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Lot Essay
In Yasmina Reza's widely acclaimed play ART, a trio of actors are confronted by the notion of a completely white painting, absent of subject, structure and form. Reactions progress from mild bemusement to anger, resentment and outright conflict, but ultimately to tolerance and appreciation. While the audience might laugh at this wonderful vignette of art bigotry - where contemporary art is deemed as bogus and foolish as the Emperor's new clothes - the battle for pure monochrome painting dates back to the mid-1950s and has its historical basis in the revolutionary work of the French artist Yves Klein.
Just as the white canvas in Reza's play becomes a landscape of infinite possibilities, its very blankness encouraging the actors to free their imaginations and find within the pregnant emptiness their own personal meaning and sense of themselves, so did Klein wish to create fields of pure and intense colour that would engage all the senses and liberate the mind. Because a monochrome painting is free from narrative content or inherent symbol, the viewer does not need to limit himself to the domain of rational thought in order to experience it. Instead he is invited by Klein to take a mental and sensory leap into the limitless void of the picture space, and by means of deep contemplation, discover the world of the infinite, the immaterial and the universal.
If all this sounds somewhat esoteric, then it will come as no surprise that Klein was well initiated in the philosophies of Zen Buddhism, and had in fact initially begun his career as a promising judo champion. It was while working in a frame shop in London at the age of 22 in 1949 however that he first discovered the possibilities of monochrome painting. "I have found it!" he proclaimed, showing off some small monochrome gouaches to his amused friends. At last here was, "a means of painting that was against painting, against all the anxieties of life, against everything. It was creation, and creation was health."
This revelation would dictate the rest of Klein's short career. Although at first he painted his monochromes in a whole myriad of intense colours, in 1956 he began what he himself called his "Blue Period". Mixing ultramarine with a synthetic resin in order to retain the brilliance and granular matte quality of the dry pigment (he would later patent the formula as "IKB" - International Klein Blue), he applied the colour onto the support with a commercial paint-roller. Despite their apparent similarity, every monochrome had a different sensibility. "Each blue world of each painting, although the same blue and treated in the same way, presented a completely different essence and atmosphere," noted Klein.
Blue was the ultimate in Klein's search for purity in the form of a single colour. For him, blue signified the indefinable and the boundlessness of space. "Blue has no dimensions, it is beyond dimensions, whereas other colours are not," he explained in 1957. "All colours arouse specific associative ideas, psychologically, material or tangible, while blue suggests at the most the sea and sky, and they are after all in visible nature what is most abstract."
IKB 81 is one of the largest monochromes ever attempted by Klein and exemplifies in its mesmerizing vibrancy and boundless expanse the truly sublime aspect of his art. Stand in front of the painting and one's whole vision is filled with its blue intensity. Its rare landscape format brings to mind an endless sea, an association reinforced by the thin ripples of powdery pigment that radiate like waves on its perfect surface. Its rounded corners helps to heighten the impression of an infinite spatial expansion.
The blue is inviting. Go on. Free yourself and take a leap into the void.
Just as the white canvas in Reza's play becomes a landscape of infinite possibilities, its very blankness encouraging the actors to free their imaginations and find within the pregnant emptiness their own personal meaning and sense of themselves, so did Klein wish to create fields of pure and intense colour that would engage all the senses and liberate the mind. Because a monochrome painting is free from narrative content or inherent symbol, the viewer does not need to limit himself to the domain of rational thought in order to experience it. Instead he is invited by Klein to take a mental and sensory leap into the limitless void of the picture space, and by means of deep contemplation, discover the world of the infinite, the immaterial and the universal.
If all this sounds somewhat esoteric, then it will come as no surprise that Klein was well initiated in the philosophies of Zen Buddhism, and had in fact initially begun his career as a promising judo champion. It was while working in a frame shop in London at the age of 22 in 1949 however that he first discovered the possibilities of monochrome painting. "I have found it!" he proclaimed, showing off some small monochrome gouaches to his amused friends. At last here was, "a means of painting that was against painting, against all the anxieties of life, against everything. It was creation, and creation was health."
This revelation would dictate the rest of Klein's short career. Although at first he painted his monochromes in a whole myriad of intense colours, in 1956 he began what he himself called his "Blue Period". Mixing ultramarine with a synthetic resin in order to retain the brilliance and granular matte quality of the dry pigment (he would later patent the formula as "IKB" - International Klein Blue), he applied the colour onto the support with a commercial paint-roller. Despite their apparent similarity, every monochrome had a different sensibility. "Each blue world of each painting, although the same blue and treated in the same way, presented a completely different essence and atmosphere," noted Klein.
Blue was the ultimate in Klein's search for purity in the form of a single colour. For him, blue signified the indefinable and the boundlessness of space. "Blue has no dimensions, it is beyond dimensions, whereas other colours are not," he explained in 1957. "All colours arouse specific associative ideas, psychologically, material or tangible, while blue suggests at the most the sea and sky, and they are after all in visible nature what is most abstract."
IKB 81 is one of the largest monochromes ever attempted by Klein and exemplifies in its mesmerizing vibrancy and boundless expanse the truly sublime aspect of his art. Stand in front of the painting and one's whole vision is filled with its blue intensity. Its rare landscape format brings to mind an endless sea, an association reinforced by the thin ripples of powdery pigment that radiate like waves on its perfect surface. Its rounded corners helps to heighten the impression of an infinite spatial expansion.
The blue is inviting. Go on. Free yourself and take a leap into the void.