Today is 29 February so this week’s picture is a photographic record of the “Leap into the Void”, enacted by the French painter, sculptor, judo expert and mystic, Yves Klein. Dressed formally in a two-piece suit, the artist hurls himself into space from a ledge below the mansard roof of a house in a street somewhere in a town in France. He has been caught by the camera at what must have been the zenith of his trajectory, although his eyes are fixed on the heavens as if to suggest that he still believes that he really might fly. Oblivious to the act of existential defiance taking place behind him, a cyclist travels calmly away from the scene. He was presumably included in this artful photograph, commissioned by Klein from Harry Shunk, to represent the indifference of the world. He recalls the ploughman in Brueghel’s famous painting of The Fall of Icarus, who does not even look up as Icarus plunges into the waters behind him. The picture also recalls films stills taken on the sets of silent movies, with the leaping Klein coming across as a conceptualist’s Harold Lloyd or Buster Keaton.

Born in 1928, Klein was an early exponent of the idea that a modern artist might also play the part of a charismatic performer, a shaman-cum-showman. He first came to prominence as the creator of a group of entirely monochrome blue canvases. “Yves le Monochrome”, as he came to be known, said that he wanted to create pictures as pure as pieces of fallen sky, and once imagined signing the blue sky itself, as if it were an enormous canvas. “My first and purest painting,” he would say when he was older, pointing upwards, adding that he hated birds because “they keep trying to make holes...

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