Yves Klein’s Postmodernist Art

Yves Klein’s
Romanticism

The 1956 performance of the costumed Georges
Mathieu (1921-2012) making action paintings before an audience at
the Sarah Bernhardt Theatre in Paris had a catalyzing effect for French
artists, just as the first happenings by Allan
Kaprow (1927-2006) did for artists in New York at the end of the fifties.
Like Kaprow, Mathieu made action
painting the basis for greater direct engagement and a new theatricality.
Between 1958 and 1962 the art actions of Yves Klein (1928-62) infused
this theatricality and the tendency toward a more directly physical expressionism
with an aura of mysticism that tied them into the traditions of European
romanticism of the 19th
century. Klein sought a flash of spiritual insight for his viewers, in
which he was the medium of revelation: unlike the American action painter’s
revelation of personal identity, Klein’s work purported to evoke an intuition
into the cosmic order.

In 1948, the twenty-year-old Yves Klein
discovered a book by Max Heindel called “La Cosmogonie des Rose-Croix”.
Heindel’s book provided the key to the teachings of the Rosicrucianists,
an esoteric Christian sect, which Klein studied obsessively for five years.
According to Heindel, the world was approaching the end of the Age of
Matter, when Spirit lies captive in solid bodies.

Soon after coming to Paris in 1955, Klein
began referring to himself as an “initiate,” seeking to guide
the world into a new “Age of Space,” in which “Spirit”
would exist free of form, objects would levitate, and personalities would
travel liberated from the body. Blue embodied Heindel’s new age and also
Klein’s imagined freedom of the sky. As self-appointed “Messenger
of the Blue Void,” Klein aspired to enter into the world of colour,
to exist as a colour. Where form and line signalled separateness and limitation,
colour embodied spirit that had coagulated enough to be visible but not
enough to precipitate into form. colour expressed unity, openness, enlightenment
– the wholeness and infinity of space. “I espouse the cause of pure
colour, which has been invaded and occupied guilefully by the cowardly
line and its manifestation, drawing in art,” he proclaimed. “I
will defend colour, and I will deliver it, and I will lead it to final
triumph.”

Klein had started painting
seriously in Spain, where he had spent ten months prior to his arrival
in Paris. His paintings each consisted of a single colour,
uniformly applied, edge-to-edge. After the rejection of an orange “monochrome”
from the 1955 Salon des Realistes Nouvelles in Paris, Klein sought
out the young critic Pierre Restany (1930-2003) to help him obtain
a gallery show. (Note: Together, Klein and Restany founded the avant-garde
movement known as Nouveau Realisme 1960-2.) According to Restany
they met in a cafe, and Klein explained to him the “diffusion of
energy in space, its stabilization by pure colour, and its impregnating
effect on sensitivity.” Klein intended the monochrome painting to
fix a focus for the cosmic energies traveling through space: it was to
provide a locus of intuitions which could not be formulated. “The
authentic quality of the picture, its very being,” according to Klein,
“lies beyond the visible, in pictorial sensitivity in the state of
prime matter.” “Yves the Monochrome,” as he called himself,
employed pure colour pigments,
gold leaf, the female body, fire, and water in his art,
and in 1958 turned to completely immaterial works in an ongoing effort
to become conscious of and hold on to his revelation of the infinite.
He persistently spoke of the “impregnation” of spiritual vibrations
in a space or a thing (as in the Rosicrucian doctrine of Spirit impregnating
solid objects). In 1957 he began using sponges as a metaphor for this
spiritual permeation of matter. He mounted them on rods and used them
in monochrome reliefs, anticipating Minimalist
art by almost a decade.

At first Klein made his “monochrome
propositions” (as Restany called them to emphasize their philosophical
and immaterial nature) in a variety of colours. In 1956 he limited his
palette to an ultramarine blue, then broadened the palette to blue, pink,
and gold (the Rosicrucian trilogy of the colours of fire). Klein had a
Paris gallery show in 1956. In January 1957 he launched “L’Epoca
Blu” (The Blue Epoch) in the Galleria Apollinaire in Milan, where
it irrevocably altered the career of the Italian artist Piero Manzoni.
In May he had two Paris shows at the Iris Clert and Colette Allendy Galleries
simultaneously, in June he exhibited in Dusseldorf (the Zero Group came
together in Cologne during 1957, influenced by Klein), and in late June
he opened a one-man show in London. Thus, he successfully orchestrated
his entrance on to the European scene as though everywhere at once.

“Le Vide”
(The Void)

Klein went beyond the monochrome to pure
immateriality in Le Vide (The Void) of 1958. For this April “exhibition”
he cleaned out and whitewashed the Galerie Iris Clert, “impregnating”
the empty space with his spirituality. By arranging to get a cabinet minister
on the guest list he succeeded in having Republican Guards in full regalia
flanking the door at the opening and nearly 3,000 visitors turned up.
The streets were so crowded that police and fire department vehicles were
called to the scene.

After some time, Klein appeared at the
door in formal dress and began guiding small groups into the vacant gallery.
Many burst out laughing and walked right out, others found Le Vide deeply
moving and stayed for hours. The writer Albert Camus wrote in the guest
book “with the void, full powers.” Meanwhile, glasses of a blue
drink were offered to those waiting outside, as at a church sacrament.
Klein had had the liquid concocted with a biologist’s stain so that after
the opening everyone who drank it had blue urine for a week.

Note: Half a century later, the Pompidou
Centre in Paris hosted a weird reincarnation of Klein’s “empty”
exhibition, when it hosted an art show entitled “The Specialisation
of Sensibility in the Raw Material State into Stabilised Pictorial Sensibility”.
The show consisted of nine empty rooms.

“Living
Brush Painting”

A little more than a month later, on June
5, 1958, Klein performed his first “Living Brush” painting in
a posh apartment on the Isle Saint-Louis in Paris. In this performance
a nude model applied blue paint to her torso and then pressed the paint
on to the canvas on the floor, forming fluid patterns of abstract
art, as directed by the artist.

For other contemporary works, see: 20th-Century
Paintings.

The apartment in which Klein staged the
first “Living Brush” painting belonged to Robert Godet, a former
Resistance fighter, a pilot, and a fifth-degree black belt in judo. Klein
himself was a fourth-degree black belt and this may be how they knew one
another. Godet was also a disciple of Gurdjieff and deeply involved in
the occult and in Eastern religions. It was rumoured that Godet supported
his high lifestyle from gun-running money and indeed he accidentally killed
himself in 1960 on the airfield in Benares, India, while preparing to
deliver a planeload of arms to Tibetan revolutionaries. Klein must have
seen some of his own fantasies of adventure lived out in Godet.

In February 1960 Klein began leaving the
blue imprint of the models’ bodies on the canvases, rather than covering
the whole of each canvas in a monochrome field. He called these abstract
paintings “Anthropometries”. The most celebrated public
performance of the “Living Brushes” was on March 9, 1960. Attired
in blue formal wear and his ceremonial cross of the Order of St. Sebastian
(an ancient fraternity of knights he had joined), he appeared before a
seated audience at the Galerie Internationale d’Art Contemporain.
He gestured to the orchestra, and they began to play his Monotone Symphony
– a single chord held for twenty minutes, followed by twenty minutes of
silence. (Note: Klein’s musical event has echoes of “4.33” –
the completely silent piece of “music” composed by the avant-garde
American composer John Cage 1912-92). He gestured
again and three naked women came out, smeared themselves with blue paint,
and, under his direction, pressed their bodies against sheets of white
paper on the floor and wall. Klein never touched the work, remaining at
a pure, “immaterial” distance.

Note: In addition to Klein and Mathieu,
other important European abstract
painters of the 50s/60s included: Serge Poliakoff (1906-69), Maria
Helena Vieira da Silva (1908-92), Alfred Manessier (1911-93), Wols
(1913-51), Nicolas de Stael (1914-55),
Asger Jorn (1914-73), Pierre
Soulages (b.1919), Karel Appel (1921-2006),
and the French-Canadian artist Jean-Paul
Riopelle (1923-2002).

Seeking
Immateriality

Meanwhile in 1959 Klein pushed still further
into the terrain of immateriality. At an exhibition in Antwerp he stood
in the space allotted for his work and read a passage from the writings
of Gaston Bachelard, impregnating the space with his spiritual vibrations.
In August, when he decided to abandon Iris Clert for a more established
dealer, he did not tell her directly but went into the gallery, picked
up his work and told Clert’s assistant that his paintings were invisible
and that prospective purchasers should simply write her a check. To her
surprise, the very first person to whom she told this agreed to do it,
so Klein devised his “Ritual for the Relinquishing of Immaterial
Zones of Pictorial Sensibility”. On November 18, 1959 the buyer met
the artist by the Seine, delivered a prescribed quantity of pure gold
in exchange for an “immaterial zone of pictorial sensibility”
and received a receipt which, following the terms of the agreement, the
buyer solemnly burned. The artist then threw half the gold into the river
and the entire transaction was recorded in photographs.

Despite this relentless drive toward the
elimination of the object in art, the female form continued to demand
Klein’s attention. He made some of his “Anthropometries” by
spraying paint around the form of the model to produce a negative imprint
that has associations with the prehistoric
hand stencils in the caves at Pech-Merle (c.25,000 BCE) and Lascaux
(c.17,000 BCE). He also sprayed models with water, had them press themselves
on to the canvas, and then attacked the surface with a flame thrower to
leave a haunting imprint which he likened to the human shadows left on
the walls after the explosion in Hiroshima: “In the desert of the
atomic catastrophe they were a terrible proof of the immaterial permanence
of the flesh.”

In 1959 the Belgian artist Pol Bury (1922-2005)
published a volume of Klein’s writings, which are filled with his visions
of ushering in the new age of telepathy, levitation, and immateriality.
This publication intensified Klein’s commitment to live up to his proclamations.
He not only sold invisible paintings, but to establish his credibility
as the highest initiate and “Messenger of the Age of Levitation,”
he began planning a public demonstration of flying. “He was sure
he could fly,” his girlfriend Rotraut Uecker later reported. “He
used to tell me that at one time monks knew how to levitate, and that
he would get there too. It was an obsession. Like a little child, he really
was convinced he could do it.” The artist Jean Tinguely (1925-1991),
who became friends with Klein in 1955, also remarked on that aspect of
his character: “He read comic books and talked about knights and
the Holy Grail. Those marvelous things that exist in the world of a child
still worked for him.”

Klein asked Pierre Restany to come to his
apartment on January 12, 1960 for a matter of importance. Restany arrived
late to find the artist on his way back from a demonstration of flying,
limping slightly and in a state of ecstasy at having accomplished the
feat of levitation! (Surely the first such example of Body
Art.) Restany was intended to have been a credible witness. Klein’s
girlfriend at the time, Bernadette Allain, did see the leap but later
remarked that for a judo black belt, trained to fall without injuring
himself, it was not spectacular.

When Klein reported his feat he was ridiculed
and disbelieved, so in October he arranged another leap into the sky from
the second story of a building of an undisclosed location in Paris. He
selected a visually unidentifiable spot across from a judo studio and
arranged for a group of judokas whom he trusted to hold a tarpaulin to
catch him. He then had the photographers create an altered photograph
that cut out the net and swore them to secrecy. On Sunday November 27,
1960, the magnificent picture of Klein’s Leap into the Void (captioned
“The Painter of Space Hurling Himself Into the Void”) appeared
on the front page of a four-page newspaper called Dimanche, le journal
d’un seul jour (Sunday, the newspaper of a single day), which Klein
created and distributed to newsstands across Paris. However contrived
the actual event, the realization of this gesture expressed magnificently
Klein’s aesthetic appropriation of all of space and its contents. It was
a simultaneously frightening and exhilarating anticipation of dematerialization
into the womb of infinite space, the void.

Klein’s Demise

In 1959 Klein ceased teaching judo, by
which means he had then been supporting himself. His “beautiful megalomania,”
as Tinguely called it, veered further out of control and even his relationship
with Rotraut came under stress. Early in 1961 she and Klein went for two
months to New York for a show of his work at the Leo
Castelli gallery but the critical reception was a disaster. His mood
was darkening. Back in Paris he started to make “Anthropometries”
with blood; he was preoccupied with death and associated it with his progress
toward dematerialization. Then he received news that a Japanese artist,
influenced by him, had killed himself by leaping from a high building
in Tokyo on to a canvas. He was also still suffering from the humiliating
portrayal in a film by Claude Chabrol of “an artist” making
“Anthropometries”: clearly the film-maker did not see it as
art.

Rotraut became pregnant at the end of the
year, and on January 21, 1962 they had a magnificent church wedding attended
by the Knights of St. Sebastian in full dress. But in the spring he suffered
another stinging humiliation at the Cannes Film Festival when he went
to see footage of himself making “Anthropometries” in the film
Mondo Cane and found that he had been portrayed like a freak in a sideshow.
In mid May he suffered a heart attack after an agitated public exchange
on a panel at the Museum of Decorative Arts in Paris and on June 6, 1962
his heart gave out.

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