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Men Getting Women Naked and Yves Klein — Female Nudity in Art

Yves Klein's Anthropometry performance art, 1960

The resultant print of an Yves Klein Anthropometry

by Christopher Agostino

The post I wrote about possible origins of bodypainting in prehistoric times drew a comment that “man started bodypainting to get women naked” — I might have trashed it as flippant sexism until I saw it was from an accomplished painter with the right to say whatever he wants, Brian Wolfe. Another friend chimed in with the observation that way, way back then nakedness was probably the norm. Not today. The nakedness of the people we paint remains an issue for bodypainters, especially here in the U.S.—but I am not writing about that today (see the post:  is a painted body naked?  https://thestorybehindthefaces.com/2011/04/15/is-a-painted-body-naked/   )

"Yves Klein Blue" (or "International Klein Blue" as he called it)

I did think of Brian’s comment in a different context: Yves Klein and his “Anthropometries”. Yves Klein is one of my heroes, one of the radical conceptual artists that could make art with their minds as well as their hands. There was the brilliance of Marcel Duchamp who reimagined the answer to “what is art?”, and then there was the playfulness of Ives Klein who invented his own color—what a concept that is, to invent your own color. I’ve had Yves Klein on the brain as I have been writing and thinking about the question “why body painting?”, because his Anthropometries are the first thing I think of when I think of “bodypainting as art”.

Anthropometry performance 1960

The linkage to Brian’s comment came from a review I’d read about a recent Klein retrospective at the Hirshhorn Musuem (http://calitreview.com/9415) that opined that we (the viewer) have to confront the question of sexism in the Anthropometry performances. That there is something troubling about a formally dressed male creating art in public with completely naked women. I will add that they are being observed by a fashionably dressed audience of men and women and accompanied by a group of classical musicians, also formal in appearance. The only people naked in the room are the women serving as the objects of art. This is not a “happening” with everyone getting naked and painted. This is a lot of people with clothes on looking at naked women in an art gallery.

He took the naked women off the wall, out of the frame, right into the middle of the gallery. It is disturbing, and disturbing your audience is a vehicle for getting them to pay attention and engage with the art. Confronted by naked women being used as paint brushes, the spectators have to deal with the central role of the human body in art—especially the naked female form in fine art. And, from my perspective, that makes this the primary example of bodypainting as fine art because it so completely centers on the body in the creative process—there is no art here without the body as it is the naked body itself that makes this a process of art as the models cover themselves in his YKB paint and press themselves against the canvas, and it is the naked body that forms the resultant object of art in the prints that remain as the final product. The video from the Hirshhorn Museum (below) relays how Klein felt his hands were no longer enough to create art. He needed “living brushes”, the models themselves, to create an art form “designed to prevent that aesthetic objectivation which would give prevalence to the two-dimensional composition and make us overlook its bodily origins”—as analyzed by Michel Thévoz in The Painted Body. The text by Pierre Restany for the invitation card to Klein’s Anthropometry performance of 1960 makes the direct linkage between this act and those ancient origins of bodyart I write about: “The blue gesture released by Yves Klein runs back through forty thousand years of modern art to link up with the anonymous markings, the both sufficient and necessary markings in that dawn of our world, which at Lascaux and Altamira signified man’s awakening to self-consciousness and the world.” (See? I don’t just make all this stuff up.)

An "Anthropometry/Shroud"

To achieve that end, Klein not only needed to use the model as the brush, he needed the model to be naked. Nudity continues to have a radical role in art. Years ago I saw a modern dance performance in which the dancer was on stage alone completely naked. I believe the piece was called “Primate”, and she moved in an animal manner, comfortable in her nakedness, allowing the audience to consider what was so shameful about being naked? A recent exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art included live naked people and directly addressed the taboo of nakedness in public. One part of the exhibit had two naked people standing in a doorway so that the museum visitor had to brush past them in order to get through the door, confronting their own feeling of discomfort being so close to a naked stranger. (I didn’t see this exhibit so this description is based on a critics’ radio interview about it. The exhibit:    Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present March 14–May 31, 2010   http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/exhibitions/965  )

At the origins of bodyart, the nakedness of the person being painted was probably not an issue. We have a different relationship with our bodies now and bodypainting functions in a very different context. In his analysis of the bodyart of the Southeast Nuba, James Farris states that the most significant element of the bodyart is the medium it is produced on, the human body—but that’s in reference to a culture in which nudity and very minimal clothing is commonplace. To risk misappropriating Marshall McLuhan‘s work (which, according to Woody Allen, is easy to do) by linking him to this idea of Farris, if the “medium is the message” than what is the contextual message embedded in the medium of a naked body in public in our current, body-conscious, sexually excitable but morally prudish, American society?

Brian and Nick Wolfe painting their championship winning design at the World Body Painting Festival 2009

Regarding the question of sexism in Yves Kein’s Anthropometries, we are back to Brian’s comment about male artists getting women to take their clothes off. Looking at the male dominated history of fine art it is hard to argue with. As I thought about this, though, it occurred to me that if you took a survey of all the naked bodies in paintings and sculptures at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (most of which would have been created by male artists) the percentage of naked men vs. women depicted would be considerably higher than the relative proportion of male to female models at your average bodypainting competition or convention, and that’s an environment that will have as many female artists as males, so in the modern bodypainting world perhaps Brian’s comment needs to be expanded to say that everyone likes to get women to take their clothes off.

about Anthropometry, from the Hirschhorn Museum show:

a video of the live performance, in color, but with cheesy music rather than his original Yves Klein Monotone Symphony:

An excerpt from:  Art Review: Yves Klein: With the Void, Full Powers at the Hirshhorn, Washington, DC  By Alix Mckenna, June 3rd, 2010 at 10:00 am

In one of Klein’s, racier projects, the Anthropometry series, the artist dressed to the nines and directed naked ladies while they painted themselves in IKB paint and impressed their bodies onto the canvas. Musicians played in the background and an audience of art lovers watched the spectacle. The impression of these bodies represented the energy and temporal nature of the human form. While Klein spoke about his Anthropometry pieces in cosmic and asexual terms, the edginess of the project cannot be denied and is one of its greatest strengths. The mysterious, headless impressions reduce women to their most elemental signifying components. Against a white canvas, we see cosmic blue breasts and thighs and stomachs. They are as primitive and as powerful as the Venus of Willendorf. http://calitreview.com/9415

All the Yves Klein photos are from: Yves Klein Archives

An Yves Klein Anthropometry, 1960

An Yves Klein Anthropometry/Shroud

An Yves Klein "Firepainting" which used models as stamps and stencils in combination with fire

Yves Klein using the model as stencil for a firepainting

Yves Klein firepainting process

At the bottom is a a remarkable video with a great deal of Yves Klein footage in combination with works of his art:

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Learn more at my Body Painting Page https://thestorybehindthefaces.com/body-painting/

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Why Body Painting?—2: Ultimate Collaboration—MODELS, Pt.2: Just how much a model can help, Amber and Kuniyoshi at FABAIC 2011

"Angry Ocean / Waterfall Tears"

by Christopher Agostino

In bodypainting, you kinda know what you paint, what you achieve, as you paint it, but you don’t know how it will survive, what it will be in the end. I have worked to learn to value the process first and understand that, for me, it is the process of painting that is my art. The photograph that results is not my art—it is a new thing, an amalgam of my art, the model’s art and the photographer’s art.

Here’s something else I find about painting people rather than canvas: when I look at my work—the final result, the photograph that makes the ephemeral act permanent—in addition to any self-critique I may make, or understanding of intent or technique, there is also always the memory of the interaction with the model, the story behind the painting. In the case of this particular painting I did with Amber LaValle Morrisey at FABAIC 2011, the story is about just how much I owe this model and a very clear answer to the question “why body painting?”
I believe that Amber is more responsible for this painting than I am. She very consciously worked to bring me to that edge of my abilities in a situation where I would not have gone there on my own. I hardly know Amber. I wish I could say we were friends but I’ve only met her, and painted her, the one time, and so I am stepping out of bounds to be describing her intentions like this, but I am aware of the results and self-aware enough to know how much I relied on her help as I painted. This is not something you could ever say about painting a canvas, that it helped—it is absolutely an example of how bodypainting is a shared act of creation by artist and model.
I painted this on Amber on Saturday night at FABAIC (Face and Body Art International Convention http://www.fabaic.com/). Although I like to paint in public as a performance art, painting at a convention is not the same thing and I will own up to the fact that my ego gets in the way there and I feel like I’m in competition with the other artists, rather than working just to my own goals. There is a fear of failure in front of my peers. Friday night I had failed. I failed to paint anyone, as the model who had asked me to paint her backed out at the last minute, too late for me to find a replacement (see how much we depend on our models?) I also failed my sponsor, as I spent Friday night sitting embarrassed on my little stage at the Kryolan booth rather than painting www.kryolan.com. Very unprofessional, and very pissed off.
So by Saturday night I felt that I did have something to prove. The pissed off part of me wanted to show off, but I also had a need to prove something to myself, that it was the art that mattered and not the praise, not the public response. That’s why I decided to take a shot at this Kuniyoshi design, the serious kind of design I’d usually save for painting at home where I have more control over the circumstances and the final photography. So that’s all on me, the decision to try something difficult for the sake of the challenge, with the awareness that I would have a beautiful woman as a model—on Friday, when I was sitting there stewing, Marcela (trying to make me feel better, I imagine) introduced me to Amber and arranged for her to model Saturday night.
Here, as I understand it, is what Amber brought to the table: she made it her business to put me in the position to succeed. Starting off by being very easy to talk to, opening up about herself and drawing me out, getting me to talk about what I was trying to do with this painting and how frustrated I was about Friday, engaging me so that I was much less concerned about where we were doing this and more fully focused on the painting process between us. And (again, stepping over the line to describe her intentions) I think that Amber is a very savvy person and worked this interaction to encourage me and get me feeling confident, confident enough to take chances. You don’t get that from a blank canvas. She also fully acquiesced to the idea that it would be a long, difficult painting process and might not come off at the end, that there were some parts of the design I was uncertain of, that we could be wasting our time—but she made a point of talking throughout like success was certain. More than that, Amber made me aware that she was fully committed to this painting being a successful work of art, and I therefore felt compelled to get past any baggage I had brought into the process to join her in that effort. So, in this case, I felt that the model led the process, not the painter.
In addition to her being a very professional model, she and her husband Bill are both photographers, so they (and my wife Lorraine) were able to help me work out some of the design questions. At one point we all conferred about how to treat the line of the waterfall at her eyes, just where it should be positioned for maximum effect and I was greatly appreciative of having that supportive collaboration.
One other thing Amber did bears mentioning, because it was unusual, and (I think) very deliberate. She started drawing attention to the painting as I was working, praising it to passersby, telling people they had to stop and look at it, pointing out details—forcing me to confront and get over that ego demon that inhibits me at conventions, giving me permission to show off while embarrassing me enough to keep me in my place.
There is a point in a bodypainting in which I have to release my art—let the model take ownership, let the photographer see it through their vision—and wait for it to return all grown up. In the best case, just like in raising children, the result exceeds the parent.
By the time we finished this painting it was 2:00 am, the convention floor was shutting down and we were rushed through the convention photography studio. Bill tried to get a shot there, but the lighting was too harsh. So Amber and Bill went off to shoot it at their own studio, and I went to bed not knowing what it would survive as, what the final result would be—only knowing how I felt about the process, the collaboration, and how much I enjoyed the challenge of the painting.
What a bonus to work with a model who has her own photography studio. After the convention, when I saw this photograph that Bill had achieved, I was overjoyed. It was much more than a record of the painting. Amber’s pose, the curl of her hand. The way they had cropped it. The colors. And if we are looking to answer the question “why body painting?” we need to look no further than her eyes.
I know that part of the reason I paint people is that I am not good enough to achieve something like this on my own. I can’t make a painting on a canvas with the poignancy of this photograph. I need the model’s help, I need her humanity. The answer to “why body painting?” is right here in Amber’s eyes.
Please check out Bill and Amber’s work at http://www.lmstudios.us/
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About the painting: I had seen an exhibit of work by the Japanese printmaker Kuniyoshi at the Japan Society and was working on a design using several of his images when the Tsunami struck Japan, changing the direction of the piece.  At the top, Hatsuhana stays under a sacred waterfall for 100 days to purify herself so that the Buddha will heal her sick husband—and this was the initiating image for my design concept. Kuniyoshi is considered one of the major masters of Japanese wood block prints, both in his illustration technique and in his subtle manipulation of colors and shading in the printing process to create effects such as the transparency of the water as it falls over Hatsuhana. The figure at the bottom of her torso is the Emperor Sutoku who turned into a demon and ravaged the land in revenge for being disrespected by his successor. The image on her back (below) is from a remarkable triptych print “Miyamoto Musashi kills great whale”.

Kuniyoshi c.1842

Kuniyoshi c.1842

Kuniyoshi - Miyamoto Musashi kills great whale -1847

Learn more at my Body Painting Page https://thestorybehindthefaces.com/body-painting/
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Why Body Painting? — 2: Ultimate Collaboration — MODELS, Pt.1 What I have learned from models.

   by Christopher Agostino

For all of my artistic life I have depended on the willing participation of another person. Even the simple act of painting a face requires the acquiesce of the person with the face to be painted. So much more so the body model. I think about this relationship between bodypainter and model a lot, and it is at the essence of the question “why body painting?”

I can’t take a canvas off a shelf and just start bodypainting, and I can’t buy a model at Michael’s. A body model is not an object, not a commodity. They talk, move, think and feel while you are painting them. What would it be like painting a canvas that talked to you? Or that had an opinion of the painting as you were doing it?

We entrust our art to the model, as they trust us when they let us paint them. There is an exchange of intimacy in the collaboration between artist and model: the obvious physical intimacy of the model letting an artist paint their body in exchange for the artist giving them entrance into his vision and the act of creation.

In describing my experience collaborating with models, I can’t speak for all bodypainters, and probably not for most professional bodypainters. I don’t paint in competitions, and don’t take a lot of commercial work. If the painting is for a performance or someone else’s project the process is specific and my role is to support the vision of the director and function like a makeup artist or costumer to make the performer feel confident and look good. Sometimes in teaching settings or painting at the Kryolan booth at a convention the goal is specific and limited, and I may approach that body painting as a sketch or exploration, or repeat something I’d done before because I know it works. In those cases I’m hoping for a model that is professional, comfortable being painted and pleasant to talk to and spend some time with as we work.

It is when I have a strong vision for a realized fine art design I am trying to achieve—whether painting in studio with the goal of generating that one key photograph or painting in public as performance art—that I have come to understand how deep my collaboration with the model is, that I am as dependent on the model as they are on me for success. I need more than the acquiescence of the model, I need their support, their encouragement, to allow me to take chances. I especially need them to let me be vulnerable and to risk failure. It’s not something you have to ask of a canvas off the shelf, and it’s an understanding I’ve only come to learn about my process through the years, and through the failures, as I have tried to find my way forward in this art.

I don’t think this is true of more experienced, professional bodypainters, but I’m not sure.

Behind the question I’ve been addressing in this series of posts, “why body painting?”, is the larger question, “why art?”, and the specific question of why did I choose to be an artist? As a generalization, I think artists are compelled to create art—I couldn’t say why or how, maybe in response to having an awareness of life that seems to them different than the norm, and so the desire to change the norm or at least express their difference. Beyond that original  impetus, I can say for myself that a large part of what keeps me creating art is the excitement of the fight, the struggle to succeed, to “win”. In much the same way I imagine an athlete must feel, setting out to create a painting feels to me like a competition, albeit an internal one between me and the limitations of my abilities to bring that idiosyncratic vision I identify as myself into the world as a physical, undeniable reality, an “object of art”.

Artists strive for the edge, both in the sense of a place they’ve never been and in the sense of a place they are unsure of, walking the razor’s edge, unsure of their footing. I’ve felt that edge most keenly in performance before an audience, especially on stage alone trying new material, unsure of how to perform it and knowing that success or failure is in my hands—and audiences let you know if you fail. I’ve also felt it late at night all alone in my workshop making a sculpture out of a piece of clay, or painting a canvas—though it’s so much harder to assess success or failure in that setting and I’m sure I’m not the only visual artist who sees the things they’ve created over the years and remains uncertain of which category they fall into.

But, speaking strictly from my own experience, there is something about body painting that feels different. Added to the usual angst of creating art is the awareness of its immediacy and ephemeral nature—you get it right or you don’t, like a performance—but it’s also there before you as a physical object. That “object” is a person, a person whose participation I appreciate and whose feelings I care about, and I want to succeed for them as well as for me. They are becoming the art I am making and I feel responsible for that in a way I’d never feel for a lump of clay, and maybe that connection to the human I am working with helps me reach deeper. The model is also invested, showing me confidence by giving me permission to paint them, plus the time and physical sacrifice involved (unless you have been bodypainted or done a bunch of bodypainting I don’t think you can understand quite what a body model is agreeing to when they let you paint them—we artists ask a lot, they work hard). Often the models I paint also help with the design and the process, making suggestions, showing me movement ideas, helping with decisions, in addition to the beauty of who they are that they bring to the painting in a  way beyond any other canvas can. When it’s really working, the model is right there at the edge with me. In a stage performance, you work to energize and engage the audience so that you can soar on their wings to new heights. When bodypainting, it is more of a direct collaboration, if we are to fly we fly together.

And then, there is that magic thing that happens when I finish the painting and now the model takes it, owns it, brings it to life—takes it away from me and makes it more than I had conceived of. This is the pivotal difference between painting a person and painting a canvas. Not only does the art come to life, but as soon as I am done it is no longer mine, it has a life of its own now—how different that feels than seeing a canvas I’ve painted hanging on a wall.

The ultimate lesson I have learned from models is about my own limitations. I don’t believe I can transcend a model’s limitations, whereas I know they can transcend mine. I’ve seen it happen, I’ve seen a model take the limited work of my art and make it into something more. That alone would be answer enough to “why body painting?”

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Painting Becca at FABAIC 2007

I’ve had quite a number of very positive collaborations with models, here are just a few practical examples of how models have helped me, helped my art.

The first time I painted someone as a recognizable, famous painting, the Picasso “Seated Woman, 1937” image in the previous post, it was because Becca told me to paint something on her I’d always wanted to try but never had the chance, and that I could take as long as needed to work it out as we went. I had a few months earlier painted some kids with Picasso faces, for a museum exhibit of his work, and with her encouragement tried it as a bodypainting. (Recently she flew to New York to let me paint her for a project with no pay, and made me feel like I was doing her the favor.)

Just as I was starting to experiment with modern art imagery, I did several paintings with Emma, who is an art historian as well as a dancer, and it was an education for me as we talked about the concepts behind the imagery. I appreciated how, given her background, she saw that what I was working to achieve was valid as fine art.

You can’t be a bodypainter without a body model. And yet, it feels like we aren’t that kind to them, asking them to stand there, forever, not moving, without any clothes on, and after all that, that’s when we want them to work even harder, bringing the art we just painted to life. I’d spent hours painting Christina at the Kryolan booth at FABAIC 2009. When we were done, it was late. Still, she went on to pose for hours. First for spectators, than for one photographer, and finally for the convention photographer, Lisa Konz. By that point it was maybe 2:00 am and Christina wouldn’t quit until she got the photo right, the photo at the top of the post of her leaping that became my Painted Bodies Living Art logo. Once the body is painted, we depend upon the model to present it at its best, even better than we conceived of it—and also on the photographer to capture it and preserve it. The result is a collective, collaborative art work.

Thank you to all of the models who have joined me in this adventure over the years.

Emma, as Cubist Tiger Pop

Christina also worked hard to get this wonderful action shot, photographed by Lisa Konz

Learn more at my Body Painting Page https://thestorybehindthefaces.com/body-painting/