Yves Klein ”Untitled Shroud Anthropometry, (ANT SU 30)”. 1960

Pure pigment and synthetic resin on fine canvas. 97 × 76,5 cm (38 ¼ × 30 ⅛ in.). Catalogue raisonné: Date not covered in the catalogue raisonné by Wember. The painting is recorded in the artist’s archive under no. ANT. SU 30. Accompanied by a photo certificate issued by Rotraut Klein-Moquay on 3 November 1984. [3021] Our work is one of only approximately 30 of the artist’s “Anthropométries suaires". Pure pigment and synthetic resin on fine canvas. 97 × 76,5 cm (38 ¼ × 30 ⅛ in.). Catalogue raisonné: Date not covered in the catalogue raisonné by Wember. The painting is recorded in the artist’s archive under no. ANT. SU 30. Accompanied by a photo certificate issued by Rotraut Klein-Moquay on 3 November 1984. [3021], Our work is one of only approximately 30 of the artist’s “Anthropométries suaires". Yvan Butler, Switzerland (received directly from the artist) / Private Collection, North Rhine-Westphalia (acquired in 1985 at Gallery 44, Kaarst), Yvan Butler, Switzerland (received directly from the artist) / Private Collection, North Rhine-Westphalia (acquired in 1985 at Gallery 44, Kaarst), “I Wanted to Tear Away the Veil of the Studio Temple”: Yves Klein’s Anthropometry SU 30 Yves Klein’s “Untitled Shroud Anthropometry (ANT SU 30)” of 1960 was created in the wake of a groundbreaking presentation at Klein’s apartment at 14 Rue Campagne-Première in Paris, which became known as the “celebration of a new anthropometric era”. Klein himself described the event as a “revelation” of his creative process, an act of tearing away the “veil of the temple of the studio”. To this end, he invited models to participate as “living brushes” in the creation of body-imprint paintings on paper (the Anthropométries de l’époque bleue, or Anthropometries of the Blue Period) or on untreated silk, gauze or fine linen (the Anthropométries Suaires, or Shroud Anthropometries). Klein first experimented with the idea of “living brushes” during a dinner party at the home of his friend Robert Godet on 5 June 1958. He instructed a model to cover her body in blue paint and create a monochrome painting by crawling across a sheet of paper laid on the floor. The resulting imprint, however, was smeared and indistinct. Klein refined his method over the following two years and, on 23 February 1960, presented his new technique to an audience at his apartment. Those present included the critic Pierre Restany, the art historian Udo Kultermann, then director of the Städtisches Museum in Leverkusen, and Klein’s future wife, Rotraut Uecker. Rotraut helped the model Jacqueline apply a special emulsion of blue paint and resin to her upper body and thighs. Under Klein’s supervision, Jacqueline pressed her body against a sheet of paper on the floor, leaving five distinct imprints. Restany announced the birth of a new series with the words: “These are the Anthropometries of the Blue Period.” At the top of the work, he added his signature, preceded by the words “Celebration of a New Anthropometric Era” and the date 23 February 1960. Klein, Rotraut and Jacqueline signed at the bottom, as did Kultermann, who wrote in German before his name: “Seen as a new form of artistic creation”. The Anthropometries marked a radical breakthrough in Klein’s artistic career. During the eight years preceding his premature death on 6 June 1962, he created more than a thousand works, beginning with his early monochromes of 1954/55. These were followed by the monochromes of the Blue Period in 1956/57, the dematerialisation of his art through the presentation of the Void in 1958, the Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility of 1959, his celebrated Leap into the Void of 1960, and finally the Fire Paintings of 1961/62. As Klein later wrote in his text” The Truth Becomes Reality”: “I spent too much time alone in the studio; I did not want to remain alone in this wonderful blue void […]. Above all, I wanted to tear away the veil of the temple of the studio. To conceal nothing of my processes. […] Everything is useful to me, even the fragments of this torn studio veil, which have given me wondrous shrouds.” In a partially crossed-out note in his archive, he described this as a new principle of collaboration in the creative act: “through collective action, yet strictly individual”. Klein’s Anthropometries were certainly influenced by prehistoric handprints discovered by the archaeologist Abbé Breuil at Castillo in Spain and reproduced in René Huyghe’s 1955 book “Dialogue avec le visible” (Dialogue with the Visible). Another influence was the imagery of human shadows imprinted by the heat of the atomic explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which Klein had seen in the Japanese filmmaker Kamei Fumio’s film “Ikiteite yokatta” (Glad to Have Survived, 1956). While the Shroud Anthropometries are rich in Christological allusions, they refer in particular to the Shroud of Turin, a linen cloth bearing a faint full-length image of the front and back of a naked man, believed to be the cloth in which Christ’s body was wrapped after it was taken down from the cross. Klein’s philosophical and artistic ideas were deeply rooted in his Catholic faith. Christological references appear throughout both his art and his writings: “In the true sense of the Christian faith, which says, ‘I believe in the Incarnation of the Word; I believe in the resurrection of the body’, the body is the true meaning of the theatre of the Word: ‘The Word became flesh!’” Klein was deeply fascinated by the shroud of Christ, left behind at the moment of his Resurrection, and regarded his own “shrouds” as “wondrous” imprints created without traditional artistic intervention, alluding to death and resurrection. ANT SU 30 is one of approximately thirty Shroud Anthropometries, in addition to the 150 Anthropometries on paper, most of which were created in 1960. It should be noted that the numbers following the respective initials do not indicate the order in which the works were created, but merely the chronological order of their registration during the inventory. Thus, the first Anthropometry, created on 23 February 1960, was registered as ANT 82 and is now in the collection of the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Following Klein’s death in June 1962, Pierre Restany and Arman were commissioned to compile an initial provisional inventory of the works found in the artist’s studio and apartment. Restany established the initials used to distinguish the various categories: M for monochromes, I.K.B. for International Klein Blue, ANT for Anthropometry, ANT SU for Shroud Anthropometry, and so forth. ANT SU 30 appears in the 16 mm black-and-white documentary film “Heartbeat of France”, made in 1961 by the British filmmaker Peter Morley for the British Film Institute. The work hung on one of the walls of the studio of the German advertising photographer Charles Wilp in Düsseldorf, where Klein recreated one of his Anthropometries with a model for the camera. ANT SU 30 shows the imprint of a female figure’s upper body and thighs in pink, blue and black. It belongs to a group of works in which the nude model sat astride a rolled-up carpet, with a sheet of paper or fabric beneath her, her knees bent and her feet positioned so that they touched her buttocks or the backs of her thighs. Klein’s Anthropometries represent a radical departure from conventional notions of artistic creation by placing collaboration at their centre. Having initially invited models to remain passively in his studio, in an early attempt to lift the veil on the studio and demystify the artist’s creative process, he moved towards a radical form of artistic expropriation, involving the deliberate blurring, sharing or rejection of individual authorship within a creative project. He first proposed this idea in 1959, at the opening of an exhibition of Yves Tanguy at Galerie Schmela in Düsseldorf. Klein called for a radically new artistic practice that would be both individual and collaborative, inviting artists to sign a pact to exchange authorship with one another: “I will then consider it entirely natural and normal to learn one day that the members of the famous pact have suddenly and spontaneously signed one of my paintings somewhere in the world […]. Likewise, I will gladly sign any works by other members of the pact that appeal to me, without feeling the slightest need to point out that the work was not, in fact, created by me.” Klaus Ottmann (All quotations are taken from “Overcoming the Problematics of Art: The Writings of Yves Klein”, translated by Klaus Ottmann (Spring Publications, 2007).)

Estimation:€2,000,000

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