The big picture: Yves Klein’s dive into immortality

The story goes that the artist Yves Klein practised his famous jump from a second-floor window onto the pavement of a Paris suburb a few times before it was photographed. The actual “leap into the void” occurred in October 1960 and was captured by the artist’s favourite “stunt photographers”, Harry Shunk and János Kender. The pair were sworn to secrecy by the artist – a fourth dan black belt in judo – about the picture’s mechanics. The mysteries of the leap were, in accordance with this agreement, not fully revealed until an exhibition 50 years later: the photographers had fused a pair of images in the dark room. One of an empty street, with a bicycle, the other of Klein leaping into a stretched tarpaulin held by friends.

Many of the early viewers of Klein’s photograph were almost prepared to accept his trick. He published it in a one-off edition of a four-page newspaper, left at newsstands. The headline read: “A Man in Space!”, pre-empting Yuri Gagarin’s orbit of the following year. “Today the painter of space must, in fact, go into space to paint,” Klein wrote, “but he must be capable of levitation.”

Klein’s photograph is included in a new group exhibition devoted to the philosopher of science Gaston Bachelard. Klein and Bachelard, who both died in 1962, shared several preoccupations. For one thing they had a fascination with the spaces between objects – between the window and the pavement – as much as objects themselves. For another, they were devoted to the colour blue. Klein famously created his own trademark pigment, claiming that it represented a kind of cosmic energy, an evocation of creation. The man who fell to Earth was fond of quoting Bachelard on the subject: “First there is nothing, then there is a deep nothing, then there is a blue depth.”

Bachelard Contemporain is at La Fab gallery, Paris, from 17 February–30 April