Yves Klein

Yves Klein is one of the most extraordinary and influential figures in post-war avant-garde art. In less than a decade - up until his untimely death in 1962 - he forged a career and built up a body of work that together have influenced and inspired contemporaries and subsequent generations of artists worldwide. Klein sought in his art to liberate the senses, to heighten our sensibility and to intensify our experience of life. In this comprehensive review of his art and ideas, Sidra Stich examines the full range of his diverse creative output - his paintings and sculptures, installations, meticulously documented performances, his copious writings, and his proposals and drawings for visionary projects - and sets them within the context of the art of the time to assess Klein's originality and his legacy.

In a short but intense creative life of just seven years, Klein painted over a thousand pictures which are among the classics of modern art. This book offers a sample of his work.

A clever, quirky read-aloud biography of a leading modern artist, for kids Artist Yves Klein always thought about how he could surprise his audience. One day, he decided that he would only paint in one color - blue. He painted canvases, globes, branches, gallery floors, and even covered people in blue paint. Klein's story is told here with wit and eccentricity, perfectly paired with black-line illustrations and blue splashes galore. Fausto Gilberti brings movement, life, and whimsy to the true life story of one of the most important modern French artists of our time.

Yves Klein was regarded as a visionary even by his contemporaries. An enfant terrible and outstanding judo enthusiast whose spectacular performances attracted considerable attention in the art world, Klein created a following that only intensified in the wake of his premature death. Having anticipated numerous movements such as Happenings, Performance, Land and Body Art, and Conceptual Art, Klein's manifold oeuvre, realized within a period of only eight years, continues to exercise a decisive influence to this day. This comprehensive retrospective, presented by the Schirn Kunsthalle gallery in Frankfurt, includes over 100 works representing Klein's entire career from his first monochromes in orange, yellow, green, pink, black, and white, to his famous Klein blue monochromes, his sponge relief sculptures, his much-discussed Anthropometries, for which he used female models as live brushes, his monogold paintings, and his last experiments with fire and elements of nature.

At a moment when the progress of technology brings the first half of the twentieth century to the depths of the Middle Ages or the late Empire, the message I bear within me is that of life and nature, and I would have you share it, in as much as my companions will know my thinking even better than myself: for they are thousands, they will reflect it thousands of times, while I myself am only one... At the crossroads of light where I have arrived, there are but two possible paths: the path of obscurity, withdrawal, maceration, meditation, and renunciation, and the more arduous and glorious path of sacrifice to the community.

Denounced as a charlatan and fêted as a mystic, French artist Yves Klein (1928–62) scandalized the art world with his enthusiastic embrace of postwar mass culture and his exploitation of controversial publicity tactics. Today, we know Yves Klein not only as one of the most radical artists of the postwar period, but also as an iconic role model for contemporary practices—he reinvented abstract painting, conceived new horizons for performance art, and was a trailblazer in the realm of land, body, and conceptual art. In this new critical biography, Nuit Banai examines the relationship between Klein’s brief life and his wide repertoire of artistic practices. While surveying the artist’s life, Banai establishes that Klein’s brilliance was, above all, performative, revealing that he created and inhabited myriad public identities: bourgeois, judo expert, painter, avant-garde artist, collaborator, politician, fascist, and showman, among others. With each persona, Banai shows, Klein invented new ways to communicate his paradoxical message of spiritual enlightenment and Dada iconoclasm to a rapt and unsuspecting audience. Illuminating the many facets of Klein’s influential artistic career, Yves Klein is an invaluable introduction to the inventor of the inimitable International Klein Blue.

How Yves Klein's formative period in Japan formed his dual pursuits of art and judo Yves Klein (1928-62) first traveled to Japan as a young man in 1952, motivated primarily by his interest in judo. During his 15 months abroad, Klein had numerous important creative and philosophical revelations that culminated in the launch of his artistic career upon his return to Paris. Prepared in collaboration with the Yves Klein Archives, this volume details Klein's relationship with Japan through nearly 150 archival documents, photographs and letters, inviting the reader on his journey from martial arts to fine art at the very beginning of his career. Along the way we learn of Klein's important encounters with art critic Takachiyo Uemura, painter Keizo Koyama and design professor Masaki Yamaguchi. Yves Klein: Japan provides essential insight into the origins of Klein's oeuvre as both a groundbreaking visual artist and prolific writer whose short-lived career helped to transform postwar art.