Customer Reviews

Yves Klein

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Unique in both Europe and the 20th Century, Yves Klein created an art that was complex and profoundly simple, containing what his friend and biographer Pierre Restany calls a "messianic spirit". Published in 1982, 20 years after Klein's untimely death at the age of 34, Restany's "Yves Klein" (in translation by John Shepley) manages not only to cover all the aspects of Klein's work (the monochromes, the anthromopetries, the fire paintings, and the sculptures) but Klein's Napoleonic personality as well. (Not surprisingly, Klein bore a physical resemblance to Napoleon.) Self taught, Klein, even as a boy, seemed to have no interest in traditional representational art. The photograph of a work completed when Klein was 19 shows a short-sleeved shirt covered with hand and foot prints punctuated by question marks. By the time he was in his twenties he was taken over by monochrome and "le vide" -- the art of emptiness. Klein had many influences, including Japanese culture (he lived in Tokyo where he studied judo, attaining a black belt), the Rosicrucians, who held a somewhat surprising fascination for him, and the 20th Century philosopher Gaston Bachelard, who became one of Klein's favorite authors. During the course of his creativity, Klein became obssessed with blue, eventually patenting his own color, the IKB (International Klein Blue). In this book there are more than 50 full-color reproductions of Klein's works (in all colors), along with dozens of photos of him at work, including the 1960 "action spectacle" in which he created anthromopetries before a discerning but challenging audience ("What is art for you?" "Art is health!"). This playful spirit was never more obvious than when Klein on November 27 1960 printed several thousand copies of an article about himself and inserted them in issues of the Journal du Dimanche (a Sunday supplement to France-Soir), these copies being bought by unsuspecting readers. Imagine all the poor Parisians who wrapped their fish heads in this future museum piece and threw it away! (Not all of the projects he was involved in were that appealing; four photographs showing Christo "packaging" a woman in Klein's home are a little unsettling.) It was Klein's fondness for escapades which caused his friends to doubt his sudden death. Invited by an Italian film producer Gualtiero Jacopetti to re-enact his famous action spectacle for a documentary the Italian was making, Klein agreed and participated in it, assuming the documentary was a serious art survey. "Mondo Cane" (which Restany only mentions en passant) is a vulgar display of drunken and bloody rituals around the world, and in the midst of all this is Yves Klein creating one of his art works using live models. After being introduced as Czechoslovakian (!!), Klein is shown conducting his Symphonie Monoton, but that quickly segues into the movie's syrupy main theme, and the participating models are photographed in a salacious manner. When Klein first saw this film at Cannes it literally made him sick, and he suffered a series of heart attacks which eventually killed him, leaving an artistic legacy that still confuses some museum-goers today. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art had an excellent representation of Yves Klein in one of its galleries (a monochrome, an anthromopetry, and a sponge sculpture, all in the IKB), but the collection suddenly vanished and all my inquiries have received vague responses (it may be in storage, it may be on loan, etc). Hopefully, the museum did not succumb to a feminist assault. That would be a shame, because Pierre Restany's book confirms what an unusual life and what an exciting genius Yves Klein possessed.