Billy Klüver

Johan Wilhelm Klüver (November 11, 1927 – January 10, 2004) was an American electrical engineer at Bell Telephone Laboratories who founded Experiments in Art and Technology. Klüver lectured extensively on art and technology and social issues to be addressed by the technical community. He published numerous articles on these subjects. Klüver curated (or was curatorial adviser) for fourteen major museum exhibitions in the United States and Europe. He received the prestigious Ordre des Arts et des Lettres award from the French government.

Life Dr. Klüver was born in Monaco, November 13, 1927, and grew up in Sweden. He graduated from the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, in Electrical Engineering. In 1952, at age 25, working for a large electronics company in France, Klüver helped install a television antenna on top of the Eiffel Tower and devised an underwater TV camera for Jacques Cousteau's expeditions.

In 1954 he came to the United States and received a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley in 1957. He served as Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering, at the University of California, Berkeley, 1957–58 and from 1958 to 1968 he was a Member of Technical Staff at Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill. He published numerous technical and scientific papers on, among others, small signal power conservation in electron beams, backward-wave magnetron amplifiers and infra-red lasers. He held 10 patents.

Art and technology practice In the early 1960s, Klüver began to collaborate with artists on works of art incorporating new technology, the first being kinetic art sculptor Jean Tinguely on his Homage to New York (1960), a machine that destroyed itself that was presented in the garden at MOMA. He was introduced to Jean Tinguely by Pontus Hulten, then director of the Moderna Museet in Stockholm.

In 1967 he wrote a key theoretical text in the history of art and technology: Theater and Engineering - an Experiment: Notes by an Engineer.

Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) In 1967 Klüver, Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Whitman, and Fred Waldhauer founded Experiments in Art and Technology, a not-for-profit service organization for artists and engineers. Since 1968 he served as president of E.A.T. on a research project on the evolution of the art community in Montparnasse from 1880 to 1930. In 1989 the book Kiki's Paris was published in the United States, and subsequently appeared in France, Germany, Sweden, Spain, and Japan. Kiki was the pseudonym of Alice Prin.

Klüver and Julie Martin edited and annotated the original English translation of Kiki's Memoirs''', published in 1930, but banned by U.S. Customs from the United States. It was issued by Ecco Press in Fall 1996; and in French by Editions Hazan in 1998.

Klüver's book, A Day with Picasso, published in 1997 in the U.S. (as well as in France, Germany. Brazil), was based on a group of photographs taken at lunch on a sunny afternoon in Montparnasse in 1916 by Jean Cocteau, of Pablo Picasso and Modigliani and friends including André Salmon, Max Jacob and Pâquerette, a model for the designer Paul Poiret. While Klüver in 1978 was researching material on the artists of Montparnasse in the 1910s and 1920s for Kiki’s Paris, he started collecting photographs of the period, noticing some that appeared to have been made together, with people dressed the same in each. He discovered 24 of these photographs and sequenced their events; the interpersonal relations of a small group in Paris vital to the Modernist era.

One that Klüver saw in a 1981 Modigliani exhibition inspired him to try to determine the exact dates and times when the pictures were taken by reading the shadows like a sundial. The images provided further clues; a uniformed man suggested that it was during WW1, the foliage on the trees indicated late spring or summer, and he recognised the awning of the Café de la Rotonde. He could identify Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), Amedeo Modigliani (1884–1920) and Moïse Kisling (1891–1953) and realised there was an exhibition in which all three participated; the Salon d’Antin of July 1916 in which Picasso showed Demoiselles d’Avignon. Thus, around or after the end of July was the most likely period in which these photographs could have been made.

Klüver set out to test whether measurements of the angles and lengths of shadows in the photographs could yield a closer date. He had already identified all the buildings as being on Boulevard du Montparnasse, with most unaltered since 1916. Using maps, making photographs and by physically measuring the buildings, their ledges or window insets, he calculated the sun's positions and plotted the results to get a spread of three weeks, with the most probable date being August 12. In 1983 he confirmed those findings with the Bureau des Longitudes.

Pierre Chanel, author of Album Cocteau (H. Veyrier, 1979) affirmed that the photographs were taken by Cocteau and provided a further six photographs from the series, dating the photographs to 1916 based on Cocteau's preface in a book on Modigliani:

Some of the negatives Kluver discovered had edge-fogging characteristic of the Autographic Kodak Junior manufactured between 1914 and 1927, and sold at a value 100 francs in 1916, and Cocteau's letters mention a Kodak given to him by his mother while he was fighting at the Front. A commercial photo lab had processed all of the films together however, and used a hole-punch numbering system to identify them. That confirmed that Cocteau had shot four rolls of 6 frames each. However, as each negative had been cut from the roll, they could not be used in providing a sequence. Instead, Klüver used use measurements of the shadows to determine the times and sequences of the series.

Chanel provided the identification of the rest of those depicted; Chilean painter Manuel Ortíz de Zárate (1887–1946) the military person who was Dadaist poet Henri-Pierre Roche (1979–1959), and the other woman was Russian painter Marie Wassilieff (1884–1957). Two earlier photographs Cocteau had taken of Erik Satie and Valentine Gross were shot before August 12, but on the same roll as the photographs he took in Montparnasse. Correspondence between Gross and Cocteau narrowed their date to August 10 or 11.

Klüver first published his findings in an article in Art in America. Reviewer Roy R. Behrens described Klüver's reconstruction in A Day With Picasso as "nearly as complete and fascinating as the forensic analysis of a crime scene." The book won Best Critical Study, in the 1998 Golden Light Book Award. The book was later published by Hakusuisha in Japan in 1999, and in Korea and Italy in 2000.

Death Billy Klüver died on January 11, 2004, at the age of 76. He was survived by his wife Julie Martin, a daughter Maja Klüver, and a son Kristian Patrik Klüver.

Publications

Klùver, B. (1986). 'A Day with Picasso'. In Art in America, 1986, 74, 9

Awards and honors

1974 Order of Vasa, bestowed by the King of Sweden 1998 he received an honorary doctorate in Fine Arts from Parsons School of Design of the New School for Social Research 1998 Golden Light Book Award; Best Critical Study, for A Day With Picasso 2002 named Chevalier in the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, by the French Government.