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Lot Essay
‘First there is nothing, then a deep nothingness, and then a blue depth.’
—YVES KLEIN
Painted in 1959, at the height of the artist’s career, this Untitled Blue Monochrome (IKB 311) is one of Yves Klein’s iconic monochromes in blue, a precious, small-scale window into the infinitude and immateriality of Klein’s distinctive ultramarine. Rendered in Klein’s signature International Klein Blue, the purity and depth of its hypnotic colour envelops the viewer in the optical quality of the blue itself – an experience of unobstructed communication between man and colour in which, as Klein himself put it, the viewer ‘can impregnate himself with colour and colour impregnates itself in him' (Y. Klein, quoted in S. Stitch, Yves Klein, Cologne 1994, p. 66). However, the work also shows the artist experimenting with the texture and matière of his paint; where his monochromes often present the viewer with a smooth, gleaming patina of light and colour, here Klein applies his brushstrokes thickly, leaving the surface veined with impasto threads of paint that creep across the paper, casting slivers of shadow over the work. In doing so, the work takes on an irresistible tactility, while continuing to draw the viewer deeper into consideration of the colour itself. As Pepe Karmel has written, ‘Texture pulls the viewer’s eye into the picture and away from its borders, insuring it will function as a field and not as a shape. Klein thus prevents individual shapes from emerging from the field. The monochrome color seems to float above the textured surface, supported by it but curiously detached from it’ (P. Karmel, Yves Klein: A Career Survey, exh. cat., L Arts, New York, 2005, p. 13.).
This distinction between field and shape is vital to Klein’s entire practice in monochrome, and his obsession in particular with blue. Klein envisioned his work in terms of a long battle for supremacy between the two elements of painting – colour and line. An acolyte of Delacroix, the master-colourist pitted against the neo-classical line drawing of Ingres, Klein’s monochromes attempt to refine colour from shape, removing it from any lineal restriction at all – even the line implied by the collocation of two tones on one canvas. ‘When there are two colours in a painting, a struggle is engaged;’ Klein wrote, ‘the viewer may extract a refined pleasure from the permanent spectacle of this struggle between two colours in the psychological and emotional realm and perhaps extract a refined pleasure, but it is one that is no less morbid from a pure philosophical and human vantage point’ (Y. Klein, in K. Ottmann (ed.), Overcoming the Problematics of Art: The Writings of Yves Klein, Putnam, CN, 2007, p. 140). Instead, in the expanse of one, impossibly vivid blue, the viewer would be able to immerse themselves in its tonal unity: an emotionally complex experience that was for Klein cosmic, emancipatory, and ultimately, what he believed to be truly human. To stand in front of Klein’s blue is to be drawn into this field of experience, at once losing and finding oneself in the pure perception of colour.
—YVES KLEIN
Painted in 1959, at the height of the artist’s career, this Untitled Blue Monochrome (IKB 311) is one of Yves Klein’s iconic monochromes in blue, a precious, small-scale window into the infinitude and immateriality of Klein’s distinctive ultramarine. Rendered in Klein’s signature International Klein Blue, the purity and depth of its hypnotic colour envelops the viewer in the optical quality of the blue itself – an experience of unobstructed communication between man and colour in which, as Klein himself put it, the viewer ‘can impregnate himself with colour and colour impregnates itself in him' (Y. Klein, quoted in S. Stitch, Yves Klein, Cologne 1994, p. 66). However, the work also shows the artist experimenting with the texture and matière of his paint; where his monochromes often present the viewer with a smooth, gleaming patina of light and colour, here Klein applies his brushstrokes thickly, leaving the surface veined with impasto threads of paint that creep across the paper, casting slivers of shadow over the work. In doing so, the work takes on an irresistible tactility, while continuing to draw the viewer deeper into consideration of the colour itself. As Pepe Karmel has written, ‘Texture pulls the viewer’s eye into the picture and away from its borders, insuring it will function as a field and not as a shape. Klein thus prevents individual shapes from emerging from the field. The monochrome color seems to float above the textured surface, supported by it but curiously detached from it’ (P. Karmel, Yves Klein: A Career Survey, exh. cat., L Arts, New York, 2005, p. 13.).
This distinction between field and shape is vital to Klein’s entire practice in monochrome, and his obsession in particular with blue. Klein envisioned his work in terms of a long battle for supremacy between the two elements of painting – colour and line. An acolyte of Delacroix, the master-colourist pitted against the neo-classical line drawing of Ingres, Klein’s monochromes attempt to refine colour from shape, removing it from any lineal restriction at all – even the line implied by the collocation of two tones on one canvas. ‘When there are two colours in a painting, a struggle is engaged;’ Klein wrote, ‘the viewer may extract a refined pleasure from the permanent spectacle of this struggle between two colours in the psychological and emotional realm and perhaps extract a refined pleasure, but it is one that is no less morbid from a pure philosophical and human vantage point’ (Y. Klein, in K. Ottmann (ed.), Overcoming the Problematics of Art: The Writings of Yves Klein, Putnam, CN, 2007, p. 140). Instead, in the expanse of one, impossibly vivid blue, the viewer would be able to immerse themselves in its tonal unity: an emotionally complex experience that was for Klein cosmic, emancipatory, and ultimately, what he believed to be truly human. To stand in front of Klein’s blue is to be drawn into this field of experience, at once losing and finding oneself in the pure perception of colour.