The Suaire de Mondo Cane (Mondo cane shroud) comes from artist Yves Klein. To the eye this painting looks simple and hurried. The blurred images congeal to form outlines of bodies engaging in activity. The brashness of "brush" stroke and high contrast of ultramarine blue on white was interesting to me, The painting seems unfinished yet brazenly complete.
Yves Klein was born in Nice, France and grew up influenced by the spirit and physical activity including Judo. Poet and lover of the essence of the earth first, Klein has a portfolio including photography, painting, music, and writings. With the help of a physist, Yves created his own brand of blue dubbed International Klein Blue, that would become a staple color in a majority of his work.
Klein is not the physical artist of Mondo Cane Shroud. The work was created by models who painted their nude bodies with IK blue paint and upon Klein's instruction would press their bodies against a canvas. He called the women models his "living brushes". Mondo Cane Shroud and other pieces like it were the finales to other of Klein's works. Klein captured the painting of the models and applying the paint to the canvases as preformance art and charged fees for viewing and was to be part of a documentary series.
Yves Klein's body imprints represent ideas he had about the importance of denying worldly influences in order to pay attention to one's own sensibilities. The Imprints emphasized ideas about reality and representation.
The blue images in Cane are headless, armless and realatively legless. They are all female and appear to be dancing. breasts and pelvic regions are the focal point on each figure. Handprints grope at the canvas. Painted women dancing in glass boxes with their bodies pressed against the walls.
Finger prints are dragged through the blue torsos. Vibration ripples through bodies as they bang on the surface.
the concept of an imprint is that it locks and captures a thing's essence when the object is no longer there.
Much of Klein's work includes painted women sprawling themselves on his canvas. Are these women living paintbrushes or Klein's sexual relics?
these imprints of naked women in empty space seem locked there.
It is kind of no wonder that Klein and his shrouds ended up in "Mondo Cane" a movie exploits many cultural practices throughout he world.
Works Cited
Nice work, and I am glad to see you took the time to research Klein and his practice, as is really changes the interpretation of the image. Your description here is evocative, too. Do you think Klein really achieved what he hoped to as far as "denying worldly influences," etc? What is your opinion of the gender issues here? Do the women end up treated more as objects than as human beings denying worldly influences? (Thanks for including links to your research too. Remember, you can also create hyperlinks in the text if you want us to be able to jump to more information about a given idea).
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