Yves Klein

Nice, and two painters for parents

Yves Klein was born in Nice on 28 April 1928. Both his parents were painters: his father, Fred Klein, worked in a figurative style, and his mother, Marie Raymond, was an abstract painter who exhibited regularly in Paris and ran a weekly salon for other painters at their flat.

He grew up around painting and did not train as a painter. He went to the École Nationale de la Marine Marchande and the École Nationale des Langues Orientales in Nice, and did not finish either.

The story he told about the origin of his work is from his teens: lying on a beach at Nice with two friends, the three of them divided the world between them, and Klein took the sky. He repeated the story throughout his life as the origin of his work in blue.

From about 1948 he read the Rosicrucian writings of Max Heindel, and kept at them for years. The vocabulary he used for his art afterwards — immaterial space, sensibility, the void — comes out of that reading rather than out of any art school.

Judo

From his late teens Klein was serious about judo, and for several years it was his profession rather than art. He trained in France and Spain, and in 1952 he went to Tokyo and spent over a year at the Kodokan, the sport's central institute.

He came back in 1954 with a fourth-dan black belt, which at that time few Europeans held, and published a book on judo technique.[1] He taught in Madrid and then opened his own school in Paris, where he hung monochromes on the walls, and he expected to make his living at it. The French judo federation did not recognise his Japanese grade, which effectively closed that career.

Judo stayed in the work. Klein described his art in terms of energy, breath and immateriality that come out of the training. When Leap into the Void was photographed, it was judo colleagues who held the tarpaulin he landed on.

The monochromes

Klein began exhibiting single-colour paintings in 1955, at the Club des Solitaires in Paris: canvases covered edge to edge in one flat colour, with no image, no composition and no visible brushwork. Early shows used orange, yellow, pink and green as well as blue. It was there that he met the critic Pierre Restany, who wrote for his exhibitions from then on.

Viewers treated them as decoration. Klein concluded that showing several colours at once made people compare them, so the works were read as compositions instead of as single colours. From 1957 he showed blue alone.

With the paint chemist Édouard Adam he worked out a synthetic binder that carried dry ultramarine pigment without dulling it, so the finished surface holds the intensity of loose powder. He called it International K[1]lein Blue, and in 1960 he lodged the formula with the French patent office so that it would be recorded as his.

The Void

In April 1958 Klein held an exhibition at the Galerie Iris Clert in Paris.[2] He had the gallery emptied, cleaned and painted white, put a blue curtain in the entrance and blue cocktails at the door, and stationed Republican Guards outside.

There was nothing in the room. The work, which he called The Specialization of Sensibility in the Raw Material State into Stabilized Pictorial Sensibility, is usually known as The Void. About three thousand people queued to get in.

The empty-gallery show was widely mocked. It is also one of the founding works of conceptual art: the work was the empty room, the visitors and the occasion, and there was nothing in it to buy.

Anthropometries

In March 1960, at a gallery in Paris, Klein staged the first public Anthropometries. Three naked models coated themselves in blue paint and pressed or dragged themselves across paper on the floor and walls, following his instructions. Klein, in evening dress, directed and did not touch the paint.

An orchestra played his Monotone-Silence Symphony: a single chord held for twenty minutes, followed by twenty minutes of silence. An invited audience watched in evening dress.

Klein described the models as living brushes. The works have been read since as a mystical exercise and as an artist using women's bodies as tools. Klein's own statements about the models, and the way he directed the sessions, have been quoted in support of both readings.

Leap into the Void

In October 1960 Klein produced the photograph he is best known for. It shows him in a dark suit in mid-air above a suburban Paris street, arms out, head up, about to hit the pavement, with a cyclist riding away in the distance.

It is a composite. Klein really jumped, repeatedly, from a first-floor wall onto a tarpaulin held below by a group of judo colleagues. The photographers Harry Shunk and János Kender then printed the negative of his [3]jump together with a second negative of the empty street.

Klein published it in November 1960 in a single-issue fake newspaper, laid out like the French daily France-Soir and distributed to Paris news-stands, under the headline "A Man in Space!".[3] The photograph was staged, and it has been reproduced ever since as a picture of a real fall.

Nouveau Réalisme

In October 1960 Klein signed the founding declaration of Nouveau Réalisme with the critic Pierre Restany and artists including Arman, Jean Tinguely and Raymond Hains. Their common ground was using the real world directly — objects, junk, machines, bodies, fire — instead of representing it.

Klein worked quickly over the next two years. He made paintings with fire from a gas burner, paintings made by rain and wind on a canvas strapped to a car roof, sponge sculptures, blue plaster casts of his friends, and a globe painted in International Klein Blue. He also worked in gold leaf and in dry pink pigment, so that the last works run in three colours rather than one.

Death

Klein married the German artist Rotraut Uecker in January 1962.[4] In May, at the Cannes film festival, he watched the documentary Mondo Cane, which included a sequence of his Anthropometries that he felt made a fool of him. He had a heart attack that evening.

He had two more heart attacks within weeks and died in Paris on 6 June 1962, aged thirty-four.[5] His son, Yves, was born that August.

Why Yves Klein matters

Klein had about eight working years. Several things he did in them became normal practice for other artists within twenty years. He exhibited an empty room. He directed a work rather than making it, and staged art as a performance for an audience. He left a work that survives only as a photograph and a story.

The colour is the other reason he is remembered. International Klein Blue is one of the very few colours attached to a single artist's name, and the monochromes are still what most people know him for.