Yves Klein

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.

As Heinz Mack said in one of our many interviews: "Are you well aware that I am one of the last to be able to tell you this? From the Dusseldorf exhibition in May 1957 to the untimely death of the artist in 1962, from the creation of Gelsenkirchen's opera to the Krefeld retrospective, Yves Klein's German adventure was essential in his dazzling career. .
Thanks to the intense exchanges between the French artist and the German artists of his generation - especially the ZERO movement - this story is found here through archival materials and interviews with all the witnesses still alive. Intimately linked to the artistic evolution in Germany, this biography is also an exceptional archive for a double history of art.

Robert Fleck, born in 1957 in Vienna, Austria, has lived in France since 1980. Critic of art and curator of exhibitions, author in 2004 of a double biography of Yves Klein and his mother, the painter Marie Raymond, translated into German, he directed successively the ERBAN - Regional School of Fine Arts from Nantes -, the Deichtorhallen - Museum of Contemporary Art and Photography - in Hamburg, and the National Art and Exhibition Center of the Federal Republic of Germany in Bonn. He has been a professor at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf since 2012, and assistant director since 2013.

The space of a meteoric race of eight years, Yves Klein (1928-1962) implements an intangible art of "marvelous realism", intended to "change the life" by an intimate aesthetic revolution of the person. The works of fire and air give form to this project. The artistic adventure of Yves Klein is one of the most emblematic of the twentieth century. Painting, music, sculpture, architecture, economy, religion, philosophy: it will have invested everything to achieve. Freed from the system of representation and perspective forged in the Renaissance, it resizes art and makes it the great stimulant of existence. Yves Klein develops an aesthetic of the body and the sensitive mind and extended to life itself. Color, immateriality and imagination bring about a transfiguration of reality and a recon- version of values. The man is invited to overcome himself: by making new skin, he puts himself in the presence of a world becoming again creation. Fire as a "universal explanation principle" (Bachelard), destructive and revealing works in the work as the plastic element, metaphor of the immaterial and self-portrait of the artist, Prometheus rimbaldian, seer and thief. A powerful Edenic tropism commands the "marvelous realism" of Yves Klein, who aspires to the advent of a new age: that of the blessed and accomplished humanity, here and now. Each of his works is intended for an intimate experience of this possibility: monochromes, fire girls. The overcoming of paradoxes and tugging of being in an aesthetics of existence. 

If the importance of Yves Klein's artistic rupture (1928-1962) with his "blue revolution" is widely recognized, the interpretations of his approach are multiplying and are often lost in the meanders of psychology, religion , even obscurantism. While the project of the artist is enlightened if one wants to analyze well his fulgurating work and his multiple writings, and to include them in their reports to the history of the art.
This book defends a strong thesis, namely that the work of Yves Klein completes the deconstruction of the device of the representation and the perspective inherited from Quattrocento, a deconstruction begun with Impressionism. Yves Klein closes this criticism by immaterializing the painting, this "jail" of colors and this prison of sensibility. At the same time, he abandons the ternary structure (model / canvas / gaze) that supports the whole device of representation, in favor of a binary structure, that of the Void and of Life or of Nature and of the Subject. By radically ending the representation, Klein inaugurates the era of a-representation, of post-representation. He invites the construction of a new symbolic form in art, even beyond, and explores its many potentialities with the theater of the Void, the intangible or the architecture of air and fire.

In the mid-1950s, Yves Klein (1928–1962) declared that “a new world calls for a new man.” With his idiosyncratic style and huge charisma, this bold artist would go on to pursue a brief but bountiful career, producing more than 1,000 paintings over seven years in an oeuvre now considered a mainstay of postwar modernism.

Klein made his name above all with his large monochrome canvases in his own patented hue of blue. International Klein Blue (IKB), composed of pure pigment and binding medium, is at once rich and luminous, evocative and decorative, and was conceived by Klein as a means of evoking the immateriality and infinitude of the world. The works of this “Blue Revolution” seem to draw us into another dimension, as if hypnotized by a perfect summer sky. Klein was also renowned for his deployment of “living brushes,” in which naked women, daubed in International Klein Blue, would make imprints of their bodies on large sheets of paper.

This Basic Art introduction presents key Klein works to introduce an artist who was at once a showman, inventor, and pioneer of performance art. With page after page of the ever-alluring International Klein Blue, it is both an essential guide to a modern art master and a meditation on the unique effects of a single color.


French :   978-3836553124
English :  978-3836553131
German : 978-3836553100

Denys Riout is an art historian specialized in Yves Klein’s work. His book reunites two complementary texts : “Overcoming the problem of art” and “Conference at the Sorbonne”, both essential to understand the artist’s process and shows his desire to work on the notion of the immaterial.

With the book comes a CD of an extremely rare document : the restored recording of the conference held by Yves Klein in 1959 at the Sorbonne. It is a unique opportunity to hear his distinctive voice and tone. 

Extracts of “Conference at the Sorbonne” :“I shall therefore began quite coolly by grasping this Ariadne’s thread that for me is this impalpable sensibility, new matter, new dimension, before I enter the labyrinth of overheated emotion, promising firmly to myself to never let it go until I come back out. This, then, is what happened.

At Antwerp first of all, barely two months ago. Invited to exhibit with a group of artists comprising Bury, Tinguely, Roth, Breer, Mack, Munari, Spoerri, Piene, and Soto, I traveled to Antwerp and on the occasion of the opening, instead of installing a painting or whatever tangible and visible object in the space that had been reserved for me in the Hessenhuis exhibition hall, I loudly pronounced to the public these words borrowed from Gaston Bachelard: “First there is nothing, then there is a deep nothing, then there is a blue depth.”

The Belgian organizer of this exhibition then asked me where my work might be. I replied, “There, there where I am speaking at this moment.” “And what is the price of this work?” “A kilo of gold, a kilo ingot of pure gold will suffise me.” Why these fanciful conditions instead of a normal price simply represented by a sum of money? Because, for pictorial sensibility in raw material state, in a space that I had specialized and stabilized by pronouncing these few words upon my arrival, which made the blood of this spatial sensibility flow, one cannot ask for money. “The blood of sensibility is blue,” says Shelley and that is exactly what I think."
 


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