• L'Évolution de l'art vers l'immatériel

Book, 2020

L'Évolution de l'art vers l'immatériel

Yves Klein, Iris Clert

"Materialism, this whole quantitative spirit, has been recognized as the enemy of freedom. For a long time the struggle has been engaged against this spirit. The real enemies are psychology, learned optics, sentimentality, composition, sentimental heroism, which generate totalitarian worlds, delimited spaces of terror, residues for the ventriloquists of the West".
Klein blue" monochromes and anthropometries, leaps into the void and aerostatic sculpture, paintings of fire... Yves Klein devoted his life to escaping from classical drawing and figuration. His obsession for the sky, in which he found both color and infinity, forged his radicalism. Judoka, he is fascinated by the void, natural forces and movement. The notion of "immaterial", at the heart of his reflection, will have led him to the frontier of conceptual art and happening. He exposes empty spaces, makes statements with work value ...
On June 3, 1959, Yves Klein gave a lecture at the Sorbonne: "L'Évolution de l'art vers l'immatériel". An ideal gateway to his work and his biography, this text reveals the constituent motifs of his work: ritual, color, emptiness, judo, sky and fire. Beyond provocation and performance, he elaborates a theory, both poetic and spiritual, of an art without limits, following the example of a John Cage's work on silence.
Many of the paths sketched here will lead to success in the following years. Yves Klein will, for example, elaborate an Architecture of the Air, or issue receipts to buyers of immaterial works. Before he died, he confided to a friend: "I'm going to enter the largest studio in the world. And I will only do immaterial works there."
Presentation by Iris Clert.

Éditions Allia
Editor Editions Allia
Lieu Paris, France
ISBN 979-10-304-1256-7