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Making something out of nothing:

Yves Klein’s Le Vide.

Jason Beale (2006)

Iris Clert invites you to honor, with all your affective presence, the lucid and

positive advent of a certain reign of the sensitive. This manifestation of perceptive

synthesis confirms Yves Klein's pictorial quest for an ecstatic and immediately

communicable emotion.

Le Vide invitation 1958 (Klein 1982)

The object of this endeavor: to create, establish, and present to the public a

palpable pictorial state in the limits of a picture gallery. In other words, creation of

an ambience, a genuine pictorial climate, and, therefore, an invisible one. This

invisible pictorial state within the gallery space should be so present and endowed

with autonomous life that it should literally be what has hitherto been regarded as

the best overall definition of painting: radiance.

Yves Klein, Sorbonne lecture 1959 (Klein 1982)

______________________________

The French artist Yves Klein (1928-62) professed an optimistic belief in the

liberation of human ‘sensibility’, and his work as a whole dramatizes the elemental

forces of nature - air, fire, earth and water – in relationship with the human

aspiration for transcendence. His worldview was inspired by various philosophies,

among them Judo, Zen, Rosicrucianism, and phenomenology. From this

combination of influences he developed a wide ranging body of work remarkably

consistent in aesthetic and conceptual terms. As stated in his Sorbonne lecture of

1959, Klein felt that the forms and perspective of linear composition were “like the

bars on the window of a prison” (Harrison & Wood 2003: 819). His embracing of

colour and space, as aesthetic and affective realities in themselves, led him to a

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concept of the void as the underlying reality of all phenomena. In its positive

generative qualities Klein’s emptiness had more in common with the eastern

philosophy of Zen, than with the meaningless existential void explored by writers

such as Jean-Paul Sartre (Westgeest 1996:126).

Klein’s work is usually identified with monochrome painting, especially his

trademark International Klein Blue (IKB) pigment applied with commercial paint

rollers. As early as 1948 Klein had ‘signed’ the blue sky of his hometown Nice, in

his words creating his “first and biggest monochrome” (Stich 1994: 19). During the

early 1950s his interest in the monochrome developed, and was influenced by his

time in Japan as a Judo student (1952-53). Klein’s aesthetic of ‘the empty field’

has been compared to the use of space as a positive element in traditional

Japanese arts, as seen in meditative screen paintings and Zen rock gardens

(Westgeest 1996: 125).

The blue monochrome was seen by Klein as a visual analogue for the void itself, a

view he found supported in the phenomenology of Gaston Bachelard, “First there is

nothing, next there is a depth of nothingness, then a profundity of blue…”

(Harrison & Wood 2003: 819). Monochrome painting was not new of course. In the

1910s Kasimir Malevich had developed Suprematist monochrome compositions,

followed in 1921 by truly non-compositional monochromes in red, yellow and blue

by Alexander Rodchenko. In the 1930s Polish artist Wladslaw Strzeminski

developed Unism, a movement using sculptured monochrome surfaces. Later, the

truly featureless monochrome was resurrected again by Robert Rauschenberg with

his White Paintings of 1951. At the same time Rauschenberg also produced a

number of body print photograms with his wife Susan Weil, prefiguring Klein’s own

Anthropometries or nude body prints. Other precedents for aspects of Klein’s work

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include the sponge sculptures of Jean Dubuffet, the conceptual music of John Cage,

and the absurdist antics of Dada, Surrealism, and Lettrism.

La specialization de la sensibilite a l’etat de matiere premiere en sensibilite

picturale stabilize (The Specialization of Sensibility in the Raw Material State of

Stabilized Pictorial Sensibility) was an empty gallery, the walls painted white. More

simply known as Le Vide (The Void) it was on display from April 28 to May 15 1958

at Galerie Iris Clert, Paris. Descriptions of the exhibition inevitably focus on the

opening night. The exterior window was painted blue and the entrance lobby

framed with an enormous blue theatre curtain, while uniformed Republican guards

and complimentary blue cocktails were on hand to welcome the visitors. Thanks to

an enormous publicity campaign (including thousands of postcards mailed with

monochrome blue stamps), almost 3,000 people crammed the street and the

gallery space, requiring 3 wagons of police to control the mob. Klein himself wrote

an amusing diary of the night, relishing the drama of the event. It was so popular

it drew 200 visitors a day and had to be extended for a week. According to Klein,

“frequently people remain inside for hours without saying a word, and some

tremble or begin to cry” (Klein 1982).

Apart from the famous 1958 show, Klein presented voids in various forms as part

of other exhibitions. An empty room was included in solo shows in 1957 and 1961,

while immaterial works were included in group shows in 1959 and 1960. In 1962

Klein created a gallery void as “a documentary photo event”, the photograph

appearing in a group show in the same gallery space a few months later (Stich

1994: 155). More famous than these manifestations were the seven sales of Zones

of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility which Klein made between 1959 and 1962.

Special certificates for immaterial zones were sold for a weight of gold. Some of

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these certificates were then ritually burnt, while Klein threw the gold into the River

Seine, in the process restoring these manifestations of the void to their original

immaterial state.

Klein’s infatuation with the void and its spiritual powers was admittedly presented

through verbose quasi-mystical commentary and attention-seeking performances.

Yet this is often combined with an underlying comic sensibility, as seen in his

outlandish utopian theories (air architecture) and absurdist conceptual pieces

(Theatre of the Void). His photomontage Leap Into the Void (1960) is the most

famous example of his tongue in cheek depiction of the artist aspiring to

transcendence. The subtle irony is that the fall that the viewer expects to follow

has been eternally delayed in the absolute certainty and stillness of the leap itself.

Despite the various precursors for Klein’s work, he remains significant for creating

a unique synthesis of avant-garde approaches. In his combination of conceptual

and performance elements Klein “reinvested avant-garde strategies with

irrationality, metaphysics, cult and ritual” (Buchloch 1995).

Klein also produced a large body of paintings and objects which share an absence

of the artist’s expressive gesture. Instead Klein used elements from the world

around him to shape the work – among them pure pigment, sponges, body

imprints, and fire. They have a beauty and simplicity that have sustained Klein’s

reputation and prevented it from collapsing into the appearance of empty rhetoric.

These works are symbolic manifestations of energies that exist in nature, and at

the same time are illustrations of the power of the void itself.

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Bibliography

Buchloch, Benjamin (1995) ‘Klein and Poses – Artist Yves Klein – Into the Blue.’

ArtForum, Summer 1995.

Harrison, Charles & Wood, Paul, eds. (2003) Art in Theory 1900-2000: An

Anthology of Changing Ideas. Blackwell Publishing, Malden MA.

Klein, Yves (1982) ‘Le Vide Performance (The Void).’ From Yves Klein 1928-1962:

A Retrospective. Institute for the Arts, Rice University, Houston. Internet:

http://web.tiscali.it/nouveaurealisme/ENG/klein5.htm

Stich, Sidra (1994) Yves Klein. Cantz Verlag, Stuttgart.

Westgeest, Helen (1996) Zen in the Fifties: Interaction in Art Between East and

West. Wanders Uitgevers, Zwolle.

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Kasimir Malevich – White Square 1918 Alexander Rodchenko – Pure Yellow Colour 1921

Wladyslaw Strzeminski - Unist Composition 1931 Robert Rauschenberg – White Painting 1951

Yves Klein – Monochrome Blue (IKB 181) 1956

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Yves Klein - La specialization de la sensibilite a l’etat de matiere premiere en sensibilite picturale stabilize

(Le Vide), Galerie Iris Clert, Paris, April 28-May 15 1958.

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Yves Klein standing inside Les surfaces et blocs de sensibilite picturale invisible, Galerie Colette Alendy

May 1957.

Yves Klein presenting a Zone of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility, Hessenhuis exhibition, Antwerp, March

17, 1959.

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Yves Klein -

1959 Untitled Blue Sponge Sculpture 1960 Leap Into the Void

1961 Untitled Shroud Anthropometry 1961 Untitled Fire Painting