de l’Époque explosions, whose ferocity simulated “succès de scandale” emphasizes the bleue” (Anthropometries of the Blue orgasm, a metaphor that Mathieu had fashionable and the noble, modeling profoundly social character of mod- Period), Klein’s debut would parody employed as early as 1948 to describe himself also after Mathieu’s dandyism. ern art. It has particular relevance to the modern male artistic subjectivity, painting as the transcendental expe- Nevertheless, Picasso still painted performance, in which people encoun- descending from Picasso, in which rience of release, of losing control, like a magician—following the figure ter art as a select group. In 1960, when artistic virtuosity was demonstrated, after an intensely concentrated of praise ever more literally—and the Anthropometries debuted, there increasingly ostentatiously during effort. 8 The debut performance of the Dalí resorted to buffoonery, neither was no medium by the name of per- the postwar period, through physical Anthropometries would be, on one really transforming their working formance within modern art. However, virility. Depending upon much older, hand, a burlesque of Mathieu’s presen- processes. Although Jackson Pollock during the early postwar period, gendered stereotypes of artistic pro- tations of painting, which by contrast and Mathieu had developed new several long- and short-term factors duction, this male quality-cum-force left Mathieu spent and sweaty, his metaphors for painting, Pollock as a had conspired to pressure modern would be emphasized in contrasts with face and clothes covered with errant Western or Native American shaman, artists, who were engaged in the fine its apparent opposite: namely, the squirts and splatters of paint—and, on with his ritualistic Navajo sand paint- gentle, obliging, malleable bodies of the other, a polemical refusal of the ing on the ground, and Mathieu as 5 Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The women, whether mimetically depicted traditions of not only virtuoso painting a French medieval knight, painting Avant-garde at the end of the century or more indirectly invoked. Klein’s Blue but also art-object making and appre- with brushes as long as swords, both (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1996), 11. Period was, of course, a mockery of ciation altogether. The second would remained beholden to these meta- 6 Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant- Picasso’s famous, early, near mono- be the true scandal of the debut: Klein phors. For Klein, as for others, during Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: chromy. Klein’s ecstatic version not would dramatize the early Christian the mid to late 1950s, Mathieu initially University of Minnesota Press, 1984). only recast Picasso’s bohemian orig- origin story of icon painting and thus served as a model; an early alliance, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “The Primary Colors for the Second Time: A Paradigm inal, stressing its religious elements, reveal contemporary art as idolatrous; however, as Klein adapted Mathieu’s Repetition of the Neo-Avant-Garde,” but also, in recalling Picasso’s origins, the debut would be a proto-Conceptu- model and challenged his supremacy, October, Vol. 37 (Summer, 1986), 41-52. Hal directed attention toward how far alist call for iconoclasm. developed into a major rivalry, Mathieu Foster, “What’s Neo about the Neo-Avant- Picasso himself had come from the When faced, as other modern and Klein becoming each other’s pri- Garde?,” October, Vol. 70 (Fall, 1994), 5-32. mythic, dilapidated Bateau-Lavoir of artists of the postwar period, with the mary targets. 9 This competition made Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “From Yves Klein’s Le Vide to Arman’s Le Plein,” in Buchloh, Montmartre. Almost sixty years later, pressure of becoming a performing Klein’s personal invitation of Mathieu Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry: in 1960, Picasso was still very much artist, Klein turned, as Picasso and Dalí to the debut performance of the Essays on European and American Art active, but by then a celebrity and a had before him, to the newly vacated Anthropometries all the more signifi- from 1955 to 1975 (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Communist, living in a storied castle in and thus readily available modes of cant, a debut, furthermore, that would Press, 2000), 257–283. the south of France (in a contradiction popular cultural performance that be taking place at the very gallery, 7 The argument that follows is fully elabo- not lost on contemporaries). Indeed, had anyways long inspired the sub- the Galerie internationale d’art con- rated in: AnnMarie Perl, The Integration Picasso was painting for the cameras, ject matter of modern art from the temporain, in which the more senior of Showmanship into Modern Art: Dalí, as superlatively quickly and faultlessly Realists and Impressionists onward: artist was regularly exhibiting and with Picasso, Georges Mathieu and Yves Klein, 1945–1962, Thesis (Ph.