Yves Klein

Paris, Union Centrale des Arts Décoratifs & Centre National d'Art Contemporain, Yves Klein: 1928-1962, January - March 1969
Turin, Galleria Civica d'Arte Moderna, Yves Klein, December 1970
Hanover, Kunstverein; Bern, Kunsthalle Bern, Yves Klein, June - August 1971, cat. no. 37
Berlin, Nationalgalerie; Berlin, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein; Düsseldorf, Städtische Kunsthalle, Yves Klein, June - July 1976
Takanawa, Seibu Museum of Modern Art; Shiga, Museum of Modern Art; Fukushima, Iwaki City Art Museum; Tokyo, Seibu Museum of Art, Yves Klein, July 1985 - February 1986, cat. no. 23, p. 34, illustrated in color
New York, Sidney Janis Gallery, Yves Klein: Monochrome Paintings and Sponge Reliefs, April - May 1986, cat. no. 18

“In working on my pictures in my studio I sometimes used sponges. They became blue very quickly! Obviously, one day I noticed the beauty of the blue in the sponge: at once this working tool became raw material for me. It is that extraordinary faculty of the sponge to become impregnated with whatever may be fluid [sic] that seduced me”.

Yves Klein in Exh. Cat., Houston, Rice University Institute for the Arts, Yves Klein: 1928-1962: a Retrospective, 1982, p. 111

Yves Klein’s RE 40 is a stunning example of Yves Klein’s rare series of Relief Eponges. These sensuously, evocative surfaces provide the viewer with shining examples of Klein’s deeply philosophical investigation into matters of space and form seen through the glass of pure color. Klein’s previous experiments with the monochrome surface (particularly his IKB paintings from 1956-1960) are now enlivened and plasticized through the addition of pigmented sponges to the surface, lending the work an articulated relief. The viewer is thus treated to a stunning drama of palpable and spatial form within the theatre of saturated color. In both its size and stature, RE 40 remains one of the most important examples of this series: a dramatic synthesis of the sensual anthropomorphism of organic mass with an almost Baroque elegance of Klein’s signature color.

More than just ‘creative’, Klein saw the act and art of painting as ‘procreative’. He considered his own paintings to be ‘living autonomous presences’ that ‘create atmospheres’ and ‘sensitive climates’. Indeed, the very tactile qualities of RE 40 afford a number of effects, suggestive of the seabed or the landscape of some unknown planet. Klein’s own notes from around this time show that he was inspired by space travel, and this work was executed the year before Yuri Gagarin would take the first manned space flight. Indeed, the lunar quality of the surface, together with a sense of the mystical and ethereal that is imbued in RE 40, suggest as much. The procreative, rather than creative impetus of Klein’s artistic vision is confirmed when one considers the artist’s thoughts about color. In his L’Aventure Monochrome of 1957 the artist wrote that “For me colors are living beings … [they] are the true inhabitants of space … there are myriads of nuances of all colors, each with its particular worth.” These ‘myriad of nuances’ lend RE 40 an expansive power and vital serenity. Like a divinely cultivated Zen garden, the deliberate composition combines a delicate balance of monochromatic quietude with a dynamic protrusion into real space. Whilst each sponge has its own ‘autonomous life’, they all work in concert with each other, playing out their individual roles within the drama of the whole painting. They erotically undulate over the rich landscape, appearing to levitate above the highly-worked surface. In essence, Klein here expands the traditional boundaries of pictorial space, creating a painting that captivates our gaze, but also questions the dynamics of that gaze. Klein’s genius is to compel the viewer to consider not only why one looks at a painting, but also how.

Klein’s interest in process connects him to a number of other artists, all of whom were making similar investigations in the realm of ‘making’. One finds a nexus between Klein’s Relief Eponges and Jasper Johns' meticulous use of encaustic; Claes Oldenburg's soft sculptures; Lucio Fontana's ruptured canvases and Piero Manzoni’s pleated canvases soaked in kaolin. All of these pioneers carved a niche for themselves and their processes of expression and execution within deeply iconoclastic territory: all the visual experiments Klein made were executed at a time when the Image still remained a concrete symbol and idea (no Image would have meant no Pop Art, for example). Klein opened up the possibility of painting images of ‘nothingness’ (an idea which finds its logical conclusion in his ‘display’ of empty gallery spaces, and his creation of art by throwing gold leaf into the air). Having ‘invented’ his signature deep ultra-marine blue four years prior, he patented International Klein Blue in May 1960, with all the spectacular theatrics appropriate to the discovery of a new aesthetic. Anchored in his deeply-held belief that aesthetic experience could release the individual from the confines of the worldly, Klein's art would aim to surpass even form itself: “What appears is separated from form and becomes immediacy” (Yves Klein in ``Le vrai devient réalité'', ZERO, 1973, p. 86).

The work of Yves Klein thus presents one of the most provocative paradoxes in postwar art: aspiring to overcome all barriers to ‘total physical and spiritual freedom’, it is also one of the purest experiments in form of its time. Relinquishing variations in color as he had earlier revoked line, Klein purifies painting of its conventional attributes only to render the monochrome as a realm for ceaseless experimentation. Klein began to include sponges on the surface of his paintings - as opposed to using sponges, which he chose with fanatical precision from suppliers in Greece and Tunisia, to apply paint to his surfaces - when he began working on a commission from a new theater in Gelsenkirchen, in Germany's Ruhr valley in 1958-1959. Gelsenkirchen's vast window-lined auditorium, entered around a glass-enclosed rotunda, was the perfect site for an artist obsessed with the elements of space and light, and the possibilities they hold for a transformative experience.

The present work is one of the most restrained, gorgeous examples of Klein's austere art. With its irregular pattern of sponges interrupting the otherwise seamless blue canvas, it alludes to the fantasies of other, unearthly territories, to the notion of the terrestre that would be other than our own. Devoted to the work of Gaston Bachelard, the French philosopher of Air and Dreams, and to the Zen philosophy of spiritual and physical harmony that he first encountered in his training as a judo-ka in Yokohama in 1952, Klein surpasses all other artists of his time in the pursuit of the spiritual within art. Flight - with all of its allusions to the infinite, to the unknown, to the unimaginable - opposes itself to form, however, in Klein's sponge paintings, the raw material is transformed into a vessel for surpassing the questions and restrictions of medium, process and even the disavowal of form itself. Embedded in an ethereal ultramarine vacuum, the material trace becomes a trace of the immaterial, otherworldly and transcendent. RE 40 is a majestic example of Yves Klein’s unique artistic language. This is a profoundly lyrical work in which the dematerializing blue pigment enhances both the sponges and the highly textured ground. Moreover, the delicate play of light and shade that moves across the holes of the sponges further animates the entire composition. This is a seminal work that boldly confronts the viewer with a deeply intellectual philosophy of art and life and, yet, leaves the viewer with an overwhelming sense of peace and calm that is so characteristic of Klein’s oeuvre as a whole.