en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yves_Klein
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttavd5wIxSo[/youtube]
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yj90EaXazus[/youtube]
He called himself a realist. 
Le monochrome, part 1 – just lovely. A meditation in color, tone, shape, and texture – a meta-expression of the self as art. I wonder why blue is the color of infinity, unlike other colors. Maybe it’s the associations with sky and sea, the boundless symbols of consciousness and God.
I just had a weirdness seeing Thomas McEvilley’s name in the wiki article on Klein. McEvilley was my Classical Civilization professor in college and had a great impact on my view of Christianity, which ultimately turned me in new and wonderful directions. He was the toughest professor I ever had, making us memorize whole ancient Greek and Roman constitutions, but his lectures were brilliant and that’s where the real value was for me. Later, I also had a friend who had dated his son and knew the family for a while. He was an odd one but he was indeed the teacher of the century at that moment in time when I was ready for a new direction. Other great teachers came along after that, but he was the first that really changed the spiritual direction of my life and opened my mind to new possibilities. What a synchronicity. I am transported in such great memories.
Yes, I believe that’s how he saw it. In his art, he tried to capture the immaterial. The blue for him represented complete freedom, or 'spirit and [immaterial] sensibility that the color of the sky and the sea alone can produce." His first artwork, according to him, was created when he imagined signing the blue sky above Nice in 1947.
I think he was an extremely sensitive kind of man (maybe like van gogh-very attuned to his environment/himself in his own way). He lived in his own world, but his perspectives are nonetheless intriguing.
Here are some quotes by him:
-For me, each nuance of a color is in some way an individual, a being who is not only from the same race as the base color, but who definitely possesses a distinct character and personal soul.
-It was pure chance that led me to judo. Judo has helped me to understand that pictorial space is above al the product of spiritual exercises. Judo is in fact the discovery by the human body of a spiritual space.
-I remain detached and distant, but it is under my eyes and my orders that the work of art must create itself (Klein directed on 9 March 1960 for the first time nude models who were ‘painting’ the walls with their moving naked bodies; “Anthropometry”, fh). Then, when the creation starts, I stand there, present at the ceremony, immaculate, calm, relaxed, perfectly aware of what is going on and ready to welcome the work of art that is coming into existence in the tangible world… …Hours of preperation for something that is excecuted, with extreme precision, in a few minutes. Just as with a judo throw.
-It was then that I remembered the colour blue, the blue of the sky in nice that was at the origin of my career as monochromist. I started work towards the end of 1956 and in 1957 I had an exhibition in Milan which consisted entirely of what I dared to call my ‘Epoque bleue’.
-Blue has no dimensions, it is beyond dimensions, whereas the other colours are not… …All colours arouse specific associative ideas, psychologically material or tangible, while blue suggests at most the sea and sky, and they, after all, are in actual, visible nature what is most abstract.
-I had left the visible, physical blue at the door, outside, in the street. The real blue was inside, the blue of the profundity of space, the blue of my kingdom, of our kingdom!… …the immaterialisation of blue, the coloured space that can not be seen but which we impregnate ourselves with… …A space of blue sensibility within the frame of the white walls of the gallery.
-As I lay stretched upon the beach of Nice, I began to feel hatred for birds which flew back and forth across my blue sky, cloudless sky, because they tried to bore holes in my greatest and most beautiful work.
-At the Galerie Colette Allendy I exhibited some twenty monochrome surfaces, all in different colours: greens, reds, yellows, purples, blues, oranges… …and so found myself at the start of my career in this style… …I was trying to show colour, but I realised at the private view that the public were prisoners of a preconceived point of view and that, confronted with all these surfaces of different colours, they responded far more to the inter-relationship of the different propositions, they reconstituted the elements of a decorative polychromy.
-Dubbed as a Knight of the Order of Saint Sebastian, I espoused the cause of pure colour, which has been invaded by guile, occupied and oppressed in cowardly fashion by line and its manifestation; drawing in Art. I aimed to defend and deliver it, and lead it to triumph and final glory.
-I am against the line and all its consequences: contours, forms, composition. All paintings of whatever sort, figuratives or abstract, seem to me like prison windows in which the lines, precisely are the bars.
-It was in 1947 that the idea of a conscious monochrome vision came to me. … …Pure, existential space was regularly winking at me, each time in a more impressive manner, and this sensation of total freedom attracted me so powerfully that I painted some monochrome surfaces just to ‘see’, to ‘see’ with my own eyes what existential sensibility granted me; absolute freedom! But each time I could neither imagine or think of the possibility of considering this as a painting, a picture, until the day when I said: Why not?
-Sponges are the portraits of the readers of my monochromes who,after having travelled in the blue of my paintings,came back totally impregnated in sensibility like the sponges.
-I did not like the nothing, and it is thus that I met the empty, the deep empty, the depth of the blue.
-I dash out to the banks of the river (river the ‘Loup’, at Cagnes, France, fh) and find myself amongst the rushes and the reeds. I grind some pigment over all this and the wind makes their slender stalks bend and appliqués them with precision and delicacy on to my canvas, which I thus offer to quivering nature: I obtain a vegetal mark. Then it starts to rain; a fine spring rain: I expose my canvas to the rain… …and I have the mark of the rain! – a mark of an atmospheric event.
-Today anyone who paints space must actually go into space to paint, but he must there go without any faking, and neither in an aeroplane, a parachute nor a rocket; he must go there by his own means, an autonomous, individual force; in a word, he must be capable of levitating.
-Recently my work with color has led me, in spite of myself, to search little by little, with some assistance (from the observer, from the translator), for the realization of matter, and I have decided to end the battle. My paintings are now invisible and I would like to show them in a clear and positive manner.
In the second video, that picture of the leap into the void is just amazing. Even though it’s a trick of photography, the effect is still wonderful.
I think that Klein was definitely postmodern and avant garde, but he was more than that. He captured the spatial emptiness of zen as an artistic frame in which to project the world from your own view. I suppose it’s not surprising that he was also a martial arts master.
From the opposite pov, Mozart said that music was in the spaces. Klein might have said that the music is the space, and he made it basically blue or else empty. So interesting.
I saw an IKB canvas not long ago, at the Tate Modern. It’s really almost painfully blue.
Its strange that I keep coming back to the same conclusion; the more concession I make to such artists and to such art, the more I become convinced of their impotence. And the more I want to say that they are not artists. And it is sad. I actually like these eccentric people, because they have some really interesting ideas inside of them, but they cannot manifest them into physical form. They just cannot do it.
Kleins sponges are an example of this.
I can understand his inspiration and his views through his words, but without them, the artwork is meaningless and petty. Some works of art can speak without their master, not this one, and not many others like this, and I assume this is because it is all about the artist, himself. His works cannot be separated from him. His attempt at capturing the immaterial via material objects, as shown to general public in art galleries, has failed. I think it would have been better if he just wrote an essay about his perspectives.