A curious case of the blues at Blenheim
Yves Klein Blenheim Palace, Oxon ★★★★★
Less than a week after Donald Trump was honoured with a banquet at Blenheim, another provocative showman takes centre stage – albeit one who is no longer alive.
Yves Klein, the great rabble-rouser of post-war French art, who produced more than a thousand works before he died of a heart attack, aged 34, in 1962, provides the focus for Blenheim Art Foundation’s fifth exhibition. His presence at the palace feels about as natural as that of, well, Trump at Windsor, having tea with the Queen.
The Great Hall offers a case study of what I mean. On the stone floor, beneath Thornhill’s painted ceiling depicting the victorious 1st Duke of Marlborough kneeling before Britannia, a field of lumpy blue pigment is arranged in an immense rectangle, held in place by a gigantic silver tray.
Klein is, of course, known for his monochrome works, executed using a distinctive ultramarine pigment that appears both radiant and granular – an instantly recognisable hue that he discovered after experimenting during the mid-fifties. In 1960, he registered its formula under the name “IKB” (International Klein Blue).
No matter how many times you have seen IKB before, encountering it for real is always mesmerising. Pure
Pigment, the iridescent installation in the entrance hall, has the rugged quality of barren terrain, so that it resembles nothing so much as the dusty surface of a newly discovered blue planet. As guests at Blenheim go, Klein feels very alien indeed.
A planetary analogy feels appropriate: after all, Klein’s short but spectacular career coincided with the Space Age, taking off with a solo exhibition of 11 monochrome paintings in Milan in 1957, the same year the Soviets launched Sputnik. And, like a planet, Klein’s fathomless blue exerts its own gravitational pull.
In the corridors, interspersed among marble busts and statues, we find evidence of Klein’s fascination with “the monochrome”: a series of canvases, mostly from the Fifties, in an array of colours including bilious green and mustard yellow. Several of these are interesting because Klein is famous for the “authorless” quality of his paintings, which he created, using sponges and rollers, in reaction against the gestural spontaneity of the American Abstract Expressionists. Yet, here, he allows drips and streaks to remain visible.
In truth, though, none of these has the glowing charisma of his selfproclaimed “Blue Period”. In the China Ante Room, spot-lit on the end wall, Blue Monochrome (1961) appears almost like an altarpiece – a reminder of the spiritual connotations of Klein’s ultramarine, which seems to intimate something profound, as infinite as the sea or sky.
It is at this point, however, that problems begin. Because of the scale of the room, Blue Monochrome is at eye level, so that we stand face-to-face as if we are about to be swallowed up by a dense blue mist or heavenly cloud. But, to prevent people from touching it, the painting is protected by Plexiglas. This is frustrating, because the most dominant effect is not the pigment’s luminosity, but our own reflection. Klein’s art always has a hermetic quality, but here that characteristic is inadvertently enhanced.
Something similar occurs towards the end, in the Long Library. Here we find one of Klein’s 1961 “fire paintings”, which he created using a gas-flame torch at a Gaz de France test centre in Saint-denis. As well as swirling, energetic scorch marks, there are lots of subtler, more magical traces, which put one in mind of fireflies or half- glimpsed will-o’-the-wisps. Again, the Plexiglas makes it impossible to appreciate them fully.
Another disappointment is the abundance of small-scale sculptures. Having won notoriety for his ultramarine monochromes, Klein said that he wished to usher in a “blue revolution”, and began coating all manner of objects with IKB. Many of these trivial objets d’art are assembled in the State Rooms: globes, driftwood, preposterously kitsch reproductions of Michelangelo’s Dying Slave, 13 blue sponges resembling pieces of coral. Amid the relatively muted colours of Blenheim’s interiors, these blue blobs stick out like sore thumbs.
In fairness, there are memorable moments. In the Long Library, Rysbrack’s statue of Queen Anne is flanked by two “relief portraits”, Ikb-coated moulds of Klein’s friends, seen against panels gilded with gold leaf. Here, they become courtiers, or bodyguards from the future, perhaps, to protect the last Stuart monarch.
In the Red Drawing Room, one of Klein’s “Anthropometry” paintings – an energetic, cosmic explosion of blue, created using nude models as “living brushes” – dominates, brilliantly offsetting two large family portraits by Reynolds and Sargent. Yves Klein at Blenheim Palace is, then, a missed opportunity. There were always two of him: the maverick self-publicist who, like Trump, felt fully alive only in the glare of publicity; and the daring artist-pioneer, whose genuinely radical work proved so influential. Sadly, too much emphasis at Blenheim is on the former, which risks trivialising Klein’s art.