Description
Yves Klein — the man who patented blue. Nuit Banai’s Critical Lives volume introduces Yves Klein: the French artist who turned a single color — International Klein Blue, which he formally registered as his own — into a philosophical statement, and in one blazing decade anticipated conceptual art, performance art, and minimalism.
From the Anthropometries — nude models used as “living brushes” — to the famous leap into the void (a photomontage, but who cares), to the exhibitions of empty galleries and the sales of invisible artworks, Klein’s brief career, ended by his death at 34, burned with ideas about immateriality, ritual, and the infinite — ideas the art world is still digesting sixty years on, and that still provoke and delight in equal measure.
Compact and lucid, this is the ideal entry point to postwar European art’s most charismatic provocateur — and to the moment art stopped being about objects at all. Blue was only the beginning of what Klein imagined.
In eight short years, Yves Klein (1928–1962) detonated the post-war art world. In this new critical biography — volume 54 in Reaktion Books’ acclaimed Critical Lives series — art historian Nuit Banai examines the relationship between Klein’s brief but incandescent life and his wide repertoire of artistic practices.
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nKlein invented his own brand of colour, the inimitable International Klein Blue, and with it produced monochromes of startling purity. But paint was only the beginning: his Anthropometries turned nude models into “living paintbrushes,” his Leap into the Void became one of the century’s iconic images, and his performances pushed art toward the immaterial. Denounced as a charlatan and feted as a mystic, he scandalized the art establishment while reinventing abstract painting and opening new horizons for performance, land, body, and conceptual art.
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nBanai shows that Klein’s brilliance was above all performative — he created and inhabited a cast of public identities, from judo expert to showman, to deliver his paradoxical message of spiritual enlightenment and Dada iconoclasm.
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nAt 224 pages, this is an invaluable introduction to one of the twentieth century’s most radical artists — for students, scholars, and anyone curious about the man who turned blue into a philosophy.
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