An early and sublime example of this now infamous series, ANT 49 enshrines in an image which is simultaneously abstract and figurative, concrete and immaterial, the themes that underpinned one of the most important events in the evolution of conceptual art. On the 9^th March 1960 at the Galerie d’Art Contemporain in the Rue Saint-Honoré in Paris, Yves Klein presided over a now legendary one night action spectacle in which the artist breathed new life into the avant-garde and introduced an entirely new art form: the Anthropométries. In front of a select crowd of critics and gallery patrons, the artist – dressed in a tuxedo and adorned with the Maltese Cross of his Saint Sebastian brotherhood – orchestrated his pigment-smeared models to create static imprints against the paper-lined walls and dynamic movement paintings as they dragged one another along the floor, also lined with paper. Conducted with ritual and formality, the occasion had a conspicuous air of theatricality entirely consonant with Klein’s assiduous promotion of his art and the Blue Revolution. In the background, three violinists, three cellists and three choristers played the droning Monotone Symphony, twenty minutes of imperturbable one-note music followed by twenty minutes of silence. Minimal and austere, the Monotone Symphony bore witness to the prom⛎otion of the role of chance and silence in the m♎usical ‘Happenings’ of John Cage, while the performance itself elevated the painting process itself to a grand theatrical idea that dramatically presages the evolution of performance art and forced the critical reorientation that took place in the latter half of the twentieth century.

The Anthropométries – a term coined by Klein’s friend the critic Pierre Restany – signalled the confluence of several divergent ideas and a new point of departure for the artist who had not previously drawn attention to the human body in his art. The seminal idea derived from a dinner party, hosted by Robert Giodet at his apartment in the Ile Saint-Louis in June 1958, in which Klein orchestrated an informal performance in which a nude model smeared in blue pigment sprawled herself across a canvas. Unlike the present series, however, the intention of this early precursor was not to create imprints or a sense of movement of the human form across the canvas, but rather to fill the canvas so completely as to create a monochrome, much like those exhibited at the Galleria Apollinaire in Milan one year prior. Concomitantly, the creative symbiosis of ideas that Klein shared with Jean Tinguely and Arman should not be underestimated in the evolution of the Anthropométries: on the one side Klein inspired Tinguely to think about immateriality and an expanded conception of art; on the other, Tinguely kindled in Klein an interest in the notion of action as vitality in art. Meanwhile in 1959, Klein stayed with Arman who was making his Allures series, fashioning a pseudo-Dadaist technique in which the artist flung ink-soaked everyday objects – jars, pebbl⛄es, necklaces – against a canvas, leaving remnants, residual traces and memories of their passage in time and space.

The final epiphany came to Klein as he studied his models moving around his studio, interacting with his blue Monochromes. While life drawing was not a function of Klein’s creative process, he had developed the practice of having nude models in his work space since he felt that the sensual climate that they engendered helped stabilise his Monochromes and hone his understanding of the universe. “The shape of the body, its curves, its colours between life and death, are not of interest to me. It is the pure affective atmosphere that is valuable” (Yves Klein, ‘Le Vrai Devient Réalité’, cited in: Exhibition Catalogue, London, Hayward Gallery, Yves Klein: Leap into the Void, 1995, p. 171) While Klein never used the models as direct figurative referents, they were fundamental to his creative process as he searched for a way of capturing their essence. This reached its pinnacle in the present series: “My models we✤re my brushes. I made them smear themselves with colour and impꦑrint themselves on canvas… But this was only the first step. I thereafter devised a sort of ballet of girls on a grand canvas which resembled the white mat of Judo contests.” (Ibid p. 172)

The association with Judo is not incidental. Klein, an avid practitioner and expert in the martial art form, embraced Rosicrucianism which shared the philosophy of the immaterial fundamental to Zen Buddhism. In his Anthropométries, Klein manifests the conception that is central to Judo that the body is a centre of physical, sensorial and spiritual energy. The deep conceptual premise of the series is that flesh confers to the work the phenomenological presence of the body. Conceiving of the body as a force of creativity, a marking apparatus that is itself a sign and signifier of life, Klein transforms the human body – the erstwhile passive subject of traditional figurative art – into the agent of artistic creativity. In so doing, Klein positions himself, the artist, in the role of director/producer, a catalyst in this creative act, set at a distance from the work itself. Klein had previously sought to distance himself from his creative output, effacing the personalised artist’s touch by using a roller instead of a brush to apply the paint to his Monochromes in a uniform layer. In the present work, Klein’s ongoing investigation into authority, authenticity and originality in art reaches its apogee: “That was, finally, the solution to the problems of distance in painting: my brushes were alive and remote-controlled” (Klein cited in Exhibition Catalogue, Ostfildern-Ruit, Yves Klein, 2004, p. 126).

The culmination of numerous and varied thematic strands of Yves Klein’s conceptually innovative and materially revolutionary oeuvre, ANT 49 witnesses the marriage of spiritual notions of immateriality with the heady and sensual worl▨d of the corporeal in a masterpiece of unmitigated beauty.