ART “4”
“2”-DAY 06 June
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Died on 06 June 1944: Ker~Xavier Roussel,
French Nabi
painter, printmaker, and decorative artist, born on 10 December 1867. He
was the brother-in-law of Edouard
Vuillard. — {Etait-il un descendant de Guillaume “Cadet”
Roussel [30 Apr 1743 – 26 Jan 1807]? Ah ! Ah ! Ah oui, vraiment?
- En tout cas ce n'est pas lui, mais Benoit A. Côté qui, en
1996, a peint les
3 maisons de Cadet Roussel. (385x387pix, 65kb gif)} — While still at the Lycée Condorcet in Paris, he met Édouard Vuillard (whose sister Marie he married in 1893), Maurice Denis and Paul Sérusier; once they had finished their studies, they all went together to the Académie Julian, where Pierre Bonnard, Georges Lacombe, Paul Ranson, and Félix Valloton were already enrolled. Dissatisfied with the teaching of William-Adolphe Bouguereau and Jules Lefèbvre, they left the Académie in 1890, two years after they had begun to meet together as the Nabis. Roussel took part in the exhibitions at the Café Volpini in 1889 and the Le Barc de Boutteville gallery in 1891. At that time his pictures applied the rules of Synthetism outlined by Sérusier — flat planes of repeated color encircled by dark lines forming a harmonious rhythm; a typical example of his oil paintings of this period is Ma Grand-mère (1888). Like the other Nabis, he did not restrict himself to easel painting but also produced murals, stained glass and lithographs: the color lithograph L'éducation du chien, which he contributed to the anthology Amours (1892-1898) published by the dealer Ambroise Vollard, was the first of several such projects in which he developed the Symbolist character of his work. The 12 lithographs he contributed to another Vollard publication, Album de Paysages (Paris), vividly expressed the pantheist vision of nature that was to characterize his later work. — LINKS — Mythological Scene (1903, 47x62cm; 575x754pix, 192kb) — Rural Festival (1913; 575x408pix, 140kb) — Paul Cézanne au Travail sur le Chemin des Lauves (1906 print, 1131x1054pix, 488kb) _ looks like a black-and-white photo. |
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Died on 06 June 1962: Yves Klein,
French Conceptual painter, sculptor, performance artist, and writer, born
on 28 April 1928. — {Klein was not gross?} — He was the son of the Dutch-born painter Fred Klein [1898–], whose work was representational, and Marie Raymond [1908–], who developed a reputation in the 1950s as an abstract artist, and whose abstraction was influential on the development of her son’s work. Although Yves had had no formal art training, he was already making his first serious attempts at painting by 1946 and showing his interest in the absoluteness of color by formulating his first theories about monochrome. In 1946 he befriended Arman, with whom he was later to be associated in the Nouveau Réalisme movement, and the writer Claude Pascal, whom he met at a judo class. Together they developed their interest in esoteric writing and East Asian religions. Klein became a student of the Rosicrucian Fellowship in 1946 and was influenced both by its mystical philosophy and by judo. In 1952–1953 he went with Pascal and Arman to Japan, where he studied the art of judo and the spiritual attitude associated with it, gaining the black belt ‘fourth dan’ at the Kodokan Institute in Tokyo. He worked as a judo teacher in Madrid in 1954 and in Paris from 1955 to 1959. E — Klein was born in Nice. From 1942 to 1946, he studied at the Ecole Nationale de la Marine Marchande and the Ecole Nationale des Langues Orientales and began practicing judo. At this time, he became friends with Arman Fernandez and Claude Pascal and started to paint. Klein composed his first Symphonie monoton in 1947. During the years 1948 to 1952, he traveled to Italy, Great Britain, Spain, and Japan. Yves Klein’s first passion in life was judo. In 1952 he moved to Tokyo and studied at the Kodokan Judo Institute, where he earned a black belt. When he returned to Paris in 1955 and discovered to his dismay that the Fédération Française de Judo did not extol him as a star, he shifted his attentions and pursued a secondary interest—a career in the arts. During the ensuing eight years Klein assembled a multifarious and critically complex body of work ranging from monochrome canvases and wall reliefs to paintings made with fire. He is renowned for his almost exclusive use of a strikingly resonant, powdery cobalt pigment, which he patented under the name “International Klein Blue,” claiming that it represented the physical manifestation of cosmic energy that, otherwise invisible, floats freely in the air. In addition to monochrome paintings, Klein applied this pigment to sponges, which he attached to canvases as relief elements or positioned on wire stands to create biomorphic or anthropomorphic sculptures. In 1955, Klein settled permanently in Paris, where he was given a solo exhibition at the Club des Solitaires. His monochrome paintings were shown at the Galerie Colette Allendy, Paris, in 1956. The artist entered his blue period in 1957; this year a double exhibition of his work was held at the Galerie Iris Clert and the Galerie Colette Allendy, both in Paris. In 1958, he began using nude models as “living paintbrushes.” Klein’s activities also included using nude female models drenched in paint as “brushes”; releasing thousands of blue balloons into the sky; and exhibiting an empty, white-walled room and then selling portions of the interior air, which he called “zones” of “immaterial pictorial sensibility.” His intentions remain perplexing 30 years after his sudden death. Whether Klein truly believed in the mystical capacity of the artist to capture cosmic particles in paint and to create aesthetic experiences out of thin air and then apportion them at whim is difficult to determine. The argument has also been made that he was essentially a parodist who mocked the metaphysical inclinations of many Modern painters, while making a travesty of the art market. Also in 1958, he undertook a project for the decoration of the entrance hall of the new opera house in Gelsenkirchen, Germany. The first manifesto of the group Nouveaux Réalistes was written in 1960 by Pierre Restany and signed by Arman, Klein, Daniel Spoerri, Jean Tinguely, and others. In 1961, Klein was given a retrospective at the Museum Haus Lange, Krefeld, Germany, and his first solo exhibition in the United States at the Leo Castelli Gallery, New York. He and architect Claude Parent collaborated that year on the design for fountains of water and fire, Les Fontaines de Varsovie, for the Palais de Chaillot, Paris. In 1962, Klein executed a plaster cast of Arman and took part in the exhibition Antagonismes 2: L’Objet at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris. Shortly before his death he appeared in the film Mondo Cane (1962). — Text of Klein's Chelsea Hotel Manifesto. — LINKS — Untitled blue monochrome (1959, 92x72cm) _ Klein rejected the idea of representation or personal expression in painting, and became obsessed with immaterial values, beyond the visible or tactile. He began making monochrome paintings in 1947 as a way of attaining total freedom. A decade later, he developed his trademark, patented color, International Klein Blue (IKB). He made a series of paintings using IKB, as well as sculptures made from objects such as sponges dipped in the color. — Untitled Anthropometry (1960) _ A monumental work. Women’s naked bodies in blue and gold float and soar through an intense blue space. Around these bodies Yves Klein has sprayed more paint, outlining each figure with a kind of aura. He has also sprayed round leaves and branches to leave silvery-blue silhouettes. Klein was famous for his vivid and distinctive blue which he called IKB (International Klein Blue). He achieved this by evaporating the binding element in his paint so that only the concentrated blue pigment was left. The repeated use of this blue in his work enabled him to express a sense of mysticism, or 'the infinite expansion of the universe', as he called it. The painting also seems to contain an elemental sense of air, earth, fire and water. Yves Klein was a fanatical reader of the works of the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard who was interested in a psychological analysis of space and fire, which he wrote about in his books Dreams and Air and Water. Klein’s method of creating this work was very unorthodox. He staged a 'happening' in Paris at which naked women rolled in the gold and blue paint leaving imprints of their bodies on the canvas. The world 'Anthropometry' included in the title refers to the study and measurement of human forms. Once the canvas was vertical, the figures seemed to fly like angels through a celestial space, painted on a great altarpiece. Although the imagery is secular, the blue and gold palette evokes Italian religious paintings of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries where a blue-robed Virgin appears against a gold background. It is quite possible that Klein intended to convey a religious spirituality in this work. He was a devout catholic and was always writing prayers to his patron saint, Saint Rita of lost causes. Klein died at the early age of thirty-four as a result of a hereditary heart condition. — Grande anthropophagie bleue, Hommage à Tennessee Williams (488x700pix, 220kb) |
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