Yves Klein

Anthropometries, 1960 Klein staged painting as a public ceremony: nude models covered in his signature blue paint pressed and dragged their bodies across canvases, while an ensemble played his Monotone Symphony and an audience in formal evening wear looked on. He directed rather than touched the surface, which raised a question the rest of this list keeps asking, about who the artist really is when other bodies do the work. Unlike most entries here, it left objects behind as well as photographs: the body prints hang in museums such as the Centre Pompidou. The same year he published Leap into the Void, a photomontage of himself leaping into empty space, with the tarpaulin his friends held to catch him removed from the final image.