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The sixties was a time of major Cultural Revolution for Americans and a time of political turmoil for a few others around the world. The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts’ current exhibition, The 60’s: Global Village, attempts to show us, and helps us understand what made the sixties so important to the development and progression of art history. In order to do that, the show has been divided in four major themes, each having its own section in the exhibition. These themes are as follows: Space, with Yves Klein’s Leap into the Void , Media, Distortion, and Change. Space is what in a way started it all. Satellite communication was now available, reuniting the world together as a “global village”, as suggested Marshall Mcluhan in the Gutenberg Galaxy. Outer space was starting to be explored, which gave a new hope to the world. Creating a sensation of change, of getting a second chance to create a better world. People dreamed of going to the moon for so long and it was now an imminent reality. This caused a boom of imagination and creativity among the population; television sets, radios, home appliances, were all being redesigned, and given a kind of “space look”, this involved a lot of curves, resembling space shuttles and space helmets. Art works from this particular time frame had infinity, emptiness, weightlessness, and strange surfaces, as their main characteristics. This led to the formation of Op Art, which can be characterized by repetition of simple forms and colors to create vibrating effects, an exaggerated sense of depth, foreground-background confusion, and other visual effects. Some of the major artistic peaces to come of this are notably the floating transparent chair, the Reconstruction of Starry Sky (1965) by Fransisco Infante, Leap into the Void (1960) by Yves Klein, the birth of modern science fiction, with movies such as 2001 A Space Odyssey by Stanley Kubrick, and Alphaville by Godard, and the creation of the popular TV series Star Trek in 1966. Yves Klein was born April 28, 1928, in Nice. He became friends with Arman Fernandez and Claude Pascal who influenced him to start painting. During the years 1948 to 1952, he traveled to Italy, Great Britain, Spain, and Japan, and in 1955, settled permanently in Paris, where he was given a solo exhibition at the Club des Solitaires. His monochrome paintings, which are representations of what looks like being the surface of the moon, were shown at the Galerie Colette Allendy, Paris, in 1956.
Approximate Word count = 1642
Approximate Pages = 6.6
(250 words per page double spaced)
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