IKB
One day on a beach
three boys with a future
divided up the world.
He got the sky
and signed his name
on its perfect surface
then lay back looking up
at what he had created
and thought that God
must be envious.
But how he hated the birds
that flew across his perfect
cloudless canvas
boring holes into his
most beautiful work.
Searching for a blue to beat
the creator at his own game
he suspended pure pigment,
like particles of heaven,
in crystal resin. Young girls,
their breasts and pubic hair
smeared in ultramarine,
pinned down his sky -
as he orchestrated
in a tuxedo and white gloves -
with limbs like living paint brushes,
though the lines of the actual body
held no interest.
For at night he dreamt only of
alchemy, of gravity and grace,
and stepping from that high
window to float above the city street
in an endless void of blue.
Yves Klein's photograph 'Leap into the Void'
shows him floating over a street in an apparent
bid to overcome gravity. He was a believer in
Rosicrucianism and his pigment, Kleinian Blue,
became known as IKB.
*
The otherworldly leapings of Yves Klein: a Bow-Wow Shop footnote
If you had been approaching the Centre Pompidou in Paris from the direction of Les Halles on the morning of 9 October 2006, you would suddenly have spotted, suspended from the outside of the building, the most famous photographic image of the artist Yves Klein that was ever contrived by this man of multiple contrivances and surprises. Klein seemed to be flinging himself out from some upper window into the air above a Paris street, arms spread wide like a bird. Will he die? Will he fly?
The photograph itself first appeared on the front page of a newspaper entitled Dimanche, which was published on one day only, 27 November 1960, and it ran above a headline which read 'A man in space!' This fake newspaper served, from start to finish, as a vehicle, artfully contrived by Yves Klein himself, to publicise himself and his work. Two years later this tumultuous, eye-catching man who, in his brief, seven-year career, managed to pioneer several different kinds of of art-making practice - body art, installation art, performance art - was dead, at the age of 34, killed not by some self-generated stunt, but by a heart attack.
The man and his work were inextricably intertwined. Klein regarded himself as his greatest artistic creation. Without all this visual and auditory evidence of his humour, his histrionic behaviour, his work would mean less than it does.
As Sue Hubbard's fine poem makes clear to us, Klein's name will forever be associated with a particular colour, a densely saturated ultramarine blue of his own creation. So much of his work - his monochromatic paintings and his sponge sculptures, for example - used it. He invented it by mixing raw pigment with a quick-drying, industrially manufactured, poisonous fixative called Rhodopas M6OA. This special formula, later patented as his trademark, became known as I.K.B.: International Klein Blue. The use of this colour is a key to an understanding of his entire, brief career as an artist, which was abruptly terminated by heart disease.
Why a key? Because Klein believed that particular colours radiated energies. Blue, he believed, 'evoked the immaterial within visible and tangible nature'. It had, in short, a mystical quality. Some part of him, it seems, was convinced that his paintings would have an enormous spiritual influence upon the state of France - and perhaps the entire world. Was he therefore a lunatic - or just a harmless, crack-brained fanatic?
Klein lived for his art, and thanks to having been born into a wealthy family, he was able to do little other than pursue his art-making with a ruthless dedication. Photographs show that, like the Dadaists before him, he was something of a dandy and a showman. He painted in a white bow tie and tuxedo. He was never seen out of a snappy suit. Klein was not content to make art. He had to live it too through audacious acts of self-publicity - which ranged from flinging himself out of a window, releasing hundreds of balloons into the air, to showing a gallery of work which consisted of nothing but white walls. Trouble was caused by the fact that he charged for entry.
A major show of his work, staged at the Schirnkunsthalle in Frankfurt in 2005, presented the onlooker with a series of mock-ups of exhibition spaces to show us in what directions, and how meteorically quickly, Klein developed. We began with a room of monochromatic paintings, all untitled, of various sizes and in a variety of colours - red, orange, green, blue, pink. The paintings' surfaces varied enormously - one was as smooth as baize, another absorbent as a sponge, a third as dry and crackled as an arid landscape. A fourth possessed the sheen of a glazed tile. None of these paintings were made with a brush - Klein didn't like the idea of the individual artist's signature. They were all painted with a roller. In a central vitrine we could examine a catalogue from 1954 created, yet again, by Klein the prankster. It consisted of plates of works for an exhibition which never took place because the works were never created. There was space for text - a whole series of black, ruled lines - but no words.
As we strolled through room after room, we began to realise that Klein embodied an extraordinary mixture of high seriousness and low comedy. He truly engaged with serious issues - how, for example, was an artist to paint the immaterial? Was it even possible? Could there be some new way of representing the essence of the human form? One way might be by inviting naked models to roll around in puddles of paint, and then stand up and make bodily impressions upon canvas attached to the wall - Klein would be present to orchestrate the whole thing, to show the girls how hard to press on, and which bits of their body to use. Was it entirely fortuitous that the models were always young and glamorous? Perhaps it was a spiritual thing. Around 1960, he created a whole series of paintings using this method, some quite enormous, called 'Anthropometries'. And they are surprisingly engaging - all those wild, fleeting, ghostly gestural marks.
But his best idea of all involved that blue again - and some sponges. One whole room was devoted to an installation of untitled sponge sculptures dating from 1958-60, beautifully set off by a long raised white stage. Each one, saturated in that unearthly blue, curled upwards from its long metal stalk. Some of the stalks were fixed into stone. They looked like fantastic, undersea forms, almost hieratic in their weird, otherworldly presence. Yes, there was something about truly unearthly - if not otherworldly - about this blue, you had to admit.
Klein wasn't the first to discover the spiritual potential of blue by any means - hadn't Giotto and Fra Angelico, for example, done so before him?