Yves Klein Blue
The current issue of Artforum has a review of last year's Frankfurt exhibition of Yves Klein's work. There is a picture of the installation of Klein's blue rectangles (why not circles, ovals or triangles; why is everything in painting in parallelograms?) at the Schirn Kunsthalle.
When I was in New York a few years ago I stopped in at a gallery in Chelsea, as much to get out of the bitter February cold as anything else.
The gallery had a library of sorts and I plopped down on a chair to thaw out and picked up some of the magazines and books that they had to pass the time. A lot of them were on Yves Klein, maybe the gallery specialized in his work.
I had never heard of Yves Klein and it was there that I first saw International Klein Blue and what Klein did with it in his art.
Trying to put one's reaction to a work of art into words is almost oxymoronic. It is art's ability to go beyond the intellect and to the soul that makes it unique and language is a tool of intellect's creation. That is apologia for the following.
I was enchanted by IKB. Technically it is, the review in Artforum says, "a mixture of dry pigment and synthetic resin."
The magic of IKB is a combination of the color and it's texture. Klein hit upon a color of such complex beauty in itself that I think it would stand on its own as a creation. The viewer can get an idea of what a painting in IKB would look like from Artforum's photograph of the blue rectangles installment in the Schirn Kunsthalle.
The installation room is wonderfully constructed to show the power of the color. It is U-shaped with the base of the U squared off at ninety degrees angles. The visitor approaches the room and the eye is drawn to the U's base where, on a wall of the purest white a horizantally-oriented blue rectangle is hung. There is obvious religious symbolism here.
It is not clear to me from the photograph if the white of the walls is luminescent or if it an artifact of the camera's flash but the horizontal painting at the base of the U is surrounded by a cloud-like aurora of white.
The cloud does not obscure the horizontal painting at all and as I look at it repeatedly it appears to be a deliberate part of the installation, perhaps to give the painting, and the whole installation, an ethereal appearance. If so, that doesn't work for me. The paintings are magnetic enough without Hollywood special effects but if the cloud is the camera's artifact it's a weird, and to me, not understandable artifact.
Along each side of the U are hung two other rectangles each, these vertically oriented. The rectangles are all of identical dimension. The floor of the room is immaculate blonde hardwood.
The cloud aside, IKB's magic is apparent in this room. It is a thrilling, positive, "up" color, with some power but not aggression.
Klein took this wondrous color and not only made monochrome paintings out of it but also covered sculpture in it. There's a Venus de Milo in Klein's blue as well as a Nike of Samothrace and a Dying Slave. Klein also did facial casts of his friends and a globe in IKB.
It is in these sculptures that the other component of IKB's power, it's texture, comes through. The dry pigment absorbs light rather than reflects it and it's soft granulation transforms the sculpture much more completely than a coating of IKB paint would. The sculpture, already 3-d is recreated by a surface that is also 3-d and in this magical color also.
I don't know how seriously, or not, the art cognescenti take Klein's work but if art is quintessentially something that "moves" a viewer then it is great art to me.
-Benjamin Harris
The current issue of Artforum has a review of last year's Frankfurt exhibition of Yves Klein's work. There is a picture of the installation of Klein's blue rectangles (why not circles, ovals or triangles; why is everything in painting in parallelograms?) at the Schirn Kunsthalle.
When I was in New York a few years ago I stopped in at a gallery in Chelsea, as much to get out of the bitter February cold as anything else.
The gallery had a library of sorts and I plopped down on a chair to thaw out and picked up some of the magazines and books that they had to pass the time. A lot of them were on Yves Klein, maybe the gallery specialized in his work.
I had never heard of Yves Klein and it was there that I first saw International Klein Blue and what Klein did with it in his art.
Trying to put one's reaction to a work of art into words is almost oxymoronic. It is art's ability to go beyond the intellect and to the soul that makes it unique and language is a tool of intellect's creation. That is apologia for the following.
I was enchanted by IKB. Technically it is, the review in Artforum says, "a mixture of dry pigment and synthetic resin."
The magic of IKB is a combination of the color and it's texture. Klein hit upon a color of such complex beauty in itself that I think it would stand on its own as a creation. The viewer can get an idea of what a painting in IKB would look like from Artforum's photograph of the blue rectangles installment in the Schirn Kunsthalle.
The installation room is wonderfully constructed to show the power of the color. It is U-shaped with the base of the U squared off at ninety degrees angles. The visitor approaches the room and the eye is drawn to the U's base where, on a wall of the purest white a horizantally-oriented blue rectangle is hung. There is obvious religious symbolism here.
It is not clear to me from the photograph if the white of the walls is luminescent or if it an artifact of the camera's flash but the horizontal painting at the base of the U is surrounded by a cloud-like aurora of white.
The cloud does not obscure the horizontal painting at all and as I look at it repeatedly it appears to be a deliberate part of the installation, perhaps to give the painting, and the whole installation, an ethereal appearance. If so, that doesn't work for me. The paintings are magnetic enough without Hollywood special effects but if the cloud is the camera's artifact it's a weird, and to me, not understandable artifact.
Along each side of the U are hung two other rectangles each, these vertically oriented. The rectangles are all of identical dimension. The floor of the room is immaculate blonde hardwood.
The cloud aside, IKB's magic is apparent in this room. It is a thrilling, positive, "up" color, with some power but not aggression.
Klein took this wondrous color and not only made monochrome paintings out of it but also covered sculpture in it. There's a Venus de Milo in Klein's blue as well as a Nike of Samothrace and a Dying Slave. Klein also did facial casts of his friends and a globe in IKB.
It is in these sculptures that the other component of IKB's power, it's texture, comes through. The dry pigment absorbs light rather than reflects it and it's soft granulation transforms the sculpture much more completely than a coating of IKB paint would. The sculpture, already 3-d is recreated by a surface that is also 3-d and in this magical color also.
I don't know how seriously, or not, the art cognescenti take Klein's work but if art is quintessentially something that "moves" a viewer then it is great art to me.
-Benjamin Harris
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