Yves Klein

A short life and a single colour

Yves Klein was born in Nice in 1928 to two painters. His father worked in a loose post impressionist manner and his mother was a leading figure in Art informel who held regular gatherings of the Parisian abstract painters. Klein received no formal art training. He studied at the Ecole Nationale de la Marine Marchande and the Ecole Nationale des Langues Orientales, and it was there that he took up judo, a discipline that occupied him as seriously as painting for a decade.

As a young man on a beach in the south of France he divided the world with his friends Arman and Claude Pascal. Arman took the earth, Pascal took words, and Klein claimed the ethereal space surrounding the planet, which he then proceeded to sign. He later treated that gesture as the origin of everything that followed.

He travelled to Japan and became, at twenty five, the first European to reach the fourth dan at the Kodokan. He wrote a book on the foundations of judo, served as technical director of the Spanish judo team, then settled permanently in Paris and set about establishing himself as an artist.

The Blue Epoch

Klein had painted monochromes since the late forties, but his public career began with shows of monochrome oil paintings at the Club des Solitaires in Paris in 1955 and at the Galerie Colette Allendy in 1956. Visitors read the orange, yellow, red, pink and blue canvases as a mosaic of bright interior decoration, which disappointed him enough that he narrowed the practice to one colour only.

The result was shown in Milan in 1957: eleven identical blue canvases, each priced differently, painted in ultramarine pigment suspended in a synthetic resin that preserved the brilliance the pigment loses in linseed oil. That blue became International Klein Blue. He lodged the recipe formally to protect what he called the authenticity of the pure idea. The canvases hung twenty centimetres clear of the wall to increase their spatial ambiguity, and the show travelled to Paris, Dusseldorf and London.

The following year at the Iris Clert Gallery he showed nothing at all. For the exhibition remembered as Le Vide he emptied the room, painted every surface white, painted the window blue, hung a blue curtain and posted republican guards at the door. Three thousand people queued in 1958 to enter an empty gallery. In 1959 the same gallery showed his paint soaked sponges mounted on steel rods, and the Gelsenkirchen Opera House unveiled his enormous blue murals, the largest twenty metres across.

Living brushes and the immaterial

Klein applied pigment with rollers, then with sponges, then with the bodies of naked models drawn across canvas, works he called Anthropometries and often staged as performance, with an ensemble playing his Monotone Symphony while an audience in evening dress watched. He recorded rain by driving with a canvas tied to the roof of his car and scorched other canvases with gas burners. In the Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility he sold empty space for gold and threw half the gold into the Seine when the buyer agreed to burn the receipt. The photomontage of him leaping from a wall into an empty street became one of the most reproduced images of postwar art.

He was a founding member of Nouveau Realisme, signing the declaration in his own studio apartment alongside Arman, Raymond Hains, Martial Raysse, Daniel Spoerri, Jean Tinguely and Jacques Villegle. A large retrospective opened at Krefeld in 1961, and a show at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York the same year failed to sell a single painting. He stayed at the Chelsea Hotel for its duration and wrote a manifesto there.

Klein suffered a heart attack while watching the film Mondo Cane at Cannes and died in Paris in 1962, aged thirty four. His widow gave birth to their son shortly afterwards. Many of his sculptural ideas, the blue casts of antique statues among them, were issued as editions after his death, which is what the small blue Venus catalogued here belongs to. The pigmented stoneware tondo IKB 53 made a strong six figure sum in pounds at Bonhams in London in 2021.