Ecole de Nice

Yves Klein

One day, on the beach, three young men, Klein, Arman and Claude Pascal decided to share the world. Klein chose the boundless sky, signed his name on its other side and started his monochrome adventure. Son of painters Fred Klein and Marie Raymon, Yves Klein was born in Nice in 1928. He thought of any type of pictures as jail windows, whose bars would be represented by the lines.

He came into monochrome space, into immeasurable pictorial sensitivity, becoming, out of any proportion, dimension, volumetrically impregnated by The Whole, where no one before him came. He explained: "Space gave me not only the opportunity to own the Blue, but also the Color, since it is also terminology of legal acts in Space. In 1955, he exhibits in Paris a score of monochrome pictures, made of different colors, and finds out that the public, in front of the ogee moulding where hang several paintings of different colors, pieces together the elements of a decorative polychromy, and cannot find the Color of one painting. That leads him into the Blue period.

He decides to present at Iris Clert: The immaterial Blue. During an outrageous event, models, smeared with color, rolled themselves onto canvas under his leadership, at the rythm of music played by a string orchestra. The use of human being for his work was, according to him, the spiritual impression revealed by the blue monochromie.

On June 6, 1962, Yves Klein dies from a heart attack, leaving behind him a work full of promises, invention, and yet much more serious than it could appear.