ARTNEWS  MARCH 2010
 
 

Two shows shed light on the story behind the iconic photograph.

One of the best-known photographs in avant-garde art is Yves Klein’s Leap into the Void (1960), an image of the artist soaring over an empty street with an expression of pure bliss on his face. Down below, a bicyclist rides into the distance, unaware of the miraculous occurrence overhead, while at the end of the street a train passes by. Since Klein’s unexpected death, in 1962 at the age of 34, a mystery has remained: how did he make the purported leap?

Two major exhibitions about to open should shed light on the controversies that still surround this iconic photograph, which was made six months before Yuri Gagarin’s flight into space and which Klein claimed (in fabricated broadsheets he inserted into France-Soir) was made partly to protest the space race: “Leaps into the Void: Documents of Nouveau Réalist Performance,” at the Menil Collection in Houston, and “Yves Klein: With the Void, Full Powers,” co-organized by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

Michelle White, assistant curator at the Menil, says she conceived “Leaps into the Void” after she discovered an odd object in the Menil archives: a piece of slate. It wasn’t art — just a piece of slate “collected” by Dominique de Menil in 1981 from the mansard roof that Klein presumably leaped from. The photograph, shot and assembled by Harry Shunk and Janos Kender, was originally published on November 27, 1960, in Klein’s broadsheet, which he considered a guerrilla intervention. In that faked four-page insert, titled Dimanche, Klein appropriates — as his artwork — all human activity on the planet for the entire day. The caption reads: “The painter of space hurls himself into the void!” When the piece of slate turned up nearly 50 years later, it was like a religious relic — proof of an apocryphal action that has reverberated ever since. Klein — part shaman, part showman — aimed not only to make art immaterial and demonstrate the presence of absence, but also to levitate into another dimension.

Art critic and Klein friend Pierre Restany, in his 1982 monograph on the artist, only mentioned the photograph once, referring to it as “The Leap into Space, which was the prelude to this gesture (the appropriation of a day in the world), and over which hovers the greatest mystery (did the monochrome painter really jump?).” It is curious that Restany, some two decades after the image was made — and after several different versions had been published — left its veracity open to question.

Klein’s first love wasn’t art; it was judo, which he studied from 1946 to 1951, along with his buddies Arman and Claude Pascal. He earned a black belt and worked in Madrid as a judo instructor. At the same time, he explored various spiritual outlets, including Zen Buddhism and the cult of Saint Rita (patron saint of the impossible), and he studied Rosicrucianism with an old astrologer, Louis Cadeaux. In 1952, when he was 24, he went to Tokyo, where he attained the 4th Dan (Yodan) at the famed Kodokan Judo Institute. After returning to Paris, in 1954, he published The Foundations of Judo, which remains a classic, and he opened the Judo Academy of Paris, which was not a success.

It was then that he turned seriously to art. He had already come up with the idea of the monochrome that same year, and in 1955 he submitted an orange one to the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, an organization of abstract artists. It was rejected by the jury with this explanation: “A single color, no, no, really that’s not enough.” In the “Chelsea Hotel Manifesto” of 1961, Klein suggested that he had conceived his first artwork in 1946, when as an adolescent he had lain on a beach in Nice and imagined himself signing his name “on the other side of the sky.”

New research has turned up several clues to the circumstances surrounding Leap, but they are contradictory or ambiguous. It seems that in 1960, Klein did actually make a number of leaps. According to Menil archivist Geraldine Aramanda and documents in the Yves Klein Archives in Paris, he performed a rehearsal jump on January 12 from 67, rue de l’Assomption, the site of Colette Allendy’s gallery, where he had shown monochromes in 1956. Shunk and Kender’s famous photo was staged the following October 19, when Klein leaped from the roof ledge of a pavilion at 3, rue Gentil-Bernard, in the Paris suburb of Fontenay-aux-Roses. Two versions of that doctored photo were published during the artist’s lifetime: One in the fake Dimanche and the other, with no bicycle or train visible, in the catalogue for his 1961 show in Krefeld, Germany. There also exists a photo focusing closely on the leaper and the sky behind him, as well as one showing Klein, facing left, flying over the pillars of a gate; these are in the Menil archive and will be in the exhibition.

According to Kerry Brougher, deputy director and chief curator of the Hirshhorn, Klein’s widow, Rotraut, confirmed to him that Klein made the leap several times. Some people maintain that his judo-school colleagues held a tarp to catch him, while others state that it was a blue sheet or a net. Brougher also says that Rotraut told him Klein claimed to have made an undocumented leap with one witness, no photographer, and no safeguards.

“It’s quite possible,” Philippe Vergne, director of Dia Art Foundation and former deputy director and chief curator at the Walker Art Center, who cocurated the Klein retrospective, told ARTnews. “Remember, he was also a judo master, so the notion of falling was part of his practice. He appropriated something from judo into his art.” As Klein wrote in his instruction manual, “Judo is, in fact, the discovery by the human body of a spiritual space.”

The famous image — a photomontage — was made by Shunk and his partner, Kender, who were photographers for the group of artists Restany had christened the Nouveaux Réalistes: Christo, Arman, Niki de Saint Phalle, and Jean Tinguely among them. According to Shunk’s obituary in the London Times, published on July 22, 2006, the photo was a fake — a “confection,” as Shunk himself had called it — manufactured in the darkroom long before the days of Adobe Photoshop. Shunk first photographed the street empty except for the bicyclist. Then, according to the obituary, Klein “climbed to the top of a wall and dived off it a dozen times — onto a pile of mats assembled by the members of his judo school across the road. The two elements were then melded to create the desired illusion.”

While the leap itself has been confirmed, the accounts continue to differ: How was the artist caught? How did the instructors of the judo school, which was at 104, boulevard de Clichy and which supposedly closed in 1956, catch him? Adding to the intrigue, Shunk and Kender later split up, and it is thought that Shunk further rewrote history by omitting Kender’s name from the photo’s attribution.

Perhaps the discrepancies can be explained by the unreliability of eyewitnesses, even those who are trained in art. The suspension of disbelief may merely be our own skepticism. Or perhaps the truth has yet to be revealed. In 2008 the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation acquired the entire photo archive of Shunk, who not only was the photographer for the artists in Paris but also later moved to Greenwich Village and became the photographer for Warhol and the Pop artists in New York. The Lichtenstein Foundation managed to prevent the photo archive from being dispersed. And the true story of Leap may still await us among those 100,000 negatives, contact sheets, and photographs.

 
— Kim Levin, ARTnews

Kim Levin is an independent art critic and curator.

 
“Leaps into the Void: Documents of Nouveau Réalist Performance” will be at the Menil Collection in Houston from March 19 through August 8. “Yves Klein: With the Void, Full Powers” will be at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., from May 20 through September 12 and then the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis from October 23 through February 13.

 
Photo: A version of Klein’s doctored photo Leap into the Void, by Harry Shunk and Janos Kender. (Shunk-Kender/©Roy Lichtenstein Foundation/Menil Collection, Houston)

WASHINGTON POST  24 FEBRUARY 2010
 

WASHINGTON, DC – In a few weeks, a fanciful and colorful trio of women in bathing suits will rise from a median on New York Avenue NW. They promise to be showstoppers, as contemporary as the last splash of pop art, as exaggerated as Las Vegas showgirls. They will be visible from the Treasury Department all the way down to the jumbled landscape that was once the old convention center.

The sculptures are part of a public art project, organized by the National Museum of Women in the Arts, that is scheduled to appear in April, the museum has announced. The work in the first act of what is called the New York Avenue Sculpture Project is by the late French sculptor Niki de Saint Phalle, whose outsize sculptures are both celebratory and bold. Her fiberglass forms are 12 and 15 feet high and will be placed in four groups. One sculpture represents basketball icon Michael Jordan flying through the air, a hapless opponent unable to stop him.

The museum, along with its public and private partners, hopes the displays will bring some much-needed zing to its sector of downtown and spark interest in the 23-year-old museum. The first sculptures will be placed on the median of the 1200 block of New York Avenue, outside the museum. By 2015, sculptures will have been installed along New York Avenue from 13th Street to Ninth Street, the heart of the Mount Vernon Square redevelopment efforts.

“This part of the city really needed a project like this. There is a lot of good stuff going on, but the street lacks character and it doesn’t pull together,” said Patricia Zingsheim, the associate director of revitalization and design at the city’s planning office. She said the approvals were given because the project benefits residents and visitors. Plus, it was unique.

In Washington, “we have a lot of traditional sculpture and even some that are commemorating grim history and grim events,” she said. “This work is fantastic. I think this will be transformative for the museum and the blocks around it and lead to other improvements.”

“We wanted to transform the five major median strips into sculpture islands,” said the museum’s director, Susan Fisher Sterling. All the artists will be women, and the work will change every year or two. “We have precious little contemporary art in Washington,” Sterling added. “The goal of having contemporary art is to create a statement in a part of town that is becoming more hip and vibrant.”

Richard H. Bradley, the executive director of the Downtown D.C. Business Improvement District, said the project will help the city develop some new cachet with unique public spaces. “We do have some of that in the monumental core. But great cities have great streets and great art, and we want those blocks to became a sculpture alley,” Bradley said. “The art project speaks to the overall change-in-brand downtown is offering. We want to be a remarkable urban experience.”

De Saint Phalle, a self-taught artist, used mosaic glass and colored stones to decorate the three women, whose bodies are chalk white, canary yellow and ink black, a 1999 grouping called “The Three Graces.” Also part of the Washington project will be her “Serpent Tree,” created in 1999, and “Nana on a Dolphin,” another outsize woman standing on the back of a dolphin, made in 1998. The sculptor, who died in 2002, is known for creating the much-talked-about Stravinsky Fountain outside the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.

Formal dedication of the sculptures is scheduled for April 28.

The project’s supporters are banking on the appeal of the “Graces” sculpture’s voluptuous hips. “Excitement and fun shouldn’t be out of our vocabulary,” Bradley said.

 
— Jacqueline Trescott, Washington Post

CAROLINA WEEKLY  12 FEBRUARY 2010
 
 

CHARLOTTE, NORTH CAROLINA – He made macho sculptures out of wheels, chains and gears. She created plump, brightly patterned earth mothers. Together they were the Bonnie and Clyde of the modern art world.

Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely, partners in art and a married couple in life, are together again at the new Bechtler Museum of Modern Art, 402 South Tryon Street in uptown Charlotte.

Charlotteans have fallen in love with the Saint Phalle “Firebird” in the museum’s outdoor courtyard, but there’s more inside. The museum’s second-floor gallery is dedicated to both artists, who met and started working together in the ’50s and were married in 1971. Visitors can see three of Tinguely’s trademark kinetic sculptures along with several two-dimensional works. De Saint Phalle is represented by “nanas” in two and three dimensions, as well as several reliefs and drawings.

Niki de Saint Phalle was born in France in 1930, but after losing their fortune in the stock market crash, her family moved to New York soon after. Niki was interested in art from an early age, although sometimes her enthusiasm got her into trouble. She was expelled from the exclusive Brearley School for painting the fig leaves on the school’s statues red.

Niki eloped with a music student at 18, quickly had two children and found herself living the sort of domestic life she always had despised. In her early 20s, she suffered a nervous breakdown and was treated with electroshock therapy and drugs. She turned to painting as part of her recovery. Meanwhile, she’d begun modeling, and became acquainted with some of the artists living in Paris while on a modeling assignment. Her family moved back to Paris in the mid-1950s, where Niki continued to paint. She met artist Jean Tinguely, and Jean and his wife both encouraged her artistic efforts. Niki asked Jean to weld an armature for one of her sculptures, the first of their artistic collaborations.

By 1960, both Niki’s and Jean’s first marriages were over. By the end of the year, they were sharing a studio and living together.

Jean Tinguely, who was almost a generation older than Niki, had a style that was markedly different from Niki’s. A member of the group of artists known as the “New Realists,” Jean’s works were masculine, often made of iron, steel and wood. Many of his sculptures had working mechanisms. “Homage to New York,” one of his most famous installations in the garden of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, was a mechanical sculpture that self-destructed.

In contrast, Niki’s work had a cheerful, lyrical sensibility and a strongly feminist nature. While earlier in her career Niki had experimented with various themes, including a period in which she created paintings by shooting at containers of paint to form designs on the canvas, she ultimately settled into her best-known style with the creation of her voluptuous, brightly painted women, the “nanas.” While not all of Niki’s subsequent work includes a nana, she continued to produce them, in all sizes and many media, for the rest of her life.

Niki and Jean eventually got married, and they were each other’s biggest champions and most frequent collaborators. They worked together to create the giant nana sculpture “Hon” at the modern art museum in Stockholm. Visitors to the museum could enter the giant figure of a woman by walking between her legs; inside was one of Tinguely’s mechanical sculptures. But the couple’s best-known joint effort is the 1983 Igor Stravinsky Fountain outside the Pompidou Center in Paris, a group of 13 sculptures that dance, gyrate or stand majestically on the surface of the water.

Niki and Jean worked together on many projects for 30 years until Jean’s death in 1991; Niki continued stewardship of his works until she died a decade later.

The Bechtler family had a special relationship with Tinguely, according to the museum’s curator, Michael Godfrey.

“They knew him for years and both Andreas’s father, Hans Bechtler, and his uncle, Walter Bechtler, had pieces by Tinguely,” said Godfrey. “Tinguely used a number of found objects in his works. He would gather wheels and cogs, and one of the things he got particularly interested in were antlers, skulls and trophies. Andreas’s father was a hunter, and when Tinguely would come over to visit, Andreas would take him up to the attic to get pieces for his works of art.”

When Andreas Bechtler was looking for more Tinguely pieces for the Queen City museum, to add to those already in the collection, he discovered that a dealer had two sculptures that incorporated some of his father’s hunting trophies. These works, “Water Buffalo” and “L’execution,” are now in the Bechtler Museum’s second-floor gallery.

Tinguely’s relationship with the Bechtler family brought him to Charlotte long before the museum was even in the planning stages. The lobby of the Carillon building on Trade Street houses a monumental work of scupture by Tinguely hanging over the fountain. While Tinguely was visiting Charlotte he made a number of other works, some of which now hang in the Bechtler gallery.

The Bechtlers also knew Saint Phalle. “When the museum came on track and we decided to look to get monumental pieces by either Tinguely or Niki to go outside, we went to Atlanta, where she was having a major exhibition in the Botanical Garden,” said Godfrey. “We saw the ‘Firebird’ and fell in love with it.” The 12-foot, mirrored sculpture was purchased from the Bonnier Gallery in Geneva, which was reluctant to sell it at first, but then decided it would be better to have it on public display.

The museum has relationships with both the Niki de Saint Phalle Museum in Japan and the Jean Tinguely Museum in Basel, which was designed by the same architect as the Bechtler, Mario Botta. The Bechtler Museum of Modern Art hopes to mount major shows about both artists in the future. Considering that the Bechtler family owns other works by both artists, chances are Charlotteans will be seeing more of both Niki and Jean.

— Jackie Lupo, Charlotte Daily

 
Photo 1: Niki de Saint Phalle’s mirrored “Firebird” greets visitors to the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art on South Tryon Street.

Photo 2: Jean Tinguely’s “L’exécution” (1990) features metal, animal skull, horns and electric motor. (JoAnn Sieburg-Baker, courtesy of the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art)

SEE CALIFORNIA  OCTOBER 2010
 
 

Escondido, California honors Queen Califia with park statues.

“Queen of California,” Queen Califia is on view in Escondido with a mosaic garden sculpture designed by internationally renowned artist Niki de Saint Phalle. She was commissioned to create an interactive sculpture garden at Kit Carson Park inspired by California’s mythic, historic and cultural roots. The installation is known as Queen Califia’s Magical Circle. The garden consists of nine large-scale sculptures, a circular “snake wall” and maze entryway, sculpturally integrated bench seating, and native shrubs and trees planted within the interior plaza and along the outer perimeter. The garden bears the brilliant, unique mosaic ornamentation that is an unmistakable part of Saint Phalle’s later work. Niki de Saint Phalle was a citizen of Switzerland who resided in La Jolla until her death in 2002. She is known worldwide for her work in Europe, such as the Stravinsky Fountain in Paris and a sculpture garden in Italy.

History of Queen Califia:

The western U.S. state was once described in a novel as an island: “Know that on the right hand from the Indies exists an island called California very close to a side of the Earthly Paradise.” The ruler of this island, Queen Califia, ruled an empire without men, and gave riches away wherever she traveled. It took several hundred years for the world to recognize that this place did exist, but it wasn’t an island, and it had both men and women. In 1776, just as the U.S. was being formed, Spanish explorers settled it once and for all that California was very much connected to a larger land mass on the North American continent, and was populated with both sexes.

A mural at Mark Hopkins Hotel in San Francisco depicts Queen Califia, the ruler of a fictitious place for which California was named.

 
— See California