This monographic essay explores Iris Clert, an unclassifiable, whimsical, confusing and emblematic figure in the artistic avant-garde of the 1960s.
Iris Clert's posterity rests on the considerable role she played in promoting the work of Yves Klein and in the emergence of the Nouveaux Réalistes group of artists. Yet wasn't Iris Clert the first gallery owner to offer works by Ad Reinhardt, Lucio Fontana and Leon Golub to the Parisian public? Then, by dint of renewing and transgressing the methods and practices usually assigned to her profession, didn't she herald art's move towards participation and the event-driven? Is she not at the origin of genuine cultural policies? Wasn't she herself an artist? And by dint of telling her story and identifying herself with art, hasn't she tried to build a personal mythology, so as to appear as the work of her gallery?
To make art an attitude of life, to provoke, to scandalize, to make ambiguous claims, to play with norms, to trust instinct more than reason, to be everywhere without limits... these are the ambitions of Iris Clert, who claimed: “I have a destiny, I am the messenger of the gods, therefore of artists!”

Following Yves Klein USA, Yves Klein Germany and Yves Klein Japan, this book, prepared in collaboration with the Yves Klein Archives, presents nearly 150 archival documents, photographs and letters linked to the artist and his travels through Italy. Through his travels, his exchanges and his artistic or personal encounters, the reader discovers the relationships that Klein was able to create there, in particular with artists such as Lucio Fontana or Piero Manzoni who, like him, knew how to leave a lasting impression on their time. Assisi, Venice, Rome, Milan: each of these cities left a mark on the life of the artist of the blue, whose first exhibition abroad in 1957, Proposte monochrome, epoca blu, took place at the Galerie Apollinaire in Milan.