7 December brings us an embarrassment of riches.
Not only…
64 years ago today, artist Yves Klein sold antiques dealer Jacques Kugel an artwork — which seems like an unremarkable anniversary, but for the fact that the art was invisible, and the buyer was supposed to burn the receipt.
Klein, you see, was selling ‘Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility’ — empty space in exchange for 20 grams of gold. Then, if the buyer agreed to burn the certificate, Klein chucked half the gold in the Seine.
This work followed his famous La spécialisation de la sensibilité à l’état matière première en sensibilité picturale stabilisée, Le Vide (The Specialization of Sensibility in the Raw Material State into Stabilized Pictorial Sensibility, The Void)
This was a room which had been entirely emptied, except for an empty cabinet, and painted completely white, saving himself from creating actual work by instead creating the idea of it in the minds of the viewers — who came in droves.
In the man’s own words:
It opened on his 30th birthday at a gallery whose windows had been painted International Klein Blue, and whose entrance had been specially draped with blue curtains. At least 3,000 people turned up, “requiring 3 wagons of police to control the mob”.
One account of the night says:
A blue drink (a combination of gin, Cointreau, and methylene blue) was served to the 3,500 attendees, who apparently ended up urinating blue the next day (much to the artist’s delight)
A couple of years later, a friend of Klein’s created Le Plein — The Full-Up by filling the same room with so much rubbish that the work could only be seen through the window.
The most famous manifestation of Klein’s obsession with voids is probably still his leap into it…
…but he sold at least seven Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility receipts, most of which were burnt as planned. According to Klein, this “rebalanced the natural order” between buyer and seller. One survived, though, and (well, of course) sold for €850,000 in April 2022.
If all this sounds a bit familiar, the guy who sold it said:
The latter work foreshadows the NFT phenomenon. It’s a revolution
…apparently forgetting that the receipt actually exists.
Still, feel free to download any of the pictures here. I will only charge you £1,000 each for the privilege.
…but also…
Happy 47th birthday to Fellini’s Casanova, a film in which Donald Sutherland was cast even though the director thought he was “a big sperm-full waxwork with the eyes of a masturbator”.
Sutherland knows this, because journalist John Patterson told him in 2005 — which was the first he’d heard of it, 29 years after the film came out. He seemed quite happy about it
Wasn’t that when you first met Fellini?
“Oh, yes,” he says, with another sly smile of pleasure and mischief.
I have a great quote from him about you, I say. This is Fellini defending his choice of you to play Casanova to one of his partners: “No, I need him. He’s a sperm-filled waxwork with the eyes of a masturbator!”
My tape recorder records an explosion of laughter from Sutherland that lasts a gratifyingly long time. “Oh God, oh God! You have to send me that, full quote and source. Let me give you my email!” He hasn’t heard it before, and is off to Venice soon for a screening of the restored version of Casanova, so this is priceless.
Whether he’d be quite so pleased to know that (according to Hollywood Reborn: Movie Stars of the 1970s) critics described his appearance in the film as
a sort of spectral anamorph of male genitals
lumpy eared, lazy-eyed, not-so-handsome
and
a bald, glabrous, waxen beanpole
I don’t know.
The original Fellini quote is from Conversations with Fellini, and is less enthusiastic than Patterson remembers it — making clear that Sutherland wasn’t the director’s first choice.
This is Gian Maria Volonté:
…and you can see what Fellini means — but he needed American money to make the picture. Producer Alberto Grimaldi suggested Brando, Pacino, and Redford, but Fellini had a different vision for the character.
He had, apparently, read Casanova’s memoirs only after signing the contract to direct, and, according to the New York Times in 1977,
was smitten by a feeling of dizziness and the mortifying impression that I had made a wrong move.
In Federico Fellini: Ringmaster of Dreams, Chris Wiegand says Sutherland
thoroughly researched the role. Fellini told him to forget everything.
Any vision Sutherland might have had was quickly forgotten. He
was told where and how to move, how to turn his head, what to do with his hands…
Full disclosure: I still haven’t seen the bloody thing myself — I just love the quote. Anyway, it’s worth reading the whole Grauniad interview with Sutherland, because he’s very entertaining, and at the end he emails Patterson about that scene in Don’t Look Now:
