Product Code Database
Yves Klein (; 28 April 1928 – 6 June 1962) was a French artist and an important figure in post-war European art. He was a leading member of the French artistic movement of Nouveau réalisme founded in 1960 by art critic Pierre Restany. Klein was a pioneer in the development of performance art, and is seen as an inspiration to and as a forerunner of Minimalism, as well as pop art. He developed and used International Klein Blue.
From 1942 to 1946, Klein studied at the École Nationale de la Marine Marchande and the École Nationale des Langues Orientales. At this time, he became friends with Arman (Armand Fernandez) and Claude Pascal and started to paint. At the age of nineteen, Klein and his friends lay on a beach in the south of France, and divided the world between themselves; Arman chose the earth, Pascal, words, while Klein chose the ethereal space surrounding the planet, which he then proceeded to sign:
In early 1948, Klein was exposed to Max Heindel's 1909 text The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception and pursued a membership with an American society dedicated to Rosicrucianism.Thomas McEvilley. "Yves Klein: Conquistador of the Void". Yves Klein: A Retrospective. (Houston: Institute for the Arts, Rice University, 1982), p 25.
The Symphony is rarely performed. Composer and performer Roland Dahinden said that "You can’t really do a full rehearsal of something like this" because "It’s too hard. Everyone would just die." The first performance was in a Paris art gallery in 1960, with only ten performing musicians. Singer Sahra Motalebi described it as "The reality is that it’s like a kind of bizarre primordial universe chorus. It’s not like a note you’ve ever heard." Klein himself compared the sound of his symphony to screams. For the first performance in Paris, Klein invited three naked women, whom he called "living brushes", who "covered themselves in his signature deep blue paint and pressed their bodies on paper during the sound half of the symphony, freezing during the silence".
The next exhibition, 'Proposte Monocrome, Epoca Blu' (Proposition Monochrome; Blue Epoch) at the Gallery Apollinaire, Milan, (January 1957), featured 11 identical blue canvases, using ultramarine pigment suspended in a synthetic resin 'Rhodopas', described by Klein as "The Medium". Discovered with the help of Edouard Adam, a Parisian paint dealer, "Portrait d'Edouard Adam, marchand de couleurs et ami des peintres...Le film (envoyé par le neveu, Fabien)" (Portrait of Edouard Adam, merchant of colours and friend of painters...a film by his nephew.) the optical effect retained the brilliance of the pigment which, when suspended in linseed oil, tended to become dull. Klein later deposited a Soleau envelope for this recipe to maintain the "authenticity of the pure idea."Quoted in Hannah Weitemeier, Yves Klein, 1928–1962: International Klein Blue, Original-Ausgabe (Cologne: Taschen, 1994), 19. . This colour, reminiscent of the lapis lazuli used to paint the Madonna's robes in medieval paintings, was to become known as International Klein Blue (IKB). The paintings were attached to poles placed away from the walls to increase their spatial ambiguities. All 11 of the canvases were priced differently. The buyers would go through the gallery, observing each canvas and purchase the one that was deemed best in their own eyes specifically. Klein's idea was that each buyer would see something unique in the canvas that they bought that other buyers may not have seen. So while each painting visually looked the same, the impact each had on the buyer was completely unique.
The show was a critical and commercial success, traveling to Paris, Düsseldorf and London. The Parisian exhibition, at the Iris Clert Gallery in May 1957, became a seminal happening. To mark the opening, 1,001 blue balloons were released and blue postcards were sent out using IKB stamps that Klein had bribed the postal service to accept as legitimate. Concurrently, an exhibition of tubs of blue pigment and fire paintings was held at Galerie Collette Allendy. "Galerie Collette Allendy" IMEC Archives
The art historian Olivier Berggruen situates Klein "as one who strove for total liberation," forming connections between perverse ritual and a disdain of convention. Klein had studied judo in Japan between 1952 and 1954, and also displayed an interest in Zen Buddhism.Olivier Berggruen, "Yves Klein – The Void" in The Writing of Art (London: Pushkin Press, 2012), 80. According to Berggruen, he used ritual as a means not to attain belief, but rather as a forum through which to reach abstraction—transcending worldly vestiges temporarily, and returning to earth as a new being.
Later in the year, he was invited to decorate the Gelsenkirchen Opera House, Germany, with a series of vast blue murals, the largest of which were 20 metres by 7 metres. The Opera House was inaugurated in December 1959. Klein celebrated the commission by travelling to Cascia, Italy, to place an ex-voto offering at the Saint Rita Monastery. "May all that emerges from me be beautiful," he prayed."True Blue" (28 June 2010 ) The New Yorker, p.72 The offering took the form of a small transparent plastic box containing three compartments; one filled with IKB pigment, one filled with pink pigment, and one with gold leaf inside. The container was only rediscovered in 1980.
Klein's last two exhibitions at Iris Clert's were Vitesse Pure et Stabilité Monochrome ( Sheer Speed and Monochrome Stability), November 1958, a collaboration with Jean Tinguely, of kinetic sculptures, and Bas-Reliefs dans une Forêt d'Éponges ( in a Sponge Forest), June 1959, a collection of sponges that Klein had used to paint IKB canvases, mounted on steel rods and set in rocks that he'd found in his parents' garden.
Klein and Arman were continually involved with each other creatively, both as Nouveaux Réalistes and as friends. Both from Nice, the two worked together for many years and Arman even named his son, Yves Arman, after Yves Klein, who was his godfather.
Sometimes the creation of these paintings was turned into a kind of performance art—an event in 1960, for example, had an audience dressed in formal evening wear watching the models go about their task while an instrumental ensemble played Klein's 1949 The Monotone Symphony..
In the performance piece, Zone de Sensibilité Picturale Immatérielle ( Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility) 1959–1962, he offered empty spaces in the city in exchange for gold. He wanted his buyers to experience The Void by selling them empty space. In his view this experience could only be paid for in the purest material: gold. In exchange, he gave a certificate of ownership to the buyer. As the second part of the piece, performed on the Seine with an art critic in attendance, if the buyer agreed to set fire to the certificate, Klein would throw half the gold into the river, in order to restore the "natural order" that he had unbalanced by selling the empty space (that was now not "empty" anymore). He used the other half of the gold to create a series of Gold leaf works, which, along with a series of pink monochromes, began to augment his blue monochromes toward the end of his life.
Klein's work revolved around a Zen-influenced concept he came to describe as "le Vide" (the Void). Klein's Void is a nirvana-like state that is void of worldly influences; a neutral zone where one is inspired to pay attention to one's own sensibilities, and to "reality" as opposed to "representation". Klein presented his work in forms that were recognized as art—paintings, a book, a musical composition—but then would take away the expected content of that form (paintings without pictures, a book without words, a musical composition without in fact composition) leaving only a shell, as it were. In this way he tried to create for the audience his "Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility". Instead of representing objects in a subjective, artistic way, Klein wanted his subjects to be represented by their imprint: the image of their absence. He tried to make his audience experience a state where an idea could simultaneously be "felt" as well as "understood".
In Blue Obelisk, a project that he had failed to realise in 1958, but that finally happened in 1983, he appropriated the Place de la Concorde by shining blue spotlights onto the central obelisk.
A large retrospective was held at Krefeld, Germany, January 1961, followed by an unsuccessful opening at Leo Castelli, New York, in which Klein failed to sell a single painting. He stayed with Rotraut at the Hotel Chelsea for the duration of the exhibition; and, while there, he wrote the "Chelsea Hotel Manifesto", a proclamation of the "multiplicity of new possibilities." In part, the manifesto declared:
He moved on to exhibit at the Dwan Gallery, Los Angeles, and traveled extensively in the Western U.S., visiting Death Valley in the Mojave Desert. In 1962, Klein married Rotraut Uecker who gave birth to their son shortly after his death.
A sort of parody of Klein's Anthropometry performance is featured in the 1961 film Wise Guys (original title: Les Godelureaux) directed by Claude Chabrol.
The Yves Klein archive is housed in Phoenix, Arizona, where his widow Rotraut Klein-Moquay has a home."Painting the Blues; As a major new exhibition highlights the brief, colourful career of artist Yves Klein, his widow Rotraut talks exclusively to Laurence Marks" (29 January 1995) The Guardian p. 2
On 8 December 2017, Welsh alternative rock band Manic Street Preachers released the lead single from their thirteenth studio album Resistance is Futile, International Blue. The song was inspired by Klein, particularly the titular International Klein Blue. The Manics' bassist and lyricist Nicky Wire told the Quietus ""There was a joy to 'International Blue' that we weren't sure we could convey any more, the feeling of being in love with something like Yves Klein, to pass on the joy of that colour and that vividness – we weren't sure if we still had it in us. It sounds quite young."
In 2017, the MoMA- and WNYC-produced contemporary art podcast A Piece of Work hosted by Abbi Jacobson had an episode focused on Klein's blue monochromes. In 2018, the podcast This is Love released an episode, "Blue," about Klein and his work.
A 2021 short novel, Blue Postcards by Douglas Bruton, is built around the life and art of Yves Klein.
In 2013, Klein's Sculpture Éponge Bleue Sans Titre, SE 168, a 1959 sculpture made with natural sea sponges drenched in blue pigment, fetched $22 million, the highest price paid for a sculpture by the artist, at Sotheby's New York.Katya Kazakina and Philip Boroff (15 May 2013), "Barnett Newman Leads Sotheby's NYC $294 Million Auction", Bloomberg.
|
|
