YVES KLEI

Quafrieme Dan du Kodokan

Les fondemenls

'JUDO

Recent abstract art actively works against the paradigms of purity and autonomy,'
A self-conscious revision of its heritage is a strikitig feature of its renewed vitality. Cotnmentators have recognized the import of impurities within the founding
practices ofthe field. Briony Fer has revealed the aherrations integral to Piet
Mondriau's paintings, for example, as Allan Kaprow did in the 1960s when he
wrote that "the impure aspect of pure painting like Mondrian's is not some hidden compositional flaw but rather the psychological setting
which must be impure for the notion of purity to make any
sense at all."^ Here I will develop and examuie a paradigm of mid-twentieth-century
Mark A. Cheetham
abstraction's resistance to the norms of purity and autonomy in
Yves Klein's agonistic reception ofthe monochrome, that compressed but not so rarefied Russian doll that sits inside abstract
painting just as abstraction inhabits the core of modernism.'
Klein systematically took the avant-garde monochrome beyond
the frame of painting. Seeing his work as a precedent in this regard underscores
Klein's historical importance and connects recent work not usually regarded as
monochromatic or abstract to a genealogy in which he is pivotal. Klein scholars
Elements of this article were presented in 2004
and supportersespecially Thomas McEvilley, Pierre Restany, and Sidra Stich
at the CAA Annual Conference in Seattle and as
part of the 2004 Teetzel Lectures at University
document his legacy for recent and contemporary art, including abstraction.
College, University of Toronto. I would like to
Others are at best ambivalent about tbe artist and his patrimony Benjamin
thank the conveners for providing these opportunities and for their generous responses to my
Buchloh claims that Klein, in company with Joseph Beuys, has been "overestiwork. Thanks also to Neugerriemschneider,
mated in U.S. reception.''^Thierry de Duve's writing in this context seems pulled
Berlin, and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York,
for assistance with the Olafur Eliasson image.
in two irreconcilable directions. On the one hand, he asserts that Klein's "only
Special thanks to Burt Konzak, Framboise
tangible contribution to the history of painting is the chemical formula that
Boudreau, and AA Bronson for their interest in
allowed him to fix powdered pigment without diminishing its glow," yet in an
this work.
instructive endnote about his reception in the United States, de Duve struggles
1. Instead of rehearsing terminological disputes,
with the tension between Klein's alleged "failure" and the fact that be "is not a
I will use the term "abstract" to include more
specific historical and current references to "nonnegligible artist."^ More serious questions about the neo-avant-garde notwithrepresentational," "nonobjective," "concrete,"
standing, a (usually) unspoken discomfort with Klein the provocateur and
"real," etc.
supposedly right-wing sympathizer colors the interpretation ofhis work.*"
2. Briony Fer. On Abstract An (New Haven: Yale

Yves Klein, cover for Lei Fondements du

judo, paper, 9 x S% in. (22.8 x 15 cm), pub.
B. Grasset. Paris, I 954 (artwork 2005
Estate ofYves Klein/ADAGP (Paris)/
SODRAC (Montreal), photograph provided
by Archives Klein, Paris)

Features

Matting the Monochrome:

Malevich, Klein, and Now

University Press, 1997); Allan Kaprow, "Impurity"

The pbrase "matting the monochrome" refers simultaneously to the intrin(1963), in Essays on the Blurring of Art and
Life/Allan Koprow, ed.Jeff Kelley (Berkeley:
sic and extrinsic contexts in which we might reconsider tbis type of abstraction
University of California, 1993), 34.
today One "mats" a work of art as a way of presenting it against something that
3. On the monochrome as an icon of modernism,
see Ann Gibson, "Color and Difference in
it is not, a practice that applies to the installation ofthe work as well as to its
Abstract Painting: The Ultimate Case of
intertial composition atid reception. As Klein showed in his struggle with Kazimir
Monochrome." Genders 13 (Spring 1992):
! 23-52: Thomas McEvilley, "Seeking the Primal
Malevith's reputation, matting in these senses is not a trivial concern. The other
through Paint: The Monochrome Icon," in
abiding passion of "Yves le monochrome" was judo. Here again, mats are not
McEvilley, The Exile's Return: Toward a Redefinition
merely supplemental but necessary support planes, limits, and frames for the
of Painting for the Post-Modern Era (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1993), 9-56. See
martial arts. I will argue that the specific Zen attributes ofthe judo form Klein
a!so Beate Epperlein, Monochrome Malerei: Zur
studied in Japan and promoted in Spain and France with his teaching and writUnterschiedlichkeit des vermeintlkh Ahnlichen
(Nuremberg: Verlag fur Moderne Kunst, 1997),
ing itiformed his innovations and excesses in abstract art throughout his short
and Denys Riout, Lo Peinture monochrome: Histoire
but
prolific career and are exemplary ofhis holistic, as opposed to pure or
et archeologie d'un genre (Aries: Diffusion, 1996).
autonomous, sense of art practice. The two types of matting, one intimate to art
4. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Neo-Avantgarde and
Culture Industry: Essays on European and American
making and viewing, the other apparently extraneous to the aesthetic, come
An from 1965 to 1975 (Cambridge, MA: MIT
together in a way that is typical not only of Klein's work but ofthe productive
Press, 2000), xxviii.
5. Thierry de Duve, "Yves Klein or the Dead
theatricality of much abstract art since the 1960s, practices that I will contrast
Dealer," trans. Rosalind Krauss, October 49
with Michael Fried's theory of absorption.
(Summer 1989): 81. 90.

95 art lournal

Yves Klein, Mo/evJtcf) ou I'espace vu de loin,

c. 1958, blue ball-point pen and pencil on
paper, I OX x B'/i in. (27 x 21 cm). Musee
national d'art moderne. Centre Georges
Pompidou, Paris {artwork 2005 Estate of
Yves Klein/ADAGP (Paris)/SODRAC
(Montreal), photograph provided by
Archives Klein, Paris)

6. See for example Hal Foster's complaint that

Klein's supposedly "Dadaist provocation was
turned into bourgeois spectacle," a view that misunderstands and shortchanges Klein's relationship
to Malevich and the avant-garde generally. Klein
repeatedly denied any simple connection between
his work and Dada. I would argue that in his relationship with Malevich's black square, discussed
below, Klein performed what Foster hopes to
achieve with his own laudable study, "a temporal
exchange between historical and neo-avantgardes, a complex relation of anticipation and
reconstruction." Foster, The Retum of tfie Real:
The Avant-Carde at tfie End of the Century
(Cambridge. MA: MIT Press, 1996), 11.13 (italics
removed in latter passage). My claims for Klein
here would, if plausible, imply a revision of both
Buchloh's and Foster's assessment of Klein's place
in the neo-avantgarde.
7. Thomas McEvilley. "Living a Contradiction:
Yves Klein and the Art of the 1960s and 70s." in
Tinguely's Favorites: Yves Klein, exh. cat. (Basel:
Museum Jean Tinguely. 2000), 9. In addition to
other essays, this publication includes an interview
with Tinguely on his collaborations with Klein.
Subsequent references in my text are to MJT.
8. See Thomas McEvilley, "Yves Klein: Conquistador of the Void," in Yves Klein 1928-1962: A
Retrospective (Houston: Institute for the Arts, Rice
University, 1982), 43. Subsequent references are
to McE. I would like to thank Alma Mikulinsky for
pointing out the reversed temporal directions of
Klein's genealogies.
9. This IS Nan Rosenthal's interpretation, which
seems right. Rosenthal, "Assisted Leviation: The
Art of Yves Klein," in Yves Klein 1928-1962: A
Retrospective, 135, n. 153. Sidra Stich's reading is
that Klein here shows a "Kandinsky collapsed on
the floor." Stich. Yves Klein, exh, cat, (Stuttgart;
Cantz, 1994), 74. Subsequent references to
Stich's text appear in my essay.

Matted Monochromes
Monochromes were Klein's first and omnipresent aesthetic obsession. He notoriously appropriated the unmarred back ofthe blue sky as his work in 1946,
painted blue the vault of a basemetit room where he and his youthful comrades
hung out, printed reproductions of putatively earlier monochromes in his booklet Yves Peintures of 1954, and conceived a film in that year in which the opening
scenes moved from monochrome white, through yellow and red, to ultramarine
blue. The list ofhis innovations is much longer; he foretold and inspired tnany of
the moves abstraction would make after World War II, not to mention an array
ofthe directions to be taken by other art forms, from kinetic to performance to
Conceptual art.^ In 1955, a large orange monochrome Klein submitted to the
Salon des Realites Nouvelles was rejected, sparking the first in a long and professionally productive series of public scandals around his work when his friends
toured the exhibition, demanding to know where the work was displayed. When
he exhibited monochromes in Paris in i95"6, comparisons with Malevich's vintage tuonochromes were made by Pierre Restany in his catalogue essay. Klein
later responded with genealogical mappings that will concern us here.^ In texts
and several versions of a cartoon ahout the Ukrainian artist, Klein outrageously
positioned his work as prior to Malevich's. Mdevitch ou I'e^pace vu de loin ("Malevich
or Space from a Distance." also titled in another version "The True Position of
Malevich in Relation to Me") of circa 1958 shows Malevich anachronistically
copying a Klein monochrome. Kandinsky's reputation seems also to be at stake
in this struggle for priority: like a mouse, he is ahout to disappear into the wall.^
In his extensive writing project, the "Monochrome Adventure," Klein quotes
Malevich's exhortation to the "aviators" ofthe future: "Fly! White, free, and endless, infinity is before you" (Stich 74). But Malevich remains the earthbound
copyist in this caricature, painting only a lowly portrait or still-hfe "after" Klein.
Klein wrote: "I can say at thirty years of age in 19^8, that when Malevich burst
into space like a tourist around 191^ or 1916.1 welcomed him and he visited
me because I was already, since always, owner, inhabitant, . ." (quoted in Stich
74). JeanTingueiy suggested tbat Klein had thus "demateriahzed the fact that
Malevich had preceded him" (MJT 53). McEvilley takes the pessimistic view that
Klein is here suffering from the anxiety of influence, as he did in relation to
Marcel Duchamp and indeed his own parents, both of wbom were artists. Mucb
of Klein's "own achieveinent paralleled works and attitudes that [these] two
artists had expressed in the teens ofthe century. Sensitive to questions of priority, obsessed with the modernist idea ofthe artist as innovator, and at the same
time willing to play the fool, Klein argued that by a proper understanding of
time he in fact preceded Malevich" (MJT 7),
There is parodic humor in the cartoon as well as a need for priority, but
the more acute aspects of Klein's gesture toward Malevich make McEvilley's negative judgment seem hasty Klein's claim to be the first to have manifested the
true monochrome, that which partook of what he would call pure sensibility
rather than merely art, is not without foundation. His monochromes were
not framed by an atmospheric "background" or three-dimensional space, as
Malevich's were. White on White (1918) addressed this issue of image against
ground but did not eradicate the dialectic. Large White Cross of 1920 exploits the

96

WISTFH

2001;

power of an internal image. As Fer reminds us, Donald Judd recognized what
was new about Klein's monochromes, that they are not "spatial." They do not
create the illusion or reality of space in the way that Cubism or collage did.'
Indeed, from Judd's perspective, Klein emphasized the object status, not the
illusory space, ofhis monochromes by hatiging them well away from the wall
and rounding their corners in 1957 exhihitions in Milan and Diisseldorf (MJT
21). Klein actively sought to displace and even destroy the easel picture, both
by removing the usual viewing coordinates ofthe image and with his fire paintings. His "studio" was life itself Later, he produced a great variety of threedimensional 1KB (International Klein Blue) works. But we need to remember too
that Klein's monochromes were not '"specific objects." "Pure sensibihty" for
Klein was more a mystical than a perceptual category, one drawn from his interests in Zen Buddhism, Gaston Bachelard's writings on space, and Rosicrucianism." He thought ofhis monochromes, and color itself, as living presences,
not fully helonging to the material world. Yet radical as Klein's revisions of him
were, Malevich was not the easel painter Klein needed him to be. The black
monochrome was a qnasi-rehgious and social icon, whether in the 1915 o, 10
exhibition, where one version proclaimed its icon status from high in a corner
ofthe room, or in agitprop excursions, Malevich was the first to be so completely identified with the monochrome, as pictures ofhis deathbed, funeral
(the black square was the hood ornament on his hearse), and grave site attest.

Matted Judoka

10. Fer, 144.

i I. On these topics, see Thornas McEvilley, "Yves

_,r, .
" V
^,
'928-/962; A Retrospect/Ve, 239-54.

Klein and Rosicrucianism, in Yves Klein

How did Klein's lifelong commitment to judo interact with his "monochrome
adventure"?The martial art was Klein's first infatuation. In the early i95os he
envisioned a career as a high-ranking judoka, a champion and teacher. Despite setbacks and constant battles with the judo association in France, he realized many
of these goals. Historians have commented on Klein's early promotion to black
belt in Nice, where he studied judo 1947-5^2, and his training at the Kodokan
Institute in Tokyo in 19,^2-^3. The scholarly hterature duly notes that Klein made
a film in Japan in 19^3 (Stich 34) about the correct performance of judo kata
the formal exercises that form the grammar of the disciplineand that stills
were used to illustrate his book Les Fondements du judo, published in France in 1954,
which brought the "true" Japanese style of Kodokan to France. Klein suppletnented the physical skills taught in the dojo in France with readings in Zen and
Buddhist thought, and he deepened his tinderstanding of these underpinnings of
Kodokan judo in Japan. "Judo." he wrote early in his training, is "the discovery
by tbe human body of a spiritual space" (quoted in Stich 17).There was a clear
connection in Klein's experience hetween the momentary weightlessness of a
judo throw and his notorious Leap into the Void of i960. He extolled the judo inspiration of the Leap in a gloss on the famous photo published in a section ofhis
mock newspaper, Dimanche, of i960: "The monochrome, w h o is also a judo
champion, black belt, 4''^ dun, trains regularly in dynamic levitationl (with or
without a net, at great risk to his life) . . ." "Let's be honest," Klein continued,
"in order to paint space, I must put myself on the spot, in space itself" (quoted

i- i

j i , . >-

\ TL

LL-L

- i -

- l - -

m Stich 217' and McE 23c).Though

his theoretical mterest mlevnation also came
J.J/
o
from Max Heindel's Rosicrucianism texts (McE 41), the practice was pure judo.

98

WlNThR

Yves Klein, Leap into the Void, subtitled

"The Painter of Space Hurls Himself into
the Void!" October 1960, artistic action of
Yves Klein, photography by Shunk-Kunder
(artwork 2005 Estate of Yves Klein/
ADAGP (Paris)/SODRAC (Montreal), photograph provided by Archives Klein, Paris)

Klein wrote that judo was "always abstract and spiritual" (quoted in Stich 33).
Anticipating his ./\nthtopometrie performances, he had thought early on of pigmenting judoka so that the imprints of their bodies could be preserved and contemplated during judo exercises (Arman in Sticb 269 n, 4). It is notable that Klein
partially distanced himself from both performances, first by assuming the role
of cameraman and later by conducting the anthropometries in a tuxedo. He
famously described the first y^nthropometrie as follows: "The time ofthe brush had
ended and finally my knowledge of judo was going to be useful. My models
were my brushes . . . [I] devised a sort of ballet of girls smeared on a grand canvas which resembled the white mat of judo contests" (quoted in Stich 171-72).
Not only did his judo pupils ofthe time catch Klein in a tarpaulin on one of
his attempts to flyafter the master landed unassisted on the first attempt and
twisted his ankle (Stich 21314)but, as McEvilley has suggested, the personal
risk of this embodied conceptual performance initiated the "self-endangerment"
work of Beuys, Carolee Schueemann, and Paul McCarthy, who himself attempted
Klein's leap (MJT 11).
Here then is the other sense of "matting the monochrome" crucial to Klein
and typical ofhis spongelike penchant for finding inspiration beyond a narrowly

12. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, "Into the Blue: Klein

and Poses." Artforum 33, no. 10(1995): 92.
I 3. Klein's friendship with Godet exemplifies again
the artist's inability to acknowledge his sources,
whether in art or elsewhere. In 1952, Godet, a
black belt judoko, published Tout lejudo: Son histoire. so technique, sa philosophie. which was in
important ways the book Klein sought to write
but never fully realized. Godet's elegant cext
expounds fully the connections between judo
and Zen that remained integral to Klein's practice
from his time in Japan but also stayed mostly in his
notes for never-real ized publications. As Klein did
in Les fondements dujudo two years later. Godet
underlined the importance of koto, the fundamental distinctions between the martial arts and sport,
and of the integration of judo and life. There was
little in Godet's book that Klem would have disagreed with. Yet Klein did have reason to bring
out his own work and to make large claims for it:
he had studied at the Kodokan and was legitimately part of the Kano heritage. He also had his
film stills, which in his book illustrated the accredited kata techniques.

artistic context. Ultimately, for Klein such a separation simply did not exist,
which is why his martial- and fine-art activities should not be sequestered in our
attempt to understand bim, Buchloh expresses the standard view, one infused
with (w-arranted) suspicion: "Klein's aspiration to be perceived as a judoka/artist
made him the neo-avantgarde's first japoniste, one situated between the ancient
culture of judo as a ritualistic performance of war and the contemporary condition after Hiroshima."'' But the evidence suggests that judo was much more than
another of Klein's publicity stunts. It was coutinuotis witb the Leop into the Void
and Anihropomeiriei.The prototype for the still-controversial .Anthropomettie performance in March i960 took place in June 1958 in the htjme of the prominent
judoka Robert J. Godet (Stich 172). Although Klein's intention was to have the
pigmented models cover a white paper sheet on the fioor to produce a blue
monociiromeas he had envisioned judokci doingthe event degenerated into
an erotic spectacle displeasing to Klein, if not Godet,'^ In certain ways tbe canvas
and judo mat were interchangeahle, or indeed one, for Klein, as were his art and
his life. Frequently these mats of one color shared the same surrounding space
and defined their internal space in the same ways, that i.s, as irrefragably material
entities that nonetheless promised transcendence. His judo school in Madrid
had monochromes on the walls in 1953-54 (McE 40), as did his Judo Academie
de Paris, each seven to eight meters longone blue, one white, one rose
along with the orange monochrome that Klein tried to exhibit in 1955 (Stich
257 n. II; 56-57). Klein's private school in Paris was open for less than a year,
but he was ahle to consolidate there the active meditation common to judo and
the monochromes. Both were sources of "sensibility" in the important sense that
with each type of monochrome one could move from the embodied, material
presentations on a defined surface to a sense of Zen limitlessness and oneness of
spirit and form. His collaborator Tinguely recalled perhaps the most significant
relationship between judo and art for Klein: balance as a goal if not a starting
point, "He didn't do it as an athlete. Just as he didn't do monochromes as a
'space.' He didn't have . . . the balance within himself He did monochromes in
a panic . . . He had none of what it'd be normal to have to do monochromes . . .
an equilibrium. He was tbe most unbalanced man-totally unbalanced. He did
monochromes as an iconoclastic anti-painter" (quoted in MJT 49). Klein took
his judo studies extremely seriously and derived some sense of balance from his
high achievements. His partner in the late 1950s, fellow judoka and architect
Bernadette Allain, said that "on the judo mats he was serene, strong, and inwardly
at peace. He had learned in Japan tbe true judo, which was nonexistent in the
French schoolsjudo as intensive discipline and ascesis. which confers on the
body itself a knowledge that has never passed through the intellectual mind"
(quoted in McE 39). What we might call the preliminary or provisional space of
the judo mat and ofthe monochrome surface equally required equilibrium on
the part ofthe judoka/artist. By bringing these spaces together in practice, Klein
was able to perform successfully in both. Success in these areas meant the effective elimination ofthe boundaries ofthe body, painterly materials, color, and
even space itself, a goal reached most dramatically in Klein's notorious leaps
into the void.
We know all this and much more ab(3ut Klein and judo. It is therefore all
the more surprising that McFvilley initiated an abiding "moving on from judo"

100

WINTIR

Advertisement for Yves Klein's Paris judo

school. 1955. 14'-^ x 11'/sin. (37 x 29 cm)
(artwork 2005 Estate ofYves Klein/
ADAGP (Paris)/SODRAC (Montreal), photograph provided by Archives Klein, Paris)

ACADEMIE DE PARIS
f

104^ BctuL DE CLICHY, 104

A 50 metres du Moulin Rouge

PLACE CLICHY
PLACE BLANCHE

La vraie methode Japonaise

Gokio - Katas

Ceintiire Noire 4' Dan

DIPLOME M KODOKAN de TOKrO

COURSTOUSIES JOURS
topos, when, in his masterly 1982 catalogue on Klein, he stated that by mld1954. "a cart^er in tht- sport, which he had seriously contemplated, was apparently no longer a possibility for him. This point marks the real beginning oi his
career as an artist" (McE 97). McEvilley suggests tbat Klein moved from a ""kingdom of judo" in Spain to a "kingdom of arc in Paris" {McE 41), Stich concurs
but dates tbe transition later, after he stopped teaching. Because he was traveling
frequently to Gelsenkirclien, Germany, for a major commission to decorate the
new theater there, Klein bad trouble fulfilling his commitments at the American
Students and Artists Center, wbere be had taught since 1955, and did not bave his
contract renewed in 19^9, He did not teach formally after this time.To suggest,
as Stich and McEvilley do, that Klein "clearly had reached tbe point wbere his
identity as an artist bad surpassed his identity as a judoka," and that this and other
difficulties conspired to bring an "end to bis active involvement witb judo"
(Stich 257 n. 16), however, is to overstate tbe case in a way that both flies in
the face of Klein's activities before his premature deatb in 1962 and misses an
important dimension of his devotion to the plastic and martial arts.
Sticb warrants tbat Klein's early monochromes "are conceptually more in
tune with an Eastern. Zen approach to hfe . . , " (67), but largely discusses Zen as

101 art journal

14. Quoted in McEvilley, "Yves Klein and

Rosicrucianism," 244.
I 5. As translated by Keiko Fukuda in Neil
Ohienkamp, "Kodokan Judo," avail, online at
http://wvi/w.|udoinfo,com/jhist I .htm.

a sensibility without its connection to judo practice. McEvilley notes that Klein's
artistic alchemy combined Rosicrucianism and Zen, but be is quick to leave judo
out ofthe picture (McE 243). There is ample evidence that Klein continued to
"practice" judo after his formal teaching ended in 195^9: pictures from October
i960 show him executing throws; Dimanche, with its illustrations of and references lo judo, went on sale on Novetnber 27, i960, Stich also records that Klein's
long battle for recognition by tbe Erench Judo Federation, the strongest such
organization outside Japan, ended belatedly in success on April 24, 1961 (Stich
2(;7 n. 16), and that be feit vindicated. During his disastrous exhibition at the
Castelli Gallery in NewYork in [961, he apparently annoyed everyone by boasting about his judo achievements (Stich 232), For Klein, as a Kodokan student,
judo was emphatically not a sport. He wrote his book and taught his classes to
establisb a fuller sense ofthe martial art in France. What Klein believed about
judo and brought home both personally and professionally is sumtned up in the
following undated note: "Tbe ordinary judoku does not practice spiritually but
pbysically and emotionally. The true judoka practices spiritually and witb a pure
sensibility" (Stich 256 n. 40), Klein refused to separate the spiritual from the
physical. We should be wary ofthe Hegehan drumbeat that claims Klein's art
overtook his incarnation of judo principles. Artists and art do not need to be
seen to progress, especially not from an external interest to a concentration on
art.The monochrome, Rosicrucianism, and judo, plus tbe many other initiatives
that preoccupied Klein, mixed to form a somehow consistent life as artwork,
Klein beheved that "painting is no longer a function ofthe eye today; it is a
function of tbe only thing that is in us tbat does not belong to us: our LIFE.''-^
The elements of space, duration, and touch crucial to his sense of judo in
part led to Klein's holistic aesthetic, "Art does not depend on vision," he wrote,
"but on the sensibility that affects us, on affectivity therefore, and on that much
more than ail that touches our five senses" (quoted Stich 14^)- Kodokan judo
stressed the integration of body and spirit in the service of more than tbe self,
Jigoro Kano, the founder of judo and the Kodokan school, wrote: "The aim of
judo is to utilize physical and mental strength tnost effectively. Its training is to
understand tlte true meaning of life tlirough the mental and physical training of
attack and defense. You must develop yourself as a person and become a useful
citizen to society." '^ Klein's Fondemetits du judo is in one sense his second genealogical exercise and is more linear tban his treatment of Malevich. Here he actively
shaped his identity as an inheritor of tbe tradition of judo founded in 1882 by
Kano, whose stern image is on the frontispiece. We read the founder's statement
that "tbe katas are the aesthetic of judo." On the next page is a photograph of
Risei Kano, son ofthe founder, and the president of tbe Kodokan and ofthe
Japan Judo Federation wben Klein studied in Japan. Following tbis introductionand adopting a traditional chronological sequence eschewed with respect
to Malevicli-^KIein turtber establishes bis lineage and legitimacy with photos
of his fourth-d(in certificate and a picture of himself with Risei Kano and other
ranking judokii at the Institute. Risei Kano wrote to Klein in 1953 on bis achievement of tbe fourth datj: "Judo of the Kodokan, as you already know . , , [is] a
moral ideal: it is the accomplishment of tbe perfect personality" (quoted in Stich
37). No one would hold tbat Klein went very far in perfecting his immensely
difficult personality, but neither did be give up tbe attempt. Judo was one of his

ways to a Zen sense of nondivision and presentness, Klein's work is a sensible

reminder or remainder of this behef. He did not want his monochromes to be
a specialty within an artistic arsenal but rather to lead beyond the genre abstraction, and especially beyond tbe gestural work of his famous mother, Marie
Raymond. Klein worked on a larger "canvas" as his "Blue Revolution" sought to
"impregnate" the world with pure sensibility. He sought to defeat the autonomy
ofthe individual senses, the art media, and tbe art object. Unwittingly but
prophetically, be provided potent alternatives to Greenberg's tbeory of media
"competence"'* and Fried's notion of "absorption."

The Theatricality of Absorption

In Art and Objecthood, Michael Fried claims that be "described tbe emergence of
a basic opposition between the radically abstract painting and sculpture I most
admired and what I characterized, pejoratively, as tbe 'literalist' and 'theatrical'
work of a group of artists usually called the Minimalists." '^ Theatricality is
defined by a particular relation.sbip between viewer and work, one that "solicited
and included the beholder in a way that was fundamentally antithetical to the
expressive and presentational mode of the recent painting and sculpture 1 most
admired" (Fried 41). While Fried cautions us against drawing easy connections
between his art criticism and his subsequent art-bistorical project of tracing the
history of what be came, by 1980, to call "Absorption andTheatricahty" in tbe
tradition of French art and criticism from about 1750 to about 1870, tbe opposition of these terms in his thinking is important to my argument abont recent
abstract art. Fried wrote recently tbat "no one witb even the sketchiest awareness
of recent history needs to be told tbat 'theatricality' . . . went on to flourish
spectacularly while abstraction in my sense ofthe term became more and more
beleaguered" (Fried [4). He stopped writing art criticism largely for tbis reason.
My claim is not simply tbat theatrical art forms won tbe day but rather tbat tbe
interactive, social, and impure paradigms that they presented offered a competing and substantial view of what abstraction could be. A different relationship
between absorption and theatricahty functions in significant abstract work from
tbe 1960s to tbe present, especially in Klein,

16. "It quickly emerged that the unique and

proper area of competence of each art coincided
with all that was unique in the nature of its medium. The task of self-criticism became to eliminate
from the specific effects of each art any and every
effect that might conceivably be borrowed from
or by the medium of any other art. Thus would
each art be rendered 'pure,' and in its purit/ find
the guarantee of its standards of quality as well
as of its independence." Clement Greenberg,
"Modernist Painting," in Clement Greenberg: The
Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. A, ed. John

O'Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

1993), 86.
17. Michael Fried, Art and Objecihood: Essays and
Reviews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1993). 14. Subsequent references are to Fried.

For Fried, absorption in the French modernist tradnion, whicb to some

extent figures as the genealogy ofthe mid-twentietb-century abstraction that he
championed (Fried 51), required that the painter "negate or neutralize . , , the
primordial convention tbat paintings are made to be beheld'" (Fried 47-48).
Artists show figures completely absorbed in tbeir activitiesin a Chardin or
Greuze or David, for exampleto the extent that. Fried continues, "the painting
appeared self-sufficient, autonomous, a closed system independent of, in that
sense blind to, the world ofthe beholder" (Fried 48). Tbat this grand fiction of
tbe beholder's absence drove much of modernism is clear. But there were and are
many competing models of reception, opposed to tbe absorptive in Fried's prophylactic sense, wbere viewer and work are beld apart. In Klein's work there
is a crucial recognition ofthe positive force of sensibility as it is absorbed. This
model is indeed more literal in the sense that it acknowledges as a positive
element tbe participation of tbe audience in the work. His memorable sponge
sculptures, for example, were anthropomorphic bearers of "absorption" in a

101

artjnurnal

Yves Klein, Tree, Large Blue Sponge (SE 71),

I 962. pure pigment and synthetic resin on
sponge and plaster, 59 x 35'X x 16'A in. (150
X 90 X 42 cm). Musee national d'art moderne. Centre Georges Pompidou. Paris
(artwork 2005 Estate ofYves Klein/
ADAGP (Paris)/SODRAC (Montreal), photograph by Philippe Migeat, provided by
CNAC/MNAM/Dist. Reunion des Musees
Nationaux /Art Resource, NY)

physical sense. Here tbe literalness of absorption was to be encouraged if art was
to have a social force: a theatricality of absorption defined the desired infection
and transformation ofthe viewer through art, Klein titled some of these sculptures The IKBWfltchtT and 1KB Reader. He referred to the many examples of this type
as "portraits" and celebrated these "readers of my monochromes who, after
having seen, after having traveled in tbe blue of my paintings, come back totally
impregnated in sensibility like tbe sponges" (quoted in Stich i6^).

Recent Adjustments of Impurity

18. Philip Guston, "The Philadelphia Panel," ed.

P G. Pavia and Irving Sandier, It Is 5 {Spring 1960):
38.
19.1 would like to thank Serge Guilbaut for insisting on this point. Here again there is a connection
with judo. During his second stay in Madrid as an
instructor, Klem bragged about having the chief of
police as a pupil. Restany claims that Klein actually
trained military personnel in Franco's Spain. But as
Stich argues, this does not make Klein or his work
fascist. His comrade Arman underlines the irony
of the situation: "Yves Is often accused of being
fascist, but if you knew Yves it is ridiculous to say
this because Yves wouldn't abide by anything but
his own fascism or imperialism" (quoted in Stich
41 -42). Even [f we deny the validity of Klein's
work on these grounds, can we rightl/ condemn
his reception by shooting the messenger again, a
reception that includes the overtly and arguably
redemptive adoption of his blue revolution by
General Idea?
20. General Idea: Pharmaopia, exh. cat.
(Barcelona: Centre d'Art Santa Monica, 1992),
60. Subsequent references are to Gl. AA
Bronson, the surviving member of Gl, has confirmed to me in conversation that very little has
been written about the group's interactions with
Klein's work,
21. Allan Doyle pointed out to me thai a recent
version of this work, XXX Rose, was performed in
2003 at the MIT List Visual Arts Center at as part
of the exhibition Influence, Anxiety, and Gratitude.

In living an expansive aesthetic life to tbe extreme, Klein embodied what has
become tbe ballmark of many acclaimed artists since his time: a protean creativity
that refuses to respect modernist boundaries of medium or method (McE (2).
Abstraction and especially tbe monochrome became for many of these artists,
as they were for Klein, not special areas of competence but ratber experitnents,
infections, contagions. Tbis expansion ofthe purview of "abstraction" accords
witb Philip Guston's prophetic vision ofthe changes in abstract art that would
arise in part as a reaction against purist formalism. "Tbere is something ridiculous and miserly," he claitiied in i960, "in tbe myth we inherit from abstract art.
That painting is autonomous, pure and for itself, and therefore we habitually
analyze its ingredients and define its limits. But painting is 'impure.' h is tbe
adjustment of'impurities' which forces painting's continuities."'** Tbe radicality
of recent abstraction is not found in the self-criticahty and containment ofthe
visual language. While this may have been the case in the tiiid-twentietb century,
as Greenberg, Fried, and otbers argued so vigorously, assertions of aesthetic
autonomy seem dated now, as much in abstract art as in the many forms that
would replace its hegemonic mid-century paradigms. Rather than a survey of
these recent developments, I will instead present two final case studies.
The group General Idea extended tbe genealogy of abstraction that I have
traced from Malevicb to Klein. GI's debts to the Klein of tnonochromatic blue
impregnations were mucb greater than bas been articulated in tbe scholarly literature on tbe group; tbis said, it would be difficult to itnagine a more pohtical
redeployment of Klein's art. which in its original social contexts was allegedly
right-wing and at the least quietistic.'" As early as tbeir film Tesi Tube in 1979
with its "blue moment"and ttp to the dissolution ofthe group more than a
decade ago, its members engaged in "tnonoclirome research" inspired by Yves
le monochrome bimself.' Happily borrowing the "chroma key blue" used in
this film, they mirrored Klein's 1KB and inaugurated a "blue period" as Klein
bad done, garnering an outrageous reference not only to Pablo Picasso but to the
later artist as well. In a parodic homage to Klein's Aithropometries, the tbree Gl
artists deployed poodlestbeir canine alter egos at tbe timeas nonbuman
brusbes lo inscribe "XXX Blue."'' Blue shards of a collapsed structure and a cotnmemorative blue pamphlet issued from the 1985 exhibition in Middelburg,
Holland: Khroma Key Klub:The Blue Ruin.s from the 1984 Miss General Idea Pavilion. GI's AIDS
Stamps invoke not only Robert Indiana's LOVE logo but also Klein's 1KB stamps
in tbeir fc^rmat as well as hue. Latterly, the group took on the guise of doctors,
tTiedical researchers not only attending to their own health but prescribing aesthetic antidotes to the viral outbreak of AIDS.The artists' deference to Kleni takes

IOS artiournal

i
General Idea, Khroma Key Kfub.-The Blue
Ruins from the (984 Miss General Idea

Pavillion, 1985, installation, mixed media,

dimensions variable; installation view, De
VIeeshal, Middelburg, Netherlands, 1985,
Collection of General Idea,Toronto (artwork AA Bronson, photograph by Vim
Riemens, Middelburg)

tbe form of extending his practices of impregnation through color and circulating their own aesthetic cures and infections in and beyond the art world.
Quoting Klein, they fastened on artistic borrowing as what he called "'seizing'...
through impregnation in sensibihty" (Gl 6o), For ideas to be "in the air" was,
for Klein, a sign of their immateriality and sophistication. Punning on the
metaphors so important to Klein's "urbanism ofthe air," Gl enthused that "inspiration from other artists continued to arrive out ofthe blue," The text concludes
with a section (later made into an artist's book) titled "XXXVoto," a reference
to Klein's devotion to Saint Rita (c, 1381-c. 14^6), patron saint of lost causes
and impossible projects, whose sbrine in Cascia, Italy, Klein visited many times,
finally leaving an elaborate ex-voto there in 19^8. For tbe saint, Gl substituted its
fictive muse. Miss General Idea, and tbanked her for ber "aeration ofthe breathlessness of ultramarine" (Gl 63). In their prayers to tbe "XXX" patron of their
lives, tbe artists ask that she migbt prevent enemies "from infecting us with
anything tbat contaminates us, ever; please make us. and all your works, totally
invulnerable" (Gl 64). But this prayer was the ultimate impossibility.Tbe group's
fantasy of playing doctor was dystopian, as were some of tbeir final collaborations, the "infected abstracts" of Mondrian, Gerrit Rietveldt, and Ad Reinhardt.
Two of GI's members died of AIDS soon after, and the group was disbanded.
Not all recent monochromes are paintings. Klein experimented with "pure"
space and ligbt in an emptied room at the home of Colette Allendy that was part
of a May 19^7 exhibition. He titled this zone of sensibility Les Surfaces et blocs de

ID6

WINTFR

General Idea, AIDS Stamps, 1988, offset on

perforated paper, 10 x QV. in.(25.S x 21
cm); signed and numbered edition of 200,
self-published. Collection of General Idea,
Toronto (artwork AA Bronson, photograph provided by General Idea,Toronto)
General Idea, Playing Doctor, 1992, chromogenic print (Ektachrome), 3 0 x 2 1 in.
(76.2 X 53.3 cm); signed and numbered
edition of 12, self-published. Collection of
General Idea,Toronto (artwork A A
Bronson, photograph provided by General
Idea, Toronto)

22, Olafur Eliasson: Your only real thing is time. exh.

cat. (Boston: Institute of Contemporary Art,

2001), 20.

sensibilite picturak invisible and guided select viewers into tbis space of meditation.
The nascent concept ofthe void as a palpably present absence would structure
bis most notorious exhibition and performance, tbat of LeVitie in i95"8. His Zen
and mystical leanings were driving a dematerializaticm in his art, which became
more spiritual as the monochrome transmuted from pigrnetit on canvas to light
in space. As McFvilley has emphasized, Klein painstakingly orchestrated the interactions of his monochrome paintings and monochrome spaces. In a text from
Dimanche, for example, in which he described many aspects of bis own work,
both extant and projected, Klein imagined an installation called Les Cinq Sailes: "In
order to promote the direct experience of feeling and matter wiibout the intermediary of energy, spectators pass through five rooms, their feet bound by ball
and chain. Nine monochrome blue paintings ofthe same format are in the first
room; the second room is empty and entirely white; nine monogold paintings
of the same format are in the third room; tbe fourth room is empty and dark,
almost black; nine nionopink paintings ofthe same format are in the fifth rootn"
(quoted in Sticb 213). Whether purposefully or not, in the 1997 Room for One Color,
Olafur Eiiasson modified and extended Klein's monochrome theater. Ehasson
states, "By putting this yellow filter on top of everything [the room] becomes
like a picture. But since we are in the picture and in fact experiencing it. , , it
becomes real again. By tnaking it hyper-representational, we have a real experienceso tbat you see sometbing that you don't normally see.Tbe eyes have better vision when you have less color."" For Klein as for Eliasson, "abstract" in tbe

107 art journal

Yves Klein, l e Vide, 1958, installation view,

Galerie Iris Clert, Paris (artwork 2005
Estate ofYves Klein/ADAGP (Paris)/
SODRAC (Montreal), photograph provided
by Archives Klein, Paris)
Olafur Eliasson, Room for one color, I 997,
monofrequency lamp, variable dimensions, installation view, Kunstmuseum
Wolfsburg, Germany. 2004 (artwork
Olafur Eliasson, photograph Nic
Tenwiggenhorn/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn,
photograph provided byTanya Bonakdar
Gallery, NewYork)

sense of "removed from experience" was not the goal. The questions their analogous five-part installations pose is "better vision" of what, and in what sense?
The ambient world or tbe constituents of vision itself? Would vision itself be
"perception," do we have access to such a precultural operation, and if we do,
what do we do witb this knowledge within an art context? If, as I am suggesting,
we think of both works under the art-historical rubric ofthe tnonochrometo
which they clearly, if not exclusively, referwe operate on the plane of culture's
uses of color, perception, and Klein's sensibility, wbicb is where these artists make
their contributions.
Mark A. Cheetham is a professor in the Graduate Department of History of Art and director of the
Canadian Studies Program at the University of Toronto. His awards include a John Simon Guggenheim
Memorial Fellowship and a Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute Fellowship. His book Abstract Art
against Autonomy will appear with Cambridge University Press in January 2006.