preview

Klein Blue Essay

Good Essays
Open Document
Yves Klein, one of the most prominent and controversial French artist, emerged in the middle of the XX century, remembered above all for his use of single color and the rich shade of ultramarine that he made his own: International Klein Blue.
Klein´s art emerged from serious circumstances. France in the late 1940s was still nation traumatized by World War II. The cultural center of gravity had moved across the Atlantic to New York. The artists who remained in Paris, or at least the good ones, were producing post-apocalyptic work, and out of the same rubble came the much younger Klein.
The abstract painting that dominated French art in the 1950s was invariably premised on the notion that an artist could communicate with the viewer through the power of…show more content…
The three friends divided the universe between themselves: Arman claimed the materiality of the earth, Pascal appropriated language and words and Klein possessed ‘’the void’’-the planet empty of all matter. Klein embarked on a realistic-imaginative daydream into the depths of the universe, where he clamed to have inscribed his name in the sky.
The void enlighten in the sky led Klein to experiment in painting, music and performance. The Monotone-Silence Symphony from 1949, a piece containing a single chord sustained for twenty minutes followed by twenty minutes of meditative silence. It symbolized the sound pitch emitted from the monochrome blue sky, or the void emphasizing universal harmony.
In the period between 1848 and 1952, Klein lived in London and began to assist in London frame shop of Robert Savage, learning basic painting techniques and using raw pigments and gilding. He was determinate to evoke sensations and emotions independent of line, abstracted symbols or rendered objects, believing the monochromatic surface released the painting from materiality through the totality of pure
Get Access
Related
Get Access