Matting the Monochrome: Malevich, Klein, and Now

Recent abstract art actively works against the paradigms of purity and autonomy. 1 A self-conscious revision of its heritage is a striking feature of its renewed vitality. Commentators have recognized the import of impurities within the founding practices of the field. Briony Fer has revealed the aberrations integral to Piet Mondrian's paintings, for example, as Allan Kaprow did in the 1960s when he wrote that "the impure aspect of pure painting like Mondrian's is not some hidden compositional flaw but rather the psychological setting which must be impure for the notion of purity to make any sense at all." 2 Here I will develop and examine a paradigm of mid-twentieth-century abstraction's resistance to the norms of purity and autonomy in Yves Klein's agonistic reception of the monochrome, that compressed but not so rarefied Russian doll that sits inside abstract painting just as abstraction inhabits the core of modernism. 3 Klein systematically took the avant-garde monochrome beyond the frame of painting. Seeing his work as a precedent in this regard underscores Klein's historical importance and connects recent work not usually regarded as monochromatic or abstract to a genealogy in which he is pivotal. Klein scholars and supporters-especially Thomas McEvilley, Pierre Restany, and Sidra Stich-document his legacy for recent and contemporary art, including abstraction. Others are at best ambivalent about the artist and his patrimony. Benjamin Buchloh claims that Klein, in company with Joseph Beuys, has been "overestimated in U.S. reception." 4 Thierry de Duve's writing in this context seems pulled in two irreconcilable directions. On the one hand, he asserts that Klein's "only tangible contribution to the history of painting is the chemical formula that allowed him to fix powdered pigment without diminishing its glow," yet in an instructive endnote about his reception in the United States, de Duve struggles with the tension between Klein's alleged "failure" and the fact that he "is not a negligible artist." 5 More serious questions about the neo-avant-garde notwithstanding, a (usually) unspoken discomfort with Klein the provocateur and supposedly right-wing sympathizer colors the interpretation of his work. 6