Yves Klein

Killed by his own Immaterial Quest?

A brief psychoanalytic biographical reflection on the development of Klein’s poetic
existentialist body of work.

Submitted By

Mateusz Kuiavski
#0100----0

Professor: Iain Cameron

Date: March 2nd, 2006
Course: NPF 036
Media Studies: Art History / Theories of Art
 Yves Klein was an artist with existentialist visions. He was a mystic, “absolutely,

a Jesus”1, said his wife. A critical reflection on the development of his ideas through a

documented anthology of his work leads us through the life of a man who took on an the

immense task of translating high esoteric doctrine into the language of art in his time.

The intensity of Klein’s creative output is comparable to that of the French poet Arthur

Rimbaud. Both bring turbulence to their arts, and pass away at an early age. Klein dies

from heart attacks at the age of thirty-four, under rather mysterious circumstances.

Klein is of French nationality born into a family of artists in 1928 Nice. He lives

there throughout much of his life in the middle of which is a World War. Klein never

obtains a higher education but continues to enrich his body with Judo, eventually

acquiring a 4th dan belt, the highest possible rank in Europe at that time. “Judo helped me

understand that pictorial space is above all the product of spiritual exercise…the

discovery of the human body of a spiritual space.”2 Klein has a vital interest in what may

be called conscious dreaming, during which, one summer at the age of eighteen, he signs

the sky as his own while his colleagues claim the earth and sea respectively. It is of little

surprise that around this time he comes across something of magical proportions,

something to influence the rest of his life and works: The Rosicrucian3 cosmo-

conception, a book by Max Heindel.

Based on traditional Mystic Christianity, the cosmogony is a summary of ways of

understanding the order of man within the universe. Klein is involved with this school of

1
Gilbert Perlain, Bruno Cora. Long Live the Immaterial! (NY: Delano Greenridge Editions, 2000), 112.
2
Pierre Rastany, Yves Klein. (Paris: Chene / Hachette, 1982), 22.
3
Rosicrucian is a term derived from the words Rosy and Cross.
consciousness for several years and his work begins to take forms influenced by pursuits

of the essence of things, the point of origin of everything.

Klein suggests a reworking of the ultimate in abstraction which has been

previously explored by artists such as Rodchenko and Rauschenberg and other

contemporaries. He begins with monochromes as the experiences of raw color forms.

Eventually, the reasons for blue monochromes converge from various points. For one,

the Rosicrucian belief identifies blue as the highest of the colors, that of spirit freed from

material form. In a diagram outlining the prayer to the Holy Father, blue is used to depict

the lines referring to spirit4. Traditionally throughout the ages, a certain ultramarine was

the most precious of pigments because it could only be imported from a specific area

over great distances. This sentence is the author’s warning of downloaded text. Klein

chose an available pigment but used it in its raw form as opposed to having it mixed and

compounded chemically. He patented an ultramarine (beyond the sea) blue and named it

International Klein Blue. “I painted monochrome surfaces in order to see, to see with my

own eyes what was visible in the absolute.”5 From when he began, he knew his

monochromes were a preparation for something greater. “My monochrome pictures are

not my definite works, but the preparation for my works. They are left-overs from my

creative process” 6 and elsewhere…”the paintings are but ashes of my art”6. When his

patented International Klein Blue color pigment is used to make the works, the base

evaporates leaving an optical experience of pure dry pigment, the particular color blue.

The blue is a deep sky complimentary to the orange sun after sunset. The atmosphere

4
Max Heindel, The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception or Mystic Christianity. (Mt. Ecclesia, Oceanside,
California: The Rosicrucian Fellowship, 1909), 443.
5 6
Perlain, Long Live., 62.
between day and night. This profound blue is most vibrant in La Vague IKB 160a (1957),

used as a scale model for his proposal of work at the Gelsenkirchen Opera. The texture is

reminiscent of the ocean surface from a low flying plane: crests of ripples in

perpendicular relations, the vertical waves being the main rift of the currents, thus much

larger. The painting is not flat and this gives it a range of reflected qualities of blue

depending on the angle of viewing. Somewhere within the hues settles the most powerful

current, Klein’s pigment in proper light.

Blue is the vital power of Klein’s explorations of his being. There is an obvious

dominance of his color patent in his repertoire. For pictorial possibilities he progresses

from elements of pigment to monochromes to immateriality. He paints objects such as

the, globe terrestre bleu (1957), a model globe. The sponges he uses are later adapted as

works, sculpture eponge sans titre (1958). Nude models in his anthropometries de

l’epoche bleu series are covered in blue and used as brushes on canvas which he directs,

accompanied by a monotone symphony, or as he called it “audible silence”. His

elemental work with fire, earth, wind and rain was also done with blue, such as for

example, cosmogonie pluie(1961) as were the relief portraits of his friends, portrait relief

de Claude Pascal, Arman, et Martial Raysse. (1962). His exhibition invitations, personal

gratuities and the paper used to sign the Constitutive of the New Realist Group all

contained blue as a dominant element. Finally, his works of the void are in effect, the

continuation of his blue pieces as they transcend the blue images and provide the raw

experience of their sensibility, the spiritual realm. “I left the physical blue…the real blue
was inside, the blue of the profundity of space…of our kingdom. The immaterialization

of blue, the colored space that cannot be seen but which we impregnate ourselves with.”6

How Klein came to use his particular blue can be traced to his sincere pursuits of

his impressions of the world he experienced. For a while Klein worked in his father’s

friends gallery shop where he learned guilding with gold leaf. “What material, what a

marvelous school of respect for pictorial matter.”7 Around this time he has an

enlightening experience of color forms in raw states, “…the pure pigments in powder

form…they have a sheen and an extraordinary life of their own.”7 He begins

experimenting with monochromes of various hues and finds blue to contain the essence

of something he would pursue for the rest of his life. “All colors arouse specific

associative ideas…while blue suggests at the most the sea and sky, and they after all, are

in actual, visible nature what is most abstract.”8

Klein has strong convictions to work with monochrome forms. He reverts

thousands of years by turning to pure pigment, acknowledging the human imprint as the

oldest form of all rites. The relationship with his own work in monochromes was one of

enlightenment, “I felt myself in the ALL”8. Klein had to fight his way into his first

exhibitions even with his mother’s artistic connections. He was at first rejected for lack

of composition within his monochrome work. However, his convictions eventually led

the way. “All paintings of whatever sort, figurative or abstract seem to me like prison

6
Gilbert Perlain, Bruno Cora. Long Live the Immaterial! (NY: Delano Greenridge Editions, 2000), 35.
7
Ibid., 142.
8
Ibid., 32.
windows in which the lines, precisely are the bars. The beholder of painting with lines,

forms and composition remains a prisoner of his five senses.”9

Klein’s eventual investigations of the representation of immaterial space in which

his monochromes reside and in relation to their essential aim deal with the nature of our

experiences of the physical realm. Klein becomes interested in the void as the possibility

of a type of image, an experience, an immaterial pictorial sensibility. The Rosicrucian

explanation of the book of Genesis lays the grounding for Klein’s work, “…the universe

is created not our of nothing as is commonly understood but out of ever-existing

Essence…to the Rosicrucian, as to any occult school, there is no such thing as empty or

void Space…Space is Spirit in its attenuated form, while matter is crystallized Space or

Spirit.”10 The teaching professes a dualistic view of spiritual being: the form and the life

within. Thus life and form originate in spirit, which exists in space. This is Klein’s realm

of the space of immaterial pictorial sensibility. In 1959 he holds a gallery exhibition

titled “vision in motion”. During the event, he designates an areas by proclaiming their

space: “Pictorial sensibility in raw material state, specialized and stabilized by me…by

pronouncing these few words on my arrival which have made the blood of this spatial

sensibility flow…sensibility’s blood is blue. The price of blood can never be money, it

must be gold.”11

9
Gilbert Perlain, Bruno Cora. Long Live the Immaterial! (NY: Delano Greenridge Editions, 2000), 71.
10
Max Heindel, The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception or Mystic Christianity. (Mt. Ecclesia, Oceanside,
California: The Rosicrucian Fellowship, 1909), 323.
11
Perlain, Long Live., p 75.
 As the roof separates us from the sky so the frame and screen separate from the

horizon. The contemporary relevance of Klein’s pursuits of the void is evident in current

innovative materials development in architecture and software design in computing.

Material technology used in architecture shapes our environment and therefore

experience of life. The construction elements of sound, scent and light can be considered

immaterials of future architecture. Such immaterials can be designed to inform of non-

physical “boundaries” and “thresholds”. A recent Harvard University graduate level

publication on experimental materials of architecture states, “It is conceivable that we

will soon be able to create invincible materials …at the molecular level where materiality

is rendered invisible.”12 The movement from painting to photography to cinema to

computer graphics, at the advent of electronics, is the current software trend towards

immaterial art. In contemporary terms, if electronic art can be defined by the physical

space it occupies, by the kind of matter it shapes then hardware is material and software

inside a computer is immaterial. This sentence is the author’s warning of downloaded

text. Furthermore, interactive installation-based possibilities of digital computing allow

for a reevaluation of the experience of presenting works of art in a given space. In the

same way, Klein’s voids are corporeal interactive experiences of painting. Merely being

in the presence of the void, one is part of it. The work merges the viewer with

representation, the subject and the object. The experience of Klein’s work is corporeal

and draws awareness of the impressions of space on our being. To achieve this, Klein

uses technology of the spiritual realm. “The authentic quality of the painting, its very

12
Toshiko Mori, ed. Immaterial / Ultramaterial. Architecture, Design and Materials. (Harvard Design
School. New York, NY: George Braziller, Inc., 2002), 56.
being once created is found beyond the visible, in pictorial sensibility in the raw material

state.”13 Klein’s immaterial works serve as “homage to the fragility of finite material

reality”13, a poetic grounding which stems form the connection made in the interaction,

the questioning between the experiencer and the work.

Leonardo had said, “The painter always paints himself”. If we are to accept

Klein’s void as empty nothingness then Klein, in this light, is nothing. If the void is the

great substrate, the cosmic mystery of life, then Klein paints himself as a being within.

Furthermore, as an instrumental piece, Klein’s exploration of the void questions the

authorship and ownership of our corporeal selves. Material is to the void as sound is to

silence. We experience neither silence nor the void due to the constraints of our bodies,

yet both are essential to our existence. “It was the ritual that remained important, not the

artwork or the void”14.

The Rosicrucian Cosmogony states, “Death ends all means to deny existence of

anything beyond the material world.” Working from such a divine order of

consciousness, Klein falls ill having experienced his work being treated as insignificant

and humorously superstitious. Some photographs of him in this time reveal a transfixed

gaze, concerned and under pressure. At the Cannes Film festival of 1962 he exits the

premiere of “Mondo Cane” humiliated. The film throws a montage of his

anthropometries wildly out of context, his nude models presented as young ladies
13
Tom Sherman, The “Finished Work of Art” is a Thing of The Past. (Stanford University. Revised
January 11, 1999). http://www.stanford.edu/class/history34q/readings/MediaArchaeology/sherman.htm,
Feb 20, 2006.
14
Jennifer Grant, Yves Klein’s Zones of Immaterial Space: The Questioning of Ownership, Exhibition and
Aura. (University of Western Ontario. Revised August 27, 2004).
http://www.uwo.ca/visarts/projects/kleinmystery/galleries/jen.htm, Feb 15, 2006.
waving. He suffers a heart attack shortly thereafter and another one after the vernisage of

his relief portraits of 1962. In his passing in mid May of 1962, he leaves behind a wife

and an unborn child.

Klein is responsible for perpetuating the task of revealing the esoteric horizon and

providing a new awareness of space. He trusted himself as much as his audiences in the

challenge. In our expanding urban world of spatial distractions, Yves Klein gives us hope

with the void.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Barnet, Sylvan. A short guide to writing about Art. United States: LeHigh Press, Inc,
2003.

Frankl, Viktor. Man’s Search for Meaning: an introduction to logotherapy. Boston:

Beacon Press, 1959.

Grant, Jennifer. Yves Klein’s Zones of Immaterial Space: The Questioning of

Ownership, Exhibition and Aura. University of Western Ontario. August 27, 2004.
http://www.uwo.ca/visarts/projects/kleinmystery/galleries/jen.htm, Feb 15, 2006.

Heindel, Max. The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception or Mystic Christianity. Mt. Ecclesia,

Oceanside, California: The Rosicrucian Fellowship, 1909.

Klein, Yves. Selected Writings 1928-1962. London: The Tate Gallery, 1974.

Lund, David. The Conscious Self, the Immaterial Center of Subjective States. NY:
Humanity Books, 2005.

Mori, Toshiko ed. Immaterial / Ultramaterial. Architecture, Design and Materials.

Harvard Design School. New York, NY: George Braziller, Inc., 2002.

Moszynska, Anna. Abstract Art. London: Thames and Hudson, 1995.

Perlain Gilbert, Bruno Cora. Long Live the Immaterial! NY: Delano Greenridge
Editions, 2000.

Rastany, Pierre. Yves Klein. Paris: Chene / Hachette, 1982.

Sherman, Tom. The “Finished Work of Art” is a Thing of The Past. Stanford University.
January 11, 1999.
http://www.stanford.edu/class/history34q/readings/MediaArchaeology/sherman.htm, Feb
20, 2006.