Klein was deeply affected by Hiroshima. He paid homage to the ghostly presences of its atomic silhouettes in a piece he called Hiroshima. This was one of a series of ‘anthropometries’, made by spraying blue pigment around live models posed on a large sheet of white paper, who, when they removed themselves, left behind a shadowy, retrospective choreography of body-shaped spaces. At the back of Klein’s mind were apparitions of the Virgin Mary; the miraculously preserved bodies of saints, particularly that of St Rita of Cascia; the ‘mummies’ of Pompeii; and the faint impressions left by a person on a judo mat.
As you know, Nina, blue is a favourite colour of mine. You remember that first day I showed you around the Municipal Gallery, when we looked at Gerard Dillon’s Yellow Bungalow. Then, by way of contrast, I showed you, as my father had first shown me, the Gallery’s most prized exhibit, J.M.W. Turner’s Dawn of Christianity, subtitled Flight into Egypt. I had always loved the blue of the sky in this painting, which is inspired by the Gospel story according to St Matthew: ‘And when they were departed, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared in sleep to Joseph, saying, Arise, and take the child and his mother, and fly into Egypt, and be there until I shall tell thee. For it will come to pass that Herod will seek the child to destroy him’ — a text my father would habitually quote to me each time we saw the painting, as I did to you, for it was ingrained in my memory. And I told you that my father would explain to me that Herod was an agent of the Roman Empire, comparing its jurisdiction in the Holy Land to that of the British in Ireland. I saved you the gory details of my father’s account of the Massacre of Innocents that followed, but when I mentioned that the Catholic Church considered the Innocents to be martyrs, you asked if one could be a martyr without full knowledge and complete consent. You’d make a good Jesuit, I said, you know they were trained to be devil’s advocates, to see both sides of an argument. Yes, you said, I know, it’s useful to imagine what it must be like to be somebody else, to see things from another’s point of view. And we gazed into Turner’s opalescent blue sky, below which the fugitive Holy Family were almost indecipherable details in a dream landscape. My father would say that blue signifies a detachment from the things of this world, I said, an inclination of the liberated soul towards God. In other words, it was the colour of flight.
Years afterwards, I discovered that these were precisely the attributes that Yves Klein ascribed to his trademark blue. He had always been fascinated by the concept of flight. Today, said Klein, the painter of space must actually go into space, but without aeroplane, parachute, or rocket. He must be capable of levitating. From his judo experience, Klein believed that levitation — he liked to think of it as a form of ascension, a victory over death — was indeed possible, through a regime of breathing exercises designed to free the body — physically, mentally, and spiritually — from the constraints of weight. In October 1960 the French journal Dimanche carried a photograph of Klein which became known as The Leap into the Void. It shows Klein, dressed in a business suit, soaring into space just off the ledge of a mansard roof, his torso and head turned towards the sky and his arms extended outwards in a convincing simulacrum of flight. The setting is a nondescript Parisian street, empty except for a man on a bicycle who has just passed by, his back to the viewer, oblivious to the marvellous event. When I first saw a reproduction of this photograph I was struck by the quotidian beauty of the scene, the crooked kerbstones, the empty bus-shelter, the tarred roadway patched and laddered with repair-work, light glinting off the leafy trees and the iron railings of a garden. How wonderfully the cyclist defies gravity, how intricate are the folds and puckers of his overcoat, caught in mid-flap behind him! Klein’s Leap into the Void might have been a camera trick; but the street is miraculously real.
I write this in blue ink, the colour of liberation, the colour of France. You remember that week in Paris, Nina, you told me about Lee Miller. We were in Cimetière du Montparnasse, where Samuel Beckett is buried, except he was alive then, and we walked the avenues between the tombs and sepulchres and monuments as they glittered in the immaculate Paris light. We stood at the grave of Baudelaire as you recited his poem ‘Parfum Exotique’ — l’odeur de ton sein chaleureux, the odour of your warm breast — and we stood silently a while by the grave of Jean-Paul Sartre, who would be joined in four years’ time by Simone de Beauvoir; and then we went to Man Ray’s grave, Man Ray who was once a lover of Lee Miller. A string of coincidences, if you like, you said. Imagine, 1927, New York, Lee Miller’s about to step in front of a car, and of all people, of all the millions of people in New York, she’s saved by Condé Nast, who owns Vogue magazine. A few weeks later she appears on the front cover of Vogue, full face, with the lights of New York behind her, lovely Art Deco cover, she’s wearing a blue cloche hat, and she’s got this look, uninhibited yet relaxed, a look of worldly sophistication. Someone who knows who she is, yet the viewer can project her own fantasies on to her. Edward Steichen, the great photographer, takes a real shine to her, that’s when she starts to get interested in photography, she watches how it’s done, how an image is created. Then Condé Nast pulls some strings for her, gets her a research assignment in Paris with French Vogue, she’s to go and look at Renaissance paintings, make detailed drawings of costume adornments, buckles, buttons and bows, haberdashery, as it were, and Steichen gives her an introduction to Man Ray. Man Ray, he was born Emmanuel Radnitzky, decides at the age of fifteen he’s going to be Man Ray, anyway, Paris in the 1920s, he’s at the forefront of the whole Surrealist enterprise, there’s Paul Éluard and André Breton, there’s Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy, Magritte, Picasso, and there’s Man Ray — what must it have been like?
Lee Miller goes and looks at the buckles and bows, and decides that drawing them is a bit silly, why not photograph them instead? All she has is a folding Kodak, she has to take close-ups in bad light with low-speed film, but she learns how to do it. She knows now she wants to be a photographer. She goes to see Man Ray, calls at his apartment, but the concierge tells her he’s just left for Biarritz. She goes to a nearby café, Le Bateau Ivre, she’s sitting there all disappointed sipping a Pernod, when who walks in but Man Ray. She tells him she’s his new student, he says he doesn’t take students, and anyway he’s leaving Paris to go on holiday, and she says, I know, I’m going with you, and she does, and they end up living together for three years. Ends up driving him near crazy. But at the beginning, she’s going with Man Ray, she’s the talk of Paris, there’s images of her all over the place, a glass manufacturer designs a champagne glass modelled on her breast, as photographed by Man Ray. She gets her own apartment, look, over there, and you pointed to a high mansard roof in a street that overlooked the cemetery, 12 rue Victor Considérant, you said, she sets up a studio, gets to photograph high society, the Duchess of Alba, Duke Vallambrosa, the Maharanee of Cooch-Bihar, whoever, it’s like something out of Proust. And one thing leads to another.