TRACES: Yves Klein

Today is the occasion to bear in mind the French artist Yves Klein (28/4/1928-6/6/1962), Klein was born in Nice and his parents were both painters. He was a French artist considered an important figure in post-war European art. He was the 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 he is seen as an inspiration to and as a forerunner of Minimal art, as well as Pop art. This column is a tribute to artists, living or dead, who have left their mark in Contemporary Art. Through documents or interviews, starting with: moments and memories, we reveal out from the past-unknown sides of big personalities, who left their indelible traces in time and history…

By Efi Michalarou

Yves Klein studied at the École Nationale de la Marine Marchande and the École Nationale des Langues Orientales and began practicing judo. At this time, he became friends with Arman 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, aka Monotone Silence Symphony) that consisted of a single 20-minute sustained chord followed by a 20-minute silence. During next four years 1948-1952, he traveled to Italy, Great Britain, Spain, and Japan. In Japan, he became a master at judo. Klein later wrote a book on Judo called ‘’Les fondements du judo’’. In 1954, Klein settled permanently in Paris and began in earnest to establish himself in the art world. 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. 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. 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 Monochrome, Epoca Blu’’ (Proposition Monochrome Blue Epoch) at the Gallery Apollinaire, Milan, (1957). The show was a critical and commercial success, traveling to Paris, Düsseldorf and London. There is a history that says that, Klein, discover his famous blue in Hydra, a Greek Island, he was visited this period, he stayed and worked in Mrs. Paouri traditional mansion. A large retrospective was held at Krefeld, Germany, January 1961, followed by an unsuccessful opening at Leo Castelli’s Gallery, New York, in which Klein failed to sell a single painting. He stayed with Rotraut Uecker at the Chelsea Hotel, for the duration of the exhibition and, while there, he wrote the “Chelsea Hotel Manifesto”, a proclamation of the “Multiplicity of new possibilities”. He was one of the founding members of the art group Nouveau Réalisme. At 1960 the French Theoritical of Art Pierre Restany, at the duration of one group exhibition at Apollinaire’s Gallery in Millan, was inspired with Yves Klein, the creation of a new art group. The declaration of the group was signatured in Klein’s apartment-studio at 27 October 1960. This idea for a French-Italian art group, was a reaction to American Post-Dadaism, Fluxus and Pop-Art. Except Restany and Klein, members of the group at first were: Martial Raysse, Arman, François Dufrêne, Raymond Hains, Daniel Spoerri, Jean Tinguely and Jacques Villeglé, and later: Cesar, Mimmo Rotella, Niki de Saint Phalle, Christo and Nikos (the Greek artist aka Nikos Kessanlis). The first group exhibition was in 1960 at Paris (Festival d’avant-garde). On 21st January 1962, in an elaborate ceremony in which Klein dressed as a Knight of the Order of St Sebastian, he married Rotraut Uecker, sister of German artist Günther Uecker, at Saint-Nicholas-des-Champs, Paris. He suffered a heart attack while watching the film Mondo cane (in which he is featured) at the Cannes Film Festival on 11 May 1962. Two more heart attacks followed, the second of which killed him on 6 June 1962. His son, Yves Amu Klein, was born on 6 August in Nice. Yves Amu studied architecture, design, cybernetics theory of systems, and Fine Arts sculpture.