Yves Klein is the French artist most known and with dimensions of second half of the xxth century. His works are negotiated besides at the full price - 6,1 million dollars for one paintingof in 2000, in New York. Yves Klein, owes his celebrity with the invention of his famous blue, of which it deposited, in 1960, the patent which always bears its name, the IKB (International Klein Blue). This pigment overseas, which inspired to him the sky of the Mediterranean very as much as the frescos of Giotto of the Saint-François basilica, in Assise, is at the base of its Monochromic.
Only sons of a couple of painters, Klein arrived at art by the means of the judo, which it practises as of adolescence. Its passion is such as in 1952, at the 24 years age, he travels out to for Japan in order to follow the teaching of the Masters there. It will return from there, the following year, girdles black 4th daN and, especially, convinced that the judo is the “discovery of a spiritual space by the human body”. Because the young adult taking into consideration ember is initially a mystic. It is thus not a chance if, about the same time, it is initiated with the esoteric philosophy of the Rosicrucian brotherhood, announcing “the end of the age of the matter and the paddle of that of space”.
As of its first exhibition, in 1955, it designs its work like a ceaseless search of spirituality, independently of the means of expression used. Because its multiform work is not limited to the “blue revolution”. Through the monochromic ones, which can be also avoided of pink or of gold - its other colors fetishes - it seeks to reach the absolute. And, when it carries out its Paintings of fire to the flame thrower or its Cosmogonies - tables which it delivers to the bad weather so that they keep the trace of the wind or the rain - it is still the immateriality which it aims. To help it to achieve his goals, Klein calls upon, on the councils of an aunt, holy Rita, owner of the desperate causes. He will achieve even several pilgrimages in Italy in his monastery of Cascia.
Obviously, the poet and the idealist who it is were not always understood. Quickly become, thanks to its innate direction of the communication, the idol of Montparnasse, holding living room in Sélect and the Cupola, it was also the prey of the gibes. Especially when its overflowing enthusiasm leads it to the limits of the limits. Thus, this April 28, 1958, when the guests cross the door of the gallery Iris Clert, street of the Art schools, where an exhibition is devoted to him, they discover with stupor a naked space with the coldly repainted walls of white. Criticisms, furious, baptize the event the “Exposure of the vacuum”, without putting questions more. “The vacuum is a concept different from nothing”, rétorque Klein, an ironic bit and all with its search of dematerialization. Two years later, according to this same logic, here which decides to sell “zones of immaterial pictorial sensitivity” - non-existent works by definition - in exchange of small quantities of gold, piers then in the Seine. At the time of a ceremony, the purchaser - the Italian writer Dino Buzzati was one of them - sees himself then allotting a receipt, that it must burn in front of witnesses so that the transaction remains purely immaterial. It is on this impetus that Yves Klein will achieve, in 1960, its famous jump in the vacuum. On a photograph which will prove to be an assembly, one sees it throwing top of a house and remaining in balance between sky and ground, as in levitation, ultimate dream of the man. In reality, it falls down in a cover tended by friends judokas (revoilà). But, such Icare, it will finish by burning the wings, embanked, at 34 years, by a heart attack. Lengthened on its bed, right before dying, Klein entrusts to a friend: “I will enter the largest workshop of the world. And I will make only immaterial works there.”