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