ABOUT YVES KLINE
Born in Nice in 1928, to Fred Klein (1898-1990) and Marie Raymond (1908-1989), both painters, Yves Klein is an autodidact. During his childhood the family lives between Paris and Nice. At a very young age, Yves worked in his aunt’s bookshop in Nice where he befriends the future artist Arman and the poet Claude Pascal.
Inclined to traveling, between 1948 and 1953 he first goes to Italy, then to England - where he works at a frame maker’s learning gold-leaf gilding- to Ireland, Spain and finally to Japan.
Over these years he devotes a lot of time to judo: holder of the prestigious rank of 4th Dan, he teaches it regularly and documents it with films and writings. From the end of the 40’s his travel diaries mention the creation of monochromes on paper, while at the same time, he imagines a Monotone-Silence Symphony and writes film scripts on art.
Yves Klein, born in 1928 in Nice, had as a first vocation to be a judoka. It was only back in Paris, in 1954, that he dedicated himself fully to art, setting out on his ‘adventure into monochrome’.
Animated by a quest to ‘liberate colour from the prison that is the line’, Yves Klein directed his attention to the monochrome which, to him, was the only form of painting that allowed to ‘make visible the absolute’.
By choosing to express feeling rather than figurative form, Yves Klein moved beyond ideas of artistic representation, conceiving the work of art instead as a trace of communication between the artist and the world; invisible truth made visible. His works, he said, were to be ‘the ashes of his art’, traces of that which the eye could not see.
Yves Klein’s practice revealed of new way of conceptualising the role of the artist, conceiving his whole life as an artwork. ‘Art is everywhere that the artist goes’, he once declared. According to him, beauty existed everywhere, but in a state of invisibility. His task was to to capture beauty wherever it might be found, in matter as in air.
The artist used blue as the vehicle for his quest to capture immateriality and the infinite. His celebrated bluer-than-blue hue, soon to be named ‘IKB’ (International Klein Blue), radiates colourful waves, engaging not only the eyes of the viewer, but in fact allowing us see with our souls, to read with our imaginations.
From monochromes, to the void, to his ‘technique of living brushes’ or ‘Anthropometry’; by way of his deployment of nature’s elements in order to manifest their creative life-force; and his use of gold as a portal to the absolute; Yves Klein developed a ground-breaking practice that broke down boundaries between conceptual art, sculpture, painting, and performance.
Just before dying, Yves Klein told a friend, "I am going to go into the biggest studio in the world, and I will only do immaterial works."
Between May 1954 and June 6, 1962, the date of his death, Yves Klein burned his life to make a flamboyant work that marked his era and still shines today.
SOURCE: http://www.yvesklein.com/en/biographie/
QUOTE BY YVES KLEIN
‘Art is everywhere that the artist goes’
WHAT I WISH FOR YOU TODAY
BE YOURSELF EVERYWHERE YOU GO; BE WHO ARE IN EVERYTHING IN YOU DO - IN THAT THERE IS IRREFUTABLE BEAUTY!