In the 1960s, Yves Klein began his “Anthropométries” – imprints of painted female bodies. “Anthropométrie SU 30,” in International Klein Blue (IKB), pink, and black, belongs to this group of works and holds a special place within the so-called “Suaires” – for its exact creation process remains unclear to this day. Our essay explores its unique form through the Christian tradition of the Holy Face and the idea of the image as a trace of touch.
On March 9, 1960, Yves Klein invited around a hundred collectors, artists, and critics to the Galerie Internationale d’Art Contemporain in Paris. The floor and walls were lined with white sheets of paper, and golden chairs were arranged all around. After the guests had taken their seats, nine men entered: three violinists, three cellists, and three singers. They strike a note and hold it for twenty minutes; this is followed by twenty minutes of silence – Klein’s “Monotone Symphony.” The artist appears in a tuxedo, with a white tie and the Maltese cross of the Order of St. Sebastian. Finally, three naked women carrying buckets of blue paint enter the room. Following Klein’s quiet instructions, they apply the paint to their bodies and press individual body parts against the paper, creating blue imprints – in that luminous ultramarine that became known as International Klein Blue (IKB). Critics later described the event as calm, ceremonial, and of an almost religious nature.
Klein did not want the creation of his “Anthropometries” – as Pierre Restany, a critic and theorist of Nouveau Réalisme, called these body-imprint paintings – to be understood as an erotic or scandalous act. For him, they were rather a method of confronting the “flesh-and-blood human being” just as directly as landscape painters confront the landscape. He referred to the women involved as “living brushes.” Restany, in turn, situated Klein’s newly “invented” technique – for which he received a patent in 1960 – within the history of cave painting, where handprints appear alongside animal drawings as early evidence of human artistic creation. Klein himself, following the public presentation, linked his Anthropométries to a belief in the “resurrection of the flesh.”
The “Anthropométrie SU 30” from 1960 belongs to a small group that Restany titled “Anthropométries Suaires.” The faded dedication to filmmaker Yvan Butler, who documented Klein’s work in Krefeld, also establishes a connection to the Rhineland art scene and the circle of the young ZERO movement. The “Suaires” – sweat cloths or burial shrouds – belong to the static anthropometries, which were not created as part of a performative action but rather as fixed traces of contact. Some of these works depict anthropomorphic, symmetrically fanned-out flower or butterfly shapes. For these multicolored “Suaires,” Restany describes a process in which the spread inner area of the model’s thighs and crotch was placed on a cylindrical support, such as a type of neck roll.
The roughly symmetrical, blue-pink-black form of “Anthropométrie SU 30” is initially reminiscent of this group, yet the irregular, at times sparse distribution of pigment suggests a different creative process. Presumably, the fabric was draped around specific, paint-covered parts of the model’s body, smoothed against the body, and then opened up again. Here, the picture surface does not appear as a passive plane onto which the body is inscribed, but rather as a cloth that envelops the body, touches it, and absorbs its traces. This also shifts the relationship between the active body and the passive picture surface: the fabric not only receives the trace of color but also actively helps shape it through folding, pressure, and touch.
It is precisely this direct contact that connects the “Suaires” with Klein’s understanding of the Anthropometries as a whole. The body imprints, which at times appear figurative, initially seem like a departure from Klein’s monochrome paintings. However, he does not view the Anthropometries as figurative any more than he regards the monochromes as conventionally abstract. With both, he aimed to show life as such. In this sense, Klein understands the “Anthropometries” as a return to a realism that is realized through the immaterial. What is real is not the mimetic image of the human being, but the contact of the body with the image-bearing surface, in which presence and absence are preserved simultaneously. “The form of the body, its contours, its strange colors that fluctuate between life and death,” Klein said, did not interest him. “What matters is only the animated, pure, and essential mood of the flesh.”
Against this backdrop, the title “Suaire” also takes on its special significance. It refers to the Christian tradition of the textile contact image, in particular to the Veil of Veronica. According to legend, the veil is said to bear the imprint of the face of Jesus Christ after Saint Veronica wiped blood and sweat from his face on the way to Calvary. The cloth belongs to the tradition of the Acheiropoieta – that is, those “not made by human hands” images that are based not on artistic representation but on direct contact with the body of Christ.
The art historian Georges Didi-Huberman describes the logic of these contact images in his analysis of such image formation through pure bodily contact without representation. Similarly, the indexical value of “Anthropométrie SU 30” does not arise from its resemblance to a body, but from contact with it. In this sense, the figure takes shape here precisely where it disappears: every figure thus has its origin at the very place where it is erased, provided that this is a place of contact. The trace of the immediate becomes visible only upon separation from the body: the “flesh” is no longer present, yet its touch is preserved in the fabric as a past presence.