Anybody ever hear of this guy? Modern artist from France, I stumbled across his name in an article on Smashing Magazine and wikipedia'd him, he was fucking nuts yet still accepted as a brilliant artist (some of his minimalist paintings just sold in 2008 for $21 million). The man was a wackjob and at the same time a complete and total badass....
Highlights from the wikipedia article (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yves_Klein):
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In Japan, at the early age of 25, he became a master at judo receiving the rank of yodan (4th dan/degree black-belt) from the Kodokan, which at that time was a remarkable achievement for a westerner. He also 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.
A fucking karate chopping painter, that's awesome....
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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, 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. These shows, displaying 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." Hannah Weitemeier
The next exhibition, 'Proposte Monochrome, 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'. Discovered with the help of Edouard Adam, a Parisian paint dealer, the effect was to retain the brilliance of the pigment which tended to become dull when suspended in linseed oil. Klein later patented this recipe to maintain the "authenticity of the pure idea."[7] This colour, reminiscent of the lapis lazuli used to paint the Madonna's robes in medieval paintings, was to become famous as 'International Klein Blue' (IKB). The paintings were attached to poles placed 20 cm away from the walls to increase their spatial ambiguities.
The show was a critical and commercial success, traveling to Paris, Düsseldorf and London. The Parisian exhibition, at the Iris Clert Gallery, May 1957, became a seminal happening[8]; As well as 1001 blue balloons being released to mark the opening, blue postcards were sent out using IKB stamps that Klein had bribed the postal service to accept as legitimate.[9] An exhibition of tubs of blue pigment and fire paintings was held concurrently at Gallery Collette Allendy.
"What, you guys don't like my stuff? fuck you, here's some blue squares. Yeah that's right, badass ain't they? I even invented my own fucking color. What now bitches?!?!?!??"
Honest to god, this is a painting. A famous painting. WTF.
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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. Thanks to an enormous publicity drive, 3000 people were forced to queue up, waiting to be let in to an empty room.[10]
"Recently my work with color has led me, in spite of myself, to search little by little, with some assistance (from the observer, from the translator), for the realization of matter, and I have decided to end the battle. My paintings are now invisible and I would like to show them in a clear and positive manner, in my next Parisian exhibition at Iris Clert's."[11]
HAHAHAHA I MADE YOU ALL STAND IN LINE TO SEE NOTHING! HAHA WHO'S THE DUMBASS NOW?!?!??! Oh wait, no no no, just kidding, there's paintings there, it's just that they're invisible. Yeah, invisible. I swear it. Painted with invisible ink on invisible canvas.
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Klein's last two exhibitions at Iris Clert's were Vitesse Pure et Stabilité Monochrome (Sheer Speed and Monochrome Stability), November 1958, a collaboration with Jean Tinguely, of kinetic sculptures, and Bas-Reliefs dans une Forêt d’Éponges (Bas-Reliefs in a Sponge Forest), June 1959, a collection of sponges that Klein had used to paint IKB canvases, mounted on steel rods and set in rocks that he'd found in his parents' garden.
"See, what happened was, me and my homeboy Juan got REALLY REALLY baked over at my dads house... it was good stuff man, so *SNORT* what we did was take these rocks, you know? And I'm like 'Hey Juan check this shit out yo, I'll put a stick in these rocks and put my sponges I paint with on them and it'll be fucking AWESOME' ROFL and Juan was like all "LOL I DARE YOU TO DO IT MAN' and I was like all 'HAH I DID IT' rofl man I fucking rock."
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This experimentalism would lead to a number of works Klein made using naked female models covered in blue paint and dragged across or laid upon canvases to make the image, using the models as "living brushes". This type of work he called Anthropometry. Other paintings in this method of production include "recordings" of rain that Klein made by driving around in the rain at 70 miles per hour with a canvas tied to the roof of his car, and canvases with patterns of soot created by scorching the canvas with gas burners.
YES! NAKED MODELS ROLLING AROUND COVERED IN PAINT, fucking AWESOME!
And how nuts are you when you strap a piece of canvas to the your roof and peg the gas as hard as you can in the middle of a thunderstorm?!?!? Who the fuck does something like that?!?!?!?!
"For my next piece, I'm going to combine these two methods and strap a naked paint covered model to the roof of my car and make even better recordings of rain. Yes, I'm a badass."
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Sometimes the creation of these paintings was turned into a kind of performance art—an event in 1960, for example, had an audience dressed in formal evening wear watching the models go about their task while an instrumental ensemble played Klein's 1949 The Monotone Symphony (a single 20-minute sustained chord followed by a 20-minute silence).
I can't even comment on that. Seriously. "OH HAI GUYZ, COME WATCH NAKED MODELS ROLL AROUND IN PAINT WHILE THE BAND HITS A G-CHORD FOR AN HOUR, $60 BUCKS A PERSON".
This dude is my new fucking idol.
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In the performance piece, Zone de Sensibilité Picturale Immatérielle (Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility) 1959-62, he offered empty spaces in the city in exchange for gold. He wanted his buyers to experience The Void by selling them empty space. In his view this experience could only be paid for in the purest material: gold. In exchange, he gave a certificate of ownership to the buyer. As the second part of the piece, performed on the Seine with an Art critic in attendance, if the buyer agreed to set fire to the certificate, Klein would throw half the gold into the river, in order to restore the "natural order" that he had unbalanced by selling the empty space (that was now not "empty" anymore). He used the other half of the gold to create a series of gold-leafed works, which, along with a series of pink monochromes, began to augment his blue monochromes toward the end of his life.
We've now just become full scale wackjob at this point.
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Klein is also well known for a photograph, Saut dans le vide (Leap into the Void) [4] , originally published in the artist's book Dimanche, which apparently shows him jumping off a wall, arms outstretched, towards the pavement. Klein used the photograph as evidence of his ability to undertake unaided lunar travel.
"Yeah man check out this pic, I can fly around the moon motherfuckers."
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As well as painting flat canvases, Klein produced a series of works throughout his career that blurred the edges between painting and sculpture. He appropriated plaster casts of famous sculptures, such as the Winged Victory of Samothrace and the Venus de Milo, by painting them International Klein Blue;
"HAHAHAH MICHAELANGELO, HOW DO U LIKE DAVID NOW THAT HE'S ALL fucking BLUE?!?!??!?! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA"
Just thought I would share.
- b
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