Klein

Taschen Basic Art

by Hannah Weitemeier

Yves Klein (1928-1962) conquered the world of art, declaring that 'a new world calls for a new man'. In a short but intense creative life of just seven years, Klein painted over a thousand pictures which are among the classics of modern art. This book offers a sample of his work.

Genres: Art, Nonfiction, Biography, Art History

96 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 1995

Reviews

[Mielou!! · Rating 4 out of 5]

un de mes artistes favoris !

[Mahatma · Rating 4 out of 5]

Boeiend inzicht achter de man. De tekst is vrij pover met veel herhaling, maar de uitgave is verder verzorgd.

De anekdote over de fluitspeler blijft me bij.

[Francesca · Rating 4 out of 5]

Breve libro, meno di 100 pagine per farci conoscere Klein, attraverso le sue opere e una stringata biografia. Molte le foto e pure ben fatte, ben stampato, bella la carta, Taschen non delude e per poco più di € 2,00 vale sicuramente la pena avere qualche numero della collezione.

[Dennis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Terribly pretentious writing but I like the artist’s work.

[Courtland Bethune · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Taschen art books are always a delight!

Yves Klein's body of work and way of thinking is quite inspirational.

[Fiachra · Rating 2 out of 5]

Great art, not great writing. The author succeeds in painting a vivid picture of the artist and his personality, but her interpretations of the work seem clumsy and pretentious.

[N. N. Santiago · Rating 2 out of 5]

Photographs have trouble communicating the radiance of the colour in Klein's work, especially of the monochrome paintings. Of the work represented, the ANT series of body-painting transmits well enough, but the sculptures come out the best (especially S41, Blue Venus), thanks to greater scope for lighting and shadow to help convey some of the famous "hovering" of the pigment.

Hannah Weitemeier contributes an essay from which one gets very little biographic sense of Klein, and only slightly more of a critical one of his work. The writing is often very woolly:

Taken from their familiar context and reworked, the found objects were raised to the status of art. Yet unlike the American Pop artists, who in the 1960s would react similarly to man-made consumer products, Klein treated his finds in a way that placed his work in a typically European context of meaning. Whether prefabricated or natural in origin, each object was conceived and reworked in an attempt to lend it a dynamic harmony that would stimulate individual perception, and a recognition that things habitually considered part of the external world possessed the same fundamental structure and laws as those which govern the individual organism. In one form or another, each piece contained covert allusions to a reciprocal influence between the subjective and objective references of a self-contained artistic universe.

In other words - I think - by infusing the artist's actions with the 'meaning' of a piece, it makes the viewer question the fault-lines between one's subjective experience of things, and those things' objective existence. Or maybe here, rather than questioning, it stresses the commonalities. So far, so Duchamp 101. But how is this a 'European context of meaning' rather than an American one? Strictly speaking, is this even context, or is it the 'meaning' derived from that context?

Elsewhere, Weitemeier employs that old undergraduate's trick, word-count-padding tangential 'context' to be raised and then quickly dropped:

Klein had learned the technique of gilding in London in 1949, and was awed at the potentials (sic) of this costly and difficult material. What especially fascinated him was the fragile nature of 'the exquisite, delicate gold, whose leaves flew away at the slightest breath.' For the medieval alchemists, the search for a way to make gold corresponded to a search for the philosopher's stone. Their attempts to combine chemically what they called earthly and heavenly elements, apart from the pragmatic aim of transforming base metals into the most precious currency, gold, were informed by a higher, metaphysical idea - that of enlightenment and salvation of mankind.

But to return to Klein...

Nothing is helped by John William Gabriel of Worpsewede's clunky translation. (Lines like "a few months later they were already able to mount a joint exhibition of recent pieces" radiate target language interference on phrasing.) Being unfamiliar with the Worpsewede name I gave it a quick search and it turns out to be an artist's colony in Lower Saxony. Though he has a few other non-Taschen credits to his name, John William Gabriel turns up nowhere else than in translators' bylines. It seems likely that Taschen, known for its cut-price publishing model, has created a pseudonym using budget translators to keep costs and royalties down. While Weitemeier seems to be a real person, it is still pretty difficult to find much other work by her or about her, and one assumes her freelancer fees would similarly have been low enough for Taschen's business model.

[Lawrence · Rating 4 out of 5]

I just (in August 2018) finished what I think is my third read-through of this book. Although I used to be a big reader of both art books and comic books, my recent reading has been so dominated by text that the experience (I almost called it a "practice") of incorporating photos of Yves Klein's deep monochrome color fields into my reading has felt like an incredible relief and opening out. I'm not sure there would be that many other artists whose work would do as good a job. Klein's work feels, to me, free of the need to be interpreted — to the point where his own interpretations of it, as quoted by Weitemeier, seem almost spurious.

[Tentatively, Convenience · Rating 3 out of 5]

I suppose Klein is most known for the famous Harry Shunk 1960 photomontage where Klein appears to be leaping off a bldg: "Man in Space! The Painter of Space Throws Himself into the Void!", for creating a particular blue, & for using nude models w/ paint on them as 'human brushes' for paintings of their body's contact points w/ the canvas. It's all interesting enuf for someone who didn't make it past 34 yrs old & this bk has nice color illustrations that get across the subtleties.

[Roberto Roldán · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dos contribuciones agradables, el salto en el vacío, como cambio de época y el desarrollo del famoso color: Azul Klein