Page 47 - Studio International - March 1966

Why does this quasi-religious alienation permeate the munication with the spectator. This cuts across different
Stockholm exhibition ? It reflects a rather widespread styles and techniques, as witness the number of
malaise among creative artists in our modern society, American artists who deliberately produce unsaleable,
expressed by way of a collective approach which takes immovable, transitory or deliberately insulting and
some of the artists to the very boundaries of corn- derisive works, such as certain pieces by Warhol, Johns
and Oldenburg. The auto-destructive works of Tinguely,
Metzger and so on are the culmination of this process
of withdrawal.
Hulten's exhibition gives rise to another thought—that
is, the virtual disappearance of all attempts at plasticity
on the part of some contemporary artists. Relations
between forms, balance and rhythm of mass, all that
has been accepted as the chief aim of painting, seem
to have no interest at all for most of these artists. They
are a world away from Maurice Denis' concept of 'a flat
surface covered with colours assembled in some order'.
The two-dimensional conception of a picture based on
a certain number of plastic and chromatic values is
replaced by two new propositions. To some the work
has become the manifestation, the quasi-symbolic
expression of a real phenomenon taking place in our
cosmic environment.
Yves Klein, like Malevich, produces 'Monochromes,
impregnated, he says, with the blue of the sky. Blue'
gold and pink are the three essences summing up the
world, together expressed in fire. Hence his famous
'fire sculptures', which he claims to be the living
quintessence of reality.
Opposed—and sometimes superposed—to these semi-
religious Gnostic ideas linked to pre-Socratic cos-
mogony, is a conception which relies upon the practical
participation of actual phenomena. Natural forces —
waves, light, motive power—are made to contribute
Yves Klein
Ici git l'espace 1961 and take a fundamental part in the work.
39 3/8 x 49 1/4 in
gold on wood I have already described this in relation to Soto's work
in Studio International, January 1966. One can also find
it in just as subtle a form in Cruz-Diez's 'physichromes'.
On a two-dimensional base Cruz- Diez places a number
of pure colours which are reflected in perpendicular
blades and mingle, thanks to the action of luminous
zones, in front of the painted panel in actual space.
Unlike his predecessors he is not satisfied with colouring
surfaces with paint; he paints space with light.
From this same principle, the direct utilization of
reality, come all kinetic works which use physical
energy in one form or another to animate, transform, or
destroy their structures. Through these works we see
the beginning of the end of the classic conception of
pictures and sculptures as passive, fictitious reflections
of their creators' plastic experiences. Contemporary
artists actively and actually try to use natural phenomena
—Calder, for example, uses wind, and Takis magnetism—
to trap reality itself rather than make arbitrary use of
surface or volume.
One can understand why Hulten's exhibition doesn't
include the neo-plasticists. To them it is plasticity—the
internal relationship of mass and colour—which counts.
They are the ultimate outcome, the apotheosis, of a long
era in the history of art, rather than the beginning of a
new epoch.
These are the main aesthetic lessons of the Stockholm
exhibition. But others, socially significant, are worth
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