Yves Klein

Anthropometries

Editorial, 2017, Denys Riout

"Bodies, flesh and imprints", by Denys Riout

Having immaterialised blue, having gone beyond the problem of art, can we go any further? Probably not, but going elsewhere is certainly possible. And that's exactly what Klein did. Alongside the monochrome/immaterial pictorial sensibility axis, he never stopped exploring other paths, conquering hitherto unknown domains and inventing possible territories. At the very moment when he deprived the monochrome painting of matter, he gave painting an unexpected physicality. On 5 June 1958, shortly...

IKB

Editorial, 2006, Alain Bouzerand

"Beyond blue, the chromatic trilogy", by Alain Bouzerand

ONE, TWO, THREE... COLOURSIn Yves Klein's imagination and symbolism, three colours are at the zenith: blue, gold and pink. These are the three colours of the ex-voto made for Saint Rita of Cascia, the patron saint of desperate causes. They are also the colours of the three obelisks and many monochromes. In traditional symbolism, blue, the favourite colour of most Westerners, is a call to escape to wide open spaces, the sky and the sea. Zeus' favourite colour in Antiquity, by the end of the...

Editorial, 2009, Sophie Cras

"Work's value: Klein's economics", by Sophie Cras

Throughout his career, according to him, Yves Klein was "in search of the real value of the painting". The term "value" here suggests not only the colour nuance - the famous I.K.B. blue - or the artistic merit of the work, but also the commercial value, the exchange price. From exhibition to exhibition, from speculative discourse to artistic innovation, his career has been punctuated by the ceaseless quest for the 'right price' - the price that would do justice to the artistic merit of the...

Editorial, 2017, Denys Riout

"From judo to pictorial sensitivity", by Denys Riout

Yves Klein, born in 1928, grew up in an artistic environment. His father, Fred Klein, a figurative painter, and his mother, Marie Raymond, soon to be known as an abstract painter, frequented many avant-garde figures. The young man, faced with the challenge of becoming a painter without having to choose between his mother's side and his father's tradition, hesitated between several other paths. In 1947, after having given up on a career in the merchant navy, he worked in a shop in Nice where his...

Immaterial

Editorial, 2009, Denys Riout

"Work's value: Credit via the market", by Denys Riout

Besides the monochrome pictures, the anthropometries, the fire paintings, and many other projects that pertain to the realm of the visible, Yves Klein executed, exhibited, and sold some “invisible” works. I would like to show that these sales pertain to a strategy that was designed to establish their credibility, the principle of which is simple: since they are offered on the art market and since they find buyers, these impalpable creations fully exist and really do possess the status of...

Editorial, 2017, Denys Riout

"Incandescent ashes", by Denys Riout

A privileged few, friends and art critics, were invited to the first floor of the Colette Allendy gallery to see the ‘Surfaces et blocs de sensibilité picturale’ (Surfaces and blocks of pictorial sensibility) presented in an apparently empty room. An article in the magazine Cimaises (July-August 1957) and a film attest to the reality of this experiment. The film, silent but in colour, takes us on a subjective camera tour of the exhibition, from the entrance to the gallery, through the...

Editorial, 2022, Damien Sausset

"Spirituality in Klein's work, by Damien Sausset

He walks the tightrope of the sublime", said Dominique de Ménil in the catalogue for the exhibition held at the Centre Pompidou in 1983. If by the sublime we mean a predisposition to a mysticism embodied in his life and his works, then Yves Klein was indeed always close to it. But, as always with the artist, ambivalence is the order of the day. The forms of spirituality that nourished him were extremely diverse, even contradictory in their principles. While the search for elevation and purity...

Judo

Editorial, 2012, Frédéric Prot

"On Judo, Considered As One of the Fine Arts", by Frédéric Prot

Yves Klein had already been practicing Judo for five years when he arrived in Yokohama in September 1952. He was to refine his technique in the famous Kōdōkan in Tokyo over a period of several months. In February 1954, he finally returned to Europe with a rare 4th Dan black belt, obtained on December 18, 1953. His Judo continued to develop throughout his work, as he Yves Klein points out a formal and spiritual analogy between the writhings Robert Godet hosted the first anthropometric meeting...

Editorial, 2020, Denys Riout

"Yves Klein and Japan", by Denys Riout

DREAMS AND ILLUSIONS OF THE ORIENT To learn judo at the Kodokan, the most renowned training centre in Japan, and come back wreathed in glory, possessed of unmatched competence – or nearly: such was the plan of this young man who was trying to find his way between two painter parents. His failure at the baccalauréat had closed the doors to merchant navy school and the prospect of travelling the world as an officer on ocean-going vessels. Enterprising and curious, Yves Klein had stayed in...

Editorial, 2022, Damien Sausset

Japan's influence, by Damien Sausset

This stay in Japan laid the foundations of a future philosophy applied to art, or more precisely to the surpassing of art.In kodokan judo, one of the branches of judo, Yves Klein found not just a sport, but a way of life and an ethical system based on Zen Buddhism. It is necessary to go beyond the body, in particular through the kiai, a technique in which the judoka concentrates his spiritual energy so intensely that he suddenly releases it through a cry arising from the depths of his being.In...

Transfers of Zones of ​​Sensibility

Editorial, 2022, Mitchell F Chan

"With Blockchain, The Blue Revolution", by Mitchell F Chan

Why it took 60 years to fully recognize Yves Klein's genius