A Special Artist’s Life
Yves Klein was born in 1928 in Nice, France. His parents were both painters and because of their work, during his childhood, Yves had the possibility to live both in Nice and Paris. Moreover, he could experience art every day and gradually started making it himself in his late adolescence. He initially had completely devoted his life to judo, his primary occupation until the beginning of the 1950s.
From 1954 on, he decided to be a full-time artist, progressively but definitively abandoning his career as a judoka. Between 1948 and 1953, he traveled a lot, visiting many countries in Europe such as Italy, the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Spain, as well as Japan. These years will later have a particular influence on him and his art.
Books and Illusions
In 1954, Yves Klein published two books, Yves Peintures and Haguenault Peintures. They are full of monochromes, a real hallmark of the artist in the following years. The preface, ending with the signature of the poet and Klein’s friend, Claude Pascal, actually presents black lines in different lengths instead of words. On the other hand, the “representations” of the monochromes are, in fact, real artworks. They are rectangular pieces of paper with the indication of their dimensions (in millimeters), linked to specific cities he had lived in.
We can see here two of the characteristics of Klein’s art: the immateriality of the surface and the love for the monochrome. This latter point, almost an obsession, was alimented by his strong will of “setting free the color from the jail of the line” and showing the world something recalling the absolute and the infinity.
The Revolution: International Klein Blue
The search for the absolute and infinity could not separate from “immateriality” and “invisible”. The first step to express this essence of art was exclusively adopting ultramarine blue.
In 1956, in collaboration with Edouard Adam, a paint supplier working in Montparnasse, Paris, he projected and materially created a specific nuance of blue: the International Klein Blue, or IKB. It included a synthetic resin that is able to maintain the extremely pure intensity of the color. At the time, it was a French pharmaceutical company, the Rhône-Poulenc, which developed this resin with the name Rhodopas.
In 1960, Yves Klein registered the paint formula at the Institut national de la propriété industrielle (INPI), an institution of the French government. He had begun a sort of revolution both in his artistic life and globally.
Le Vide According to Yves Klein
Klein’s revolution did not stop there. He continued to try and go beyond a standard definition of art. Therefore, in 1958, in Paris, he made a personal exposition called La spécialisation de la sensibilité à l’état matière première en sensibilité picturale stabilisée (the specialization of sensibility in the raw material state into stabilized pictorial sensibility), which was however soon called Le vide or The void.
At the entrance, the windows were painted in Klein’s signature blue. On the day of the presentation, Klein offered a blue cocktail to his audience. Inside, he exposed an empty room, with walls and windows painted in white, declared as “filled with his pictorial sensibility”. In other words, he wanted people to perceive the void and the invisible as fully finished artwork. The exposition was so successful that closure was postponed for a week and a documentary later explained it in detail. The journals of the time reported his visionary ideas.