Yves Klein

Yves Klein (28 April 1928 – 6 June 1962) was a French artist and an important figure in post-war European art.

From 1942 to 1946, Klein studied at the École Nationale de la Marine Marchande and the École Nationale des Langues Orientales.

At this time, he became friends with Arman (Armand Fernandez) and Claude Pascal and started to paint.

At the age of nineteen, Klein and his friends lay on a beach in the south of France, and divided the world between themselves; Arman chose the earth, Pascal, words, while Klein chose the ethereal space surrounding the planet, which he then proceeded to sign:

"With this famous symbolic gesture of signing the sky, Klein had foreseen, as in a reverie, the Thrust of his art from that time onwards—a quest to reach the far side of the infinite."

Between 1947 and 1948, Klein conceived his Monotone Symphony (1949, formally Monotone Silence Symphony) that consisted of a single 20-minute sustained chord followed by a 20-minute silence – a precedent to Klein's later monochrome paintings and to the work of minimal musicians, particularly La Monte Young's drone music and John Cage's 4′33″.

In early 1948, Klein was exposed to Max Heindel's 1909 text The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception and pursued a membership with an American society dedicated to Rosicrucianism.

While attending the École Nationale des Langues Orientales Klein began practicing judo.

During the years 1948 to 1952, he travelled to Italy, Great Britain, Spain, and Japan.

Although Klein had painted monochromes as early as 1949, and held the first private exhibition of this work in 1950, his first public showing was the publication of the artist's book Yves Peintures in November 1954.

Parodying a traditional catalogue raisonné, the book featured a series of intense monochromes linked to various cities he had lived in during the previous years.

He travelled to Japan in 1953 where he became, at the age of 25, a master at judo receiving the rank of yodan (4th dan/degree black-belt) from the Kodokan, becoming the first European to rise to that rank.

Later that year, he became the technical director of the Spanish judo team.

In 1954 Klein wrote a book on judo called Les Fondements du judo.

The same year, he settled permanently in Paris and began in earnest to establish himself in the art world.

Yves Peintures anticipated his first two shows of oil paintings, at the Club des Solitaires, Paris, October 1955 and Yves: Proposition monochromes at Gallery Colette Allendy, February 1956.

Public responses to these shows, which displayed orange, yellow, red, pink and blue monochromes, deeply disappointed Klein, as people went from painting to painting, linking them together as a sort of mosaic.

"From the reactions of the audience, [Klein] realized that...viewers thought his various, uniformly colored canvases amounted to a new kind of bright, abstract interior decoration. Shocked at this misunderstanding, Klein knew a further and decisive step in the direction of monochrome art would have to be taken...From that time onwards he would concentrate on one single, primary color alone: blue."

The next exhibition, 'Proposte Monocrome, Epoca Blu' (Proposition Monochrome; Blue Epoch) at the Gallery Apollinaire, Milan, (January 1957), featured 11 identical blue canvases, using ultramarine pigment suspended in a synthetic resin 'Rhodopas', described by Klein as "The Medium".

Discovered with the help of Edouard Adam, a Parisian paint dealer, the optical effect retained the brilliance of the pigment which, when suspended in linseed oil, tended to become dull.

Klein later deposited a Soleau envelope for this recipe to maintain the "authenticity of the pure idea."

This colour, reminiscent of the lapis lazuli used to paint the Madonna's robes in medieval paintings, was to become known as International Klein Blue (IKB).

The paintings were attached to poles placed 20 cm away from the walls to increase their spatial ambiguities.

All 11 of the canvases were priced differently.

The buyers would go through the gallery, observing each canvas and purchase the one that was deemed best in their own eyes specifically.

Klein's idea was that each buyer would see something unique in the canvas that they bought that other buyers may not have seen.

So while each painting visually looked the same, the impact each had on the buyer was completely unique.

The show was a critical and commercial success, traveling to Paris, Düsseldorf and London.

The Parisian exhibition, at the Iris Clert Gallery in May 1957, became a seminal happening.

To mark the opening, 1001 blue balloons were released and blue postcards were sent out using IKB stamps that Klein had bribed the postal service to accept as legitimate.

Concurrently, an exhibition of tubs of blue pigment and fire paintings was held at Galerie Collette Allendy.

For his next exhibition at the Iris Clert Gallery (April 1958), Klein chose to show nothing whatsoever, called La spécialisation de la sensibilité à l'état matière première en sensibilité picturale stabilisée, Le Vide (The Specialization of Sensibility in the Raw Material State into Stabilized Pictorial Sensibility, The Void): he removed everything in the gallery space except a large cabinet, painted every surface white, and then staged an elaborate entrance procedure for the opening night: the gallery's window was painted blue, and a blue curtain was hung in the entrance lobby, accompanied by republican guards and blue cocktails.

He was a leading member of the French artistic movement of Nouveau réalisme founded in 1960 by art critic Pierre Restany.

Klein was a pioneer in the development of performance art, and is seen as an inspiration to and as a forerunner of minimal art, as well as pop art.

He is known for the development and use of International Klein Blue.

Klein was born in Nice, in the Alpes-Maritimes department of France.

His parents, Fred Klein and Marie Raymond, were both painters.

His father painted in a loose post-impressionist style, while his mother was a leading figure in Art informel, and held regular soirées with other leading practitioners of this Parisian abstract movement.

Klein received no formal training in art, but his parents exposed him to different styles.

His father was a figurative style painter, while his mother had an interest in abstract expressionism.