The University of Tokyo holds a collection of plaster models of three-dimensional functions made in Germany between 1880 and 1890. This collection totalizing over 200 items, acquired and brought back to Japan by Senkichi Nakagawa, a Professor of Mathematics at the Imperial University who was studying in Germany during the Taisho era, is considerably rare even on an international scale. Diverse and varying curves characterize each of these objects. By transferring them to the realm of fashion according to high-level patterning and sewing techniques, we would like to reconsider again the fundamental issue of the human body, its forms and movements, an eternal problem facing every artist.
It is the artist Yves Klein who used the word “Anthropometria” (literally “the measure of the human body”) in the field of the plastic arts. In the 1960s, he produced paintings by applying the IKB (International Klein Blue), an industrial pigment he named himself, to the naked bodies of women, pressing them on a canvas and making them roll over. He entitled these paintings Anthropométrie. In Japan, where the traditional stamping technique of takuhon (stone rubbing) exists, Klein’s title was once translated as jintaku (literally “stamping of the human body”). Among the exhibits presented here, the frames which once contained tattooed skin specimens from the Specimen room of the Faculty of Medicine now enclose slight human shadows on the remaining mounting papers, shadows which are precisely jintaku heralding the advent of the Anthropométrie series.
Klein’s work prefigures happenings in that it is a one-time artistic production, and as such it already has a legendary status in the world of art. Moreover, insofar as it has been a significant attempt at reducing human corporality on the bi-dimensional scale of the canvas, Klein’s work has considerably expanded the realm of possibilities for the artistic endeavors to come.
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