The [Young-Girl] Worker as Equipment: Yves Klein's Living Paintbrushes Available to Purchase

Chapter 4 continues the analysis of the way in which aesthetic abstraction continued to be motivated and informed by changes in the labor relation in the mid- to late twentieth century and the accelerated reification of labor through changes in the trope of the nude. French painter Yves Klein declared the nude women working as paid models in his studio to be “living paintbrushes.” Klein explained how he turned subjects (already objectified by gender) into objects saturated in paint to apply pigment to a receptive surface. A half century later, in an interview in 2016, one of the artist’s former models from the 1960s insisted that despite Klein’s language, the women hired to work in the studio and who were applicators of paint did in fact engage in difficult intellectual labor. Klein’s artwork operates as an allegory of acceleration, subsumption and reification in the labor relation.