Exhibition, 5 Jun 1958 - 5 Jun 1958

First experience of "living brushes"

Appartement de Robert Godet 9, rue Le-Regrattier, Île Saint-Louis, Paris, France

"Having had rejected brushes as too excessively psychological already earlier, I painted with rollers, in order to be remain anonymous and at a distance between the canvas and myself during the execution, at least intellectually … Now, what a miracle, the brush returned, but this time it is alive: it was the flesh itself that applied the color to the canvas, under my direction, with a perfect precision, allowing me to remain constantly at an exact distance x from my canvas and thus continue to dominate my creation during the entire execution.That way my hands stayed clean, and I no longer dirtied myself with paint, not even tips of my fingers. The work the completed itself in front of me, with the absolute collaboration of the models, and I was in a position to show myself worthy of it by welcoming the work into the tangible world in a fitting manner wearing a tuxedo. It is at this time that I noticed “the marks of the body” at each session. They disappeared immediately, for it was required that everything should become monochrome. These marks, pagans in my religion of absolute monochromy, hypnotized me right away, and I worked on them secretly, always in absolute collaboration with the models, in order to share the responsibilities in case of a spiritual bankruptcy. The models and I practiced a perfect and irreproachable scientific telekinesis and it is thus that I presented The Anthropometries of the Blue Period, first privately at Robert Godet’s in Paris, in the spring of 1958, and then again, in a much more perfected form, on March 9, 1960 at the Galerie Internationale d’Art Contemporain."

Extract from "Truth becomes reality", in Yves Klein, Overcoming the Problems of Art: The Writings of Yves Klein, Spring Publications, New York, 2007, p. 187-188