Yves Klein

Early days: Yves Klein (April 28, 1928 - June 6, 1962), Paris, was a French painter, sculptor, and recital artist. With no formal artistic guidance, he started in the midst of 1950s to display the nonobjective paintings in which a canvas was evenly covered in a single colour, generally blue; he also used the method for sculptural figures and relief’s. In 1958 he created a near-riot with an “exhibition of emptiness,” an empty gallery painted white, titled “The Void”. He used a multiplicity of unorthodox techniques to produce pictures, such as imprints of the human body on paper or canvas. His work was intentionally intense and practical.

Career:

Even though Klein had painted monochromes as early as 1949, and held the earliest private exhibition of this work in 1950, his first and foremost public showing was the publication of the Artist's book “Yves: Peintures” in November 1954. Parodying a cultured catalogue, the volume featured a sequence of intense monochromes connected to a variety of cities he had lived in during the previous years. Yves: Peintures expected his first two shows of oil paintings, at the Club des Solitaires, Paris, October 1955 and the Yves: Proposition monochromes at Gallery Colette Allendy, February 1956.

These shows, which displayed orange, yellow, red, pink and blue monochromes, intensely disappointed Klein, as people went from painting to painting, connecting them collectively as a sort of mosaic.