Yves Klein: With the Void, Full Powers

Description

One of the last century's most influential artists, Yves Klein (1928-1962) took the European art scene by storm in a prolific career that lasted only from 1954 to 1962, when he suffered a heart attack at the age of 34. Klein was an innovator who embraced painting, sculpture, performance, photography, music, theater, film, architecture and theoretical writing. Self-identified as "the painter of space," Klein sought to achieve immaterial spirituality through pure color (primarily an ultramarine blue of his own invention-International Klein Blue) and even went so far as to present white galleries emptied of all artworks for his renowned 1958 exhibition of "the Void." His diverse oeuvre represents a pivotal transition from modern art's concern with the material object to contemporary notions of the conceptual nature of art.Yves Klein: With the Void, Full Powers is published to accompany the first major retrospective of the artist's work in the United States in nearly 30 years. It includes examples from all of Klein's major series, including his Anthropometries, Cosmogonies, fire paintings, planetary reliefs and blue monochromes, as well as selections of his lesser-known gold and pink monochromes, body and sponge reliefs, "air architecture" and immaterial works. Essays by curators Kerry Brougher and Philippe Vergne, Klein scholar Klaus Ottmann, art historian Kaira M. Cabanas and curatorial fellow Andria Hickey, as well as archival materials and translations of Klein's published and unpublished writings, offer insights into the artist's endeavors and process. Born in Nice, France, in 1928, Yves Klein created what he considered his first artwork when he signed the sky above Nice in 1947, making his earliest attempt to capture the immaterial. The artist carved out new aesthetic and theoretical territory based on his study of the mystical sect Rosicrucianism, philosophical and poetic investigations of space and science, and the practice of Judo, which he described as "the discovery of the human body in a spiritual space."

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Overcoming the Problematics of Art: The Writings of Yves Klein

Description

The first complete collection of the major writings of the visionary French conceptual artist YVES KLEIN to be published in English translation. Klein was an artist with a keen philosophical mind, yet deeply spiritual. In his art and in his writings he constructed a vision of the future art that would purify the soul from the ashes of his painting. Translated, with an introduction by KLAUS OTTMANN

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Yves Klein: Fire at the Heart of the Void (Art & Knowledge)

Description

Translated by Andrea Loselle. With an introduction by Klaus Ottmann. RESTANY's groundbreaking, exegetic study show show the myth of fire was the culmination of the artist's quest for the immaterial. The visionary French conceptual artist and "painter of the Void" Yves Klein (1928-1962) was an artist with a keen philosophical mind, yet deeply spiritual.

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Yves Klein: Expressing the Immaterial

Description

In April 1958, Yves Klein presented an exhibition in a white room at the Iris Clert gallery in Paris, devoid of all objects save for an empty cabinet. This milestone show, later known as the "exhibition of the void," debuted Klein's "immaterialization of painting": "an ambience, a pictorial climate that is invisible but present." Shortly afterward, Klein upped the stakes even further by offering ritualized sales of "zones of immaterial pictorial sensibility"--i.e., "zones" of nothing--in exchange for a certain weight of fine gold, half of which he then in turn dispatched into the Seine (the other half was used to make gold monochromes). Denys Riout's illustrated study is the first devoted entirely to Klein's immaterial works. Drawing on both known and newly discovered documentation, Riout portrays this development in Klein's thought against its cultural backdrop and attendant postwar philosophic and religious discussions on the idea of the void.

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Yves the Provocateur: Yves Klein and Twentieth-Century Art

Description

For seven years, from 1956 to 1962, a young French artist electrified the European art world with visual, conceptual and performance art works far ahead of their time. His rise was wildly celebrated by some as the appearance of a prophetic genius, and derisively dismissed by others as scandalous nonsense. His monochrome paintings, body art works, fire paintings, conceptual exhibitions and music, and monumental public space works threatened to upend the very categories of art, in both Europe and America. Indeed, after his tragically premature death in 1962, some of the most far-reaching transformations in contemporary art would follow directly in his wake. But by the 1970s his reputation seemed headed for oblivion, until in 1977 a young classics scholar at Rice University, Thomas McEvilley, proposed Klein for a retrospective show to Dominique deMenil, then director of the Rice gallery, and wrote several texts about Klein that would transform our understanding of Yves Klein's aesthetics. The project grew to involve major institutions, resulting in 1982 with exhibitions in Houston, New York, Paris and Chicago. Virtually overnight Yves Klein's art reentered the art canon. Coincidentally, the career of an important critic was launched. Yves the Provocateur provides the "skeleton key" to clearly examine the full dimensions of Klein's accomplishment. In two opening essays, McEvilley briefly surveys and places Klein's art into context. Then, in the centerpiece essay -- which amounts to a miniature critical biography bearing all the best features of a novella -- he traces the formative and crucial events in Klein's life. Finally, he describes Klein's intellectual development, demonstrating how Klein embedded and parodied in his work the philosophical system of a particular form of Rosicrucianism. An extensive chronology is appended at the end. Yves the Provocateur collects Thomas McEvilley's writings on Klein which rejuvenated Klein's stature and hitherto have only been available in journals and hard-to-find exhibition catalogues. Together they constitute an important document in contemporary art history. The publication of this book is timed to coincide with the major Klein retrospective at the Hirshhorn Gallery in Washington, DC on May 16, 2010, and later at the Walker Arts Center, Minneapolis, on October 23.

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Yves Klein: USA

Description

This book, produced in collaboration with the Yves Klein Archives, recounts the relationship between Yves Klein, one of the major artists of the postwar period, and the United States-a relationship of mutual fascination and reciprocal influence. Numerous documents, many of them previously unpublished, bear witness to the close ties that Klein forged with the U.S. The rising stars of the early 1960s American art scene (Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns and Frank Stella, plus Marcel Duchamp) all make an appearance here, as does President Eisenhower! The book includes an interview with Rotraut Klein-Moquay, who talks about her trip to the United States with Yves Klein in 1961, as well as the artist's comments on his own work. It also includes a hitherto unpublished essay by the American critic Robert Pincus-Witten, who met the protagonists of this story when he worked for dealer Leo Castelli.

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