He overlaid on his physical works a set of semantic dictions and contradictions, in the forms of essays, gestures, symbolic events, and photographs, which interacted with the physical works on many levels. Klein was a dedicated craftsman (as well as a despiser of craft as an end in itself), and his works, even when conceptually anti-art, have a vivid and arresting sensual presence, a directness that, as Susan Sontag said in another context, “frees us from the itch to interpret.” 5 But in this case it was the artist himself who was never freed from the itch to interpret. It includes objects and events in all media, interpenetrated, mutually referenced, and carefully layered into a semantic stack. His oeuvre has a mazelike coherence, with circular corridors and cul-de-sacs deliberately built into it. In the seven years before his death he produced over a thousand art objects in various media, as well as many prophetic works of nonstatic art and numerous writings. A year after his visit to America, he died of a heart attack at the age of 34. Klein had Leapt past the American consciousness too quickly, and never had a chance to set it right. There was little sense of his work overall, of either its varied sensual appeal or its deep-structural coherence and swift intellectual interplay his reputation solidified around a series of Neo-Dada art jokes. His show was regarded as a one-liner, and so were the fragments of his broader career that floated across from Europe, usually inaccurately. But not even in Los Angeles was the labyrinth of Klein’s gestures, his poses, his mutually cancelling intentionalities, perceived as a coherent whole. To this day Klein is regarded in Los Angeles as in some sense a “California” artist: particularly for his use of space and silence as primary materials, his works in natural phenomena such as fire and water, his use of his own body as the locus of the art event, his reckless mixing of artistic codes and roles, and his deliberate ridicule of his own serious works. When, after two months in New York, Klein moved on to Los Angeles for a show of his works at the Virginia Dwan Gallery, he found a somewhat friendlier reception. In reference to the same exhibition, the World-Journal-Tribune called him, “a Dali-junior grade.” 4 3 Six years later John Canaday, reviewing the Jewish Museum show of his works for the New York Times, called him “a vaudevillian,” “full panoplied in cap and bells,” whose work is “only stuntmanship.” “I Got the Yves Klein Blues,” the headline on this story read. Koan of French Neo-Dada.” Time called his works “tricks” and his reputation in Europe “a fad.” “Have you ever been all blue?” inquired the New York Herald Tribune. Art News called him “the latest sugar-Dada to jet in from the Parisian common market,” and “the George M. The art press, which did not bother to investigate the wider context of his work, found him easy prey. New York artists virtually boycotted his show of monochrome paintings in “International Klein Blue” (his own patented formula of blue) at Leo Castelli’s gallery. When he arrived in New York in April 1961, on his only visit to this country, the New York School was arrayed against the fading hegemony of the School of Paris, 2 and Klein, with his fanciful personae and self-ordained titles-Champion of Color, Proprietor of Color, Painter of Space-looked like Paris come slumming again. Klein, who is widely regarded in Europe as the most important French artist since the Second World War, has remained, in the North American consciousness, primarily a showman and a clown. Klein’s own fate in this country has been the same: he has been assimilated out of context. The poem excerpted above was found on the second page. Beside the headline was the remarkable photograph, captioned underneath: “ Le peintre de l’espace se jette dans le vide!” (The painter of space launches himself into the void!) Characteristically two-edged, Klein’s point was not merely self-advertisement, but provocation it included an invitation to the readers to effect a Leap, or an analogue of the Leap, themselves. Klein’s imitation newspaper, Dimanche 27 Novembre: Le journal d’un seul jour (Sunday November 27th: the newspaper of a single day), his contribution to the Paris Festival d’Art d’Avant-garde in 1960, headlined the phrase: THEATRE DU VIDE (THEATER OF THE VOID). Originally part of a literary document, the photograph contributed to an intricate mingling of visual and verbal signifiers, in Klein’s most characteristic style. THE MOST FAMOUS IMAGE OF Yves Klein-the startling photograph of the artist, dressed in business suit and necktie, leaping into flight from a second-floor ledge on a quiet Paris street-is usually seen out of context.
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