Yves Klein

1928

Yves Klein was born in Nice on 28 April 1928 to painter parents - Fred Klein, a figurative painter, and Marie Raymond, an abstract painter.


1928 – 1946

During his childhood, the Klein family lived between Paris and Nice.


1947

During the summer, Yves Klein joined the judo club at police headquarters and met Claude Pascal and Armand Fernandez, the future Arman. They were united by a strong attraction to physical exercise, and all three aspired to the ‘Adventure’ of travel, creation and spirituality. For Yves, judo was the first experience of ‘spiritual’ space.

On the beach in Nice, the three friends decided to ‘share the world’: Armand would have the earth and its riches, Claude Pascal the air, and Yves the sky and its infinity.


1948-1954

During the summer of 1948, Klein visited Italy (Genoa, Portofino, Pisa, Rome, Capri, Naples...).

In November 1948, he left for eleven months of military service in Germany.

At the end of 1949, Claude Pascal and Yves Klein moved temporarily to London where they continued their judo activities. Yves found a job with the framer Robert Savage. His time with Savage taught him rigour in his work. Yves learned to gild with gold leaf.

During this period, Yves created a number of monochrome paintings on paper and cardboard using pastels and gouache. He also devised a Monoton-Silence Symphony and wrote film scripts about art.

In 1951, Yves Klein left for Madrid to study Spanish. Joining a judo club, Klein replaced an instructor and from then on regularly took on this role. He became very close to the headmaster of the school, Fernando Franco de Sarabia, whose father was a publisher.

With the help of his aunt, he left for Japan in 1952 and enrolled at the Kôdôkan Institute, the most prestigious judo centre. He lived in Japan for fifteen months, dividing his time between the Institute and giving French lessons to American and Japanese students. Shortly before his return, he obtained his 4th dan in judo, thus reaching the highest level in Europe.


1954 – 1957

On his return from Japan, he published Yves peintures in Spain and Les Fondements du judo in Paris. These publications reflected his dual career as a judoka and artist.

In the spring of 1955, he exhibited an orange monochrome entitled ‘Expression de l'univers de la couleur mine orange’ at the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, which was reserved for abstract artists. The rectangular wooden panel was uniformly covered in matt orange paint. It is signed with the monogram YK and dated May 1955. The monochrome was rejected by the jury.

In October, the first public exhibition of Yves Peintures was held at the Club des Solitaires in Paris. Yves exhibited monochromes in different colours.

In 1956, Yves exhibited his works at the Galerie Colette Allendy in Paris, ‘Yves, Propositions Monochromes’. During the opening, Klein met Marcel Barillon de Murat, knight of the Order of the Archers of Saint-Sébastien, who invited him to join them. On 11 March, Yves was knighted in the Order of the Archers of Saint-Sébastien in the Church of Saint-Nicolas-des-Champs in Paris. His motto was: For colour! Against line and drawing!

Yves Klein met Iris Clert, who ran a small 20 m2 gallery at 3, rue des Beaux-Arts in Paris.

1957 marked the beginning of his ‘Époque bleue’.
During this year, Yves perfected the production of the colour he would call IKB (International Klein Blue), which was characteristic of the works of his ‘Epoque bleue’ and would be his signature until 1959.
Presented in January 1957, the exhibition ‘Yves Klein, Proposte monocrome, epoca blu’ at the Galleria Apollinaire in Milan consisted of eleven blue Monochromes of the same format suspended by a system of brackets at a distance of 20cm from the wall, saturating the limited space of this small gallery.

In May 1957, Yves presented a double exhibition at the Galerie Iris Clert in Paris: Yves, Propositions monochromes from 10 to 25 May and Pigment pur from 14 to 23 May at the Galerie Colette Allendy.

• At Iris Clert, Yves chose to present his Propositions monochromes as he had done in Milan. The advent of L'Epoque bleue was celebrated by releasing 1,001 blue balloons into the Paris sky at the inauguration. Klein described this gesture as Sculpture aérostatique.
• At Colette Allendy, Yves presented a group of works that heralded his future developments: Sculptures, environnement, vats of pure pigment, paravent, the first fire painting, Feux de Bengale-tableau de feu bleu d'une minute (M 41) and the first Immatériel: a room was left entirely empty as a testimony to the presence of pictorial sensibility in its raw material state. The joint invitation to the two exhibitions bore a text by Pierre Restany and was franked with a blue stamp by Yves Klein.

In June 1957, the exhibition ‘Yves, propositions monochromes’ opened at the Schmela Gallery in Düsseldorf with monochrome paintings in different colours. At this exhibition, Yves Klein made friends with the artists of the ZERO group (Otto Piene and Heinz Mack) and with the young Düsseldorf art scene.

In July, the ‘Monochrome Propositions of Yves Klein’ exhibition was held at Gallery One in London. The exhibition featured monochrome paintings in different colours.

During the summer, Yves met Rotraut Uecker (Rerik, 1938) in Nice. She was a German artist who worked as an au pair for Arman and later became his assistant and then his wife. 


1958 – 1960

Winner of an international competition launched in 1957 by the municipality of Gelsenkirchen in Germany, Yves Klein was commissioned to create a series of Reliefs Eponges and monumental monochrome panels.

At the same time, Yves Klein was seeking to go beyond an agreed definition of art: he exhibited empty spaces and made statements that had the value of a work. The Immaterial that the artist ‘specialised’ in was the subject of transactions in exchange for gold, both a noble metal and a colour, which took on a singular place in his work.

The Monogolds were produced between 1960 and 1961, using fine gold in their composition, a material as precious as it was symbolic. Some Monogolds consist of a series of rectangles assembled into grids; others are composed of mobile gold leaves fixed to a panel covered in burnished gold, which quiver at the slightest breath; finally, some are concave reliefs in which the covering gold leaves have been carefully polished until they acquire a real power of reflection.

His collaboration with the architect Claude Parent on the Architecture de l'air project was a milestone.

On 19 May 1960 Klein registered the blue formula he had developed under the name International Klein Blue (IKB).

Thanks to him, the public space (the illumination of the obelisk on the Place de la Concorde) and the media (the Sunday 27 November 1960 edition) appeared as new territories for art.

Natural forces and elements also become the raw material for his Cosmogonies, marks of the moment-states of nature.

His reflections on art led him to imagine new relationships with his models, who became the ‘living brushes’ of his Anthropometries, marks of the ‘moment-states of the flesh’.

On 19 October 1960, Yves Klein made Le Saut dans le vide, 3 rue Gentil-Bernard in Fontenay-aux-Roses, which was photographed by Harry Shunk and John Kender.

On 27 October 1960, the manifesto of the Nouveaux Réalistes was signed in his flat. The Déclaration constitutive du groupe des Nouveaux Réalistes, drafted by Pierre Restany, was signed by Arman, Dufrêne, Hains, Klein, Raysse, Restany, Spoerri, Tinguely and Villeglé. César and Rotella were invited but were absent.


1961 – 1962

A radical artist, Yves Klein was a model for the European artists of the Zero group.

In January 1961, the Museum Haus Lange in Krefeld held the first institutional retrospective of his work, entitled ‘Yves Klein: Monochrome und Feuer’. Yves Klein exhibited his blue, pink and gold monochromes, the Dessins-architecture and the Mur de Feu. On 26 February, when the exhibition closed, Klein produced the first Peintures de Feu.

In February 1961, Yves Klein travelled to Cascia in Italy to leave an ex-voto at the monastery of Saint Rita. The object was found in 1980 in the monastery's offerings depot.

Between March and July 1961, Yves Klein produced Peintures de Feu at the Gaz de France test centre near Paris. An extension of the Cosmogonies and Anthropometries, the Peintures de Feu are the hallmark of the ‘States-moments of fire’.

He did not hesitate to use his image and his private life as material for his art,

On Sunday 21 January 1962, Yves and Rotraut were married in the church of Saint-Nicolas-des-Champs in Paris. Everything about the ceremony was meticulously orchestrated by the artist himself, with a real concern for ritual.

While working on the Portraits Reliefs of his friends Arman, Claude Pascal and Martial Raysse, he died of a heart attack at home on 6 June 1962, aged 34. His son Yves was born in Nice in August.