YVES KLEIN

Klein combined mysticism, conceptual art, and showmanship in exploring intensely saturated colours, ritualistic actions, and symbolic materials to make a wide range of distinctive paintings, sculptures, and explanatory documents.

Early Years

From an early age, Klein was exposed to various art genres and practitioners socially. His parents, Fred and Marie, were painters; one was figurative, and the other was abstract expressionist.

From 1942 to 1946, he studied at the École Nationale de la Marine Marchande and the École Nationale des Langues Orientales. At the latter, he took up judo and became very good at it. In the late 1940s, he travelled through Europe, and in 1953, he went to Japan, where, at 25, he became a judo master. In 1954, however, he decided to make art his career.

Yves Klein Artworks

Klein held his first exhibition of monochromes in 1950 and two more shows in Paris five years later featuring five colours. Because his audience did not apprehend the colours individually, instead viewing them as a kind of mosaic, he decided to concentrate only on blue. Due to judo, he also became interested in Zen Buddhism, ritual acts, and the notion of emptiness.

International Klein Blue

In 1957, in Milan's Galerie Apollinaire, he presented 11 identical ultramarine canvases featuring an especially radiant pigment, International Klein Blue. To increase spatial ambiguity, they were positioned on poles 20 centimetres out from the wall.

Klein believed that art is everywhere the artist goes and that while beauty is invisible, the artist must attempt to capture it, encouraging the audience to see with their imaginations. He regarded monochrome painting as an 'open window to freedom, as the possibility of being immersed in the immeasurable existence of colour.' These works gave access to the infinite, immateriality, as seen in Untitled Blue Monochrome (IKB 191) (1962).

In a 1957 Paris exhibition at Iris Clert, he released 1001 blue balloons and postcards sent with IKB 'stamps'. The following year, he emptied the Clert gallery and its large cabinet, painted the walls white and the windows blue, put up blue curtains, brought in guards, and served blue cocktails—3,000 people queued up for the opening.

The following year, in an opera house in Gelsenkirchen, Germany, Klein showed a group of massive 7-x-20-metre murals made of IKB and soaked sponges. He often picked sponges to apply the paint, and in the 'Anthropometry' series (1960), naked women used their bodies as 'living brushes' on rolls of paper on the floor and wall.

Performance and Documentation

In Leaping into the Void (1960), Klein exploited a fake photograph of him diving headfirst out of a first-floor window, the image of a safety tarpaulin held by friends later removed.

In his quest for memorable symbols of elemental spirituality, he also used water and fire from blowtorches. He made flaming sculptures and burnt paintings, as in Untitled Fire Painting (F18) (1961), and utilised burnt receipts for negative fiscal transactions with gold leaf, seen in Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility (1961).

Yves Klein Exhibitions

Yves Klein has been featured extensively in important international exhibitions, including:

• Yves Klein, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (1997)
• A Bigger splash: Painting After Performance, Tate Modern, London (2013)

Collections

Yves Klein's work is held in major collections around the world, including Fondation Louis Vuitton, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis, and Archives Yves Klein, Paris.

Website

Yves Klein's website can be found here. The Yves Klein Archives Instagram can be found here.

FAQs

Hazel Ellis | Ocula | 2025