Modern Mystic Yves Klein

The following post is part of  an article published in The New York Times, and it’s about Yves KLein, whose ‘Blue Artworks’ have always fascinated me. This article by Carol Vogel explains a little bit what makes Yves Klein so different.

Here it is:

Yves Klein, the radical French artist who died in 1962 when he was only 34, has been something of an enigma to Americans. Individual works have occasionally turned up in museum shows in this country, and Upper East Side galleries like Gagosian, Michael Werner and L&M Arts have displayed his work. In contrast to Europe, where several institutions have held shows of his art, such exhibitions have been rare here.

Now the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis are about to give Klein his first solo museum moment in the United States since a traveling exhibition in 1982 visited the Guggenheim, the Rice Museum in Houston and other sites.

Four years in the making, “Yves Klein: With the Void, Full Powers” will open in May at the Hirshhorn and will include more than 100 works arranged thematically. Loans are coming from the artist’s archives, institutions in Europe and the United States, and private collections.

“More and more we’re starting to understand how Klein opened up the gates for what came in the late ’60s, ’70s and ’80s in Minimalism, Conceptual art, light and space art, and performance,” said Kerry Brougher, deputy director and chief curator at the Hirshhorn. “He used a full host of media, not just painting but sculpture, performance, film, photography.”

A colorful figure who was an aspiring judo instructor, Klein studied Rosicrucianism and was obsessed with philosophical and poetic investigations of space and science. He actually leapt into space one morning in 1960 by throwing himself out the window of a house in Paris, an act that was documented by Harry Shunk in the photograph “Leap Into the Void.”

“For me one of the most important things about Klein was that he blurred his life and art together, injecting humor as well as a sense of the magician,” Mr. Brougher said. “Sometimes you wonder if he’s serious or not.”

Klein’s search for a new kind of painting began on a beach in Nice in 1947, when he imagined himself levitating, staring at the sky and singing his name before falling back to earth. He then proclaimed that “the blue sky is my first artwork.”

He also became obsessed with blue, which he said embodied nature. He eventually patented a deep blue, known as International Klein Blue or I.K.B., and applied it — with sponges — in his famous monochrome paintings. He also used nude models, whom he called “living brushes,” covering them in paint and using them on white paper on the walls and floor. In 1961 he started a series of paintings using a flamethrower.

Examples of all these works will be included in the exhibition, which opens in Washington on May 20 before traveling to the Walker, where it will be on view starting Oct. 23.

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Happy Painting ,

JanPaul

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