Out of the blue

Among the art-savvy, the name Yves Klein inevitably calls to mind a vision of blue. Not just any blue, but an ultramarine hue so rich, deep and powdery that it has an unworldly cast. Like magnetic dust from a far-off galaxy, Klein's signature color draws the eye and saturates the soul. He called it International Klein Blue (IKB) and threw a psychological patent over the stuff, branding it with his outsized personality, visionary ambition and impish charm.

Once you've seen a Klein-blue sculpture, painting or performance you cede the color to him. Other artists and even the occasional decorator might throw out a spot of Klein blue, but it will always carry an echo of its master, a little cry or whisper from somewhere back of the beyond recalling the artist who so unexpectedly flamed out more than a half-century ago in the prime of youth.

Klein was a mere 34 when he died in 1962. His career spanned just eight years. In France -- his homeland -- he was already a celebrity who leaped to fame the way Andy Warhol later did in the United States.

European artists and collectors have never lost their fascination with Klein, but his moment has been slow to arrive in the United States. Walker Art Center and the Hirshhorn Museum took up the torch this year with a show that opens Saturday in Minneapolis after debuting this summer in Washington, D.C. "Yves Klein: With the Void, Full Powers" runs through Feb. 13 at the Walker.

Besides his mesmerizing blue paintings and sculptures -- including globes and sponges impregnated with ultramarine pigment -- "Yves Klein" features textured relief-paintings that look like slabs of lunar landscapes; nude-body-prints made by performers at the artist's direction; canvases covered with pink paint or gold leaf; paintings marked by the elements -- wind, rain, smoke and flame; proposals for fountains of fire and water, sketches, correspondence and photos documenting his fanciful costumes and performances.

The latter include the infamous "Leap Into the Void," a black-and-white 1960 photo in which Klein appears to be soaring from a building in a surely doomed effort to fly. In that pre-Photoshop era, the "Leap" picture was a sensation when he published it on the front page of a faux-edition of Dimanche, a popular Parisian Sunday paper.

"The work is hard to pigeonhole," said Kerry Brougher, the Hirshhorn's deputy director, who co-curated the show with Philippe Vergne, a former Walker curator who now heads the Dia Art Foundation in New York. "He was taking painting in a new direction, a kind of futurist, utopian direction that came out of the existential dilemma after World War II. He went beyond even the abstraction you found in the U.S. then, and pointed to the conceptual and performance art that came later."

Innovative rebel

Born in Nice, Klein grew up in an arty environment fostered by parents who painted symbolist scenes and colorful abstractions. Rejecting their influence, he trained as a judo master in Tokyo and opened a judo school in Paris. Though raised as a Catholic, he fell under the spell of Rosicrucianism and blended its ideas about the importance of space and spirituality with zen concepts picked up in Japan.

Brougher speculates that Klein's originality was a fusion of his ad hoc philosophies and his lack of formal art training.

"A lot of the things we think about with Klein come out of judo or zen or Rosicrucianism," Brougher said. "The idea of levitating and of flying through space and landing without getting hurt were influential not just in his 'Leap Into the Void,' but also in his paintings of bodies floating in space, and his 'air architecture.' His idea was that a painting wasn't really a painting as we think of it -- an image of something -- but was a vehicle to obtain another state of mind.

"He created a 1958 installation in which he painted the outside of a gallery blue -- walls, windows, everything. You passed through a blue curtain into a whitewashed gallery with nothing on the walls. His paintings are like that, too -- you go through them and reach an inner immateriality that is the void."

Klein was endlessly inventive in his efforts to capture the ephemeral bits of life -- breath, weather, thought. He never painted conventionally but used rollers, palette knives and most notoriously "living brushes." Instead of depicting female nudes, as artists had for centuries, he directed women covered in blue paint to press their nude bodies against bare canvas, leaving shadowy shapes as a record of performances that were also documented on film. He used blowtorches to create abstract patterns of smoke and flame, and produced velvety paintings by sprinkling dry pigment onto canvases impregnated with glue. Once he strapped a pink-and-blue painting to the top of his car and drove from Paris to Nice in a storm, letting the wind and rain stain the canvas.

"Ephemerality and immateriality were the core of his work," said Vergne. "He always said his paintings were the ashes of his art. ... But he was extremely serious about it and never thought what he was doing was a joke or a provocation. He truly believed that you can change the world through art."

Shaman and showman

In the end he may have been done in by his utopian convictions and his naivete. Although his lectures, projects and performances made him something of a media darling, they also brought notoriety and attracted the attention of three Italian filmmakers who asked to record one of his painting-performances with the nude women. He agreed, believing that the publicity would further his "blue revolution." Instead, their film "Mondo Cane" was a kind of international freak show of bizarre behavior exploited by the filmmakers for shock value.

Klein attended the film's premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May 1962 and was horrified by its treatment of his work. That evening he suffered his first heart attack. Three days later he had a second attack, and he died three weeks later of a third. Popular legend blames the film for his premature death, but Vergne attributes it to "a mix of things," including possible exposure to toxic art materials, and overwork.

Besides making art, giving lectures and performances, Klein wrote thousands of pages of letters, journals and other jottings. His correspondence includes letters to "glass house" architect Philip Johnson, accusing him of stealing Klein's ideas for a fountain, and to Fidel Castro, congratulating him on the success of his revolution, which Klein compared to his own utopian visions.

"I think he exhausted himself to death," said Vergne, a fellow French national. "His work is universal but he himself is very French as a character. He's both a shaman and a showman ... and he was in love with life."

mabbe@startribune.com • 612-673-4431