In the Studio: Yves Klein’s Body Art • Rene Burri • Magnum Photos

In the Studio is a series dedicated to the photographic documentation of artists within their workspaces. Over more than seven decades Magnum’s member-photographers have captured images of the inner sanctums of many artists, often forging long-standing working or creative partnerships with them in the process. The images made in the studios of artists, in the company of their creatively imposing occupiers, reveal everything from insights on techniques and fabrication processes to illuminating clutter, reassuringly normal mess, and hints at the personal lives of individuals beyond their well-known artistic output.

You can see other stories from the In the Studio series, here.

Yves Klein was like an escape artist, always trying to free himself from the formal constraints of the painter’s canvas. An agitator extraordinaire, he became France’s most notorious creative figure, a position cemented by his premature death at the age of 34.  He created many physical works but was also a maverick in the art of illusion, producing what he called ‘Immaterials’. In 1958, for example, he ushered thousands of Parisians into a gallery full of empty space. Ever the provocateur, he called the work, The Specialization of Sensibility in the Raw Material State into Stabilized Pictorial Sensibility, The Void.