History

Yves Klein and the leap into the void

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A rough lump of lapis lazuli from Afghanistan, deep blue with flecks of gold pyrite and white calcite

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The Seine in Paris with the Pont des Arts, seen from the quai de Conti, in an old black and white photograph

A heap of natural ultramarine pigment powder ground from lapis lazuli

How Yves Klein staged a flight, registered a blue, emptied a gallery and sold empty space for gold, and how those works stretched the idea of what an artwork can be.

The photograph

On Sunday 27 November 1960 a newspaper called Dimanche went on sale at Paris newsstands. It looked like an ordinary Sunday paper, but it was a one-day publication made by the artist Yves Klein for the second Avant-Garde Art Festival.¹ Inside was a photograph of Klein in a suit, launching himself off a wall above a quiet suburban street, arms spread and face turned to the sky. The text beside it said that to paint space, he had to be in space.¹

The picture, now known as Leap into the Void, was taken in October 1960 on rue Gentil-Bernard in Fontenay-aux-Roses, just south of Paris, by Harry Shunk and János Kender, two photographers Klein hired for the job.²³ Below him, a group of his friends from judo held a tarpaulin to catch him.³⁴ The photographers then printed two negatives together, one of Klein in mid-air and one of the same street with no tarpaulin and no catchers, so the result reads as a straight documentary snapshot.² Klein had also claimed to have jumped from a second-floor window earlier that year, a leap nobody photographed.²

The judo is part of the story. Klein went to Japan in the early 1950s to study it, and in 1954 he was in Madrid as director of the Spanish Judo Federation.⁵ The Kodokan in Tokyo had given him the rank of fourth dan in 1953.⁶ He knew how to fall. So the jump happened, the landing was cushioned, and the image that reached the public was a construction. The painter and critic Greg Lindquist, reviewing a 2010 retrospective, described it as a darkroom invention that viewers choose to believe.⁷

A blue of his own

Klein had been making monochromes, canvases covered in a single colour, since the late 1940s. In 1955 the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles in Paris turned down an orange one.⁵ In January 1957, at the Galleria Apollinaire in Milan, he hung eleven blue canvases of the same size, about 78 by 56 cm, set roughly 20 cm out from the wall so that they seemed to float.⁸ They looked identical, but each had a different price, which Klein said reflected the particular spirit of each painting. According to Klein, the buyers chose among them and each paid the price asked.⁹ Whatever made one canvas worth more than another, it was not anything you could see.

The blue came out of a technical problem. Ultramarine is at its most intense as a dry powder, and traditional binders dull it as they dry. Klein looked for a solution with Édouard Adam, a colour merchant in Montparnasse, and settled on Rhodopas M, a synthetic resin made by the chemical company Rhône-Poulenc, which fixed the pigment without killing its brightness.⁸ Rolled onto a surface, it gave a matt, velvety finish.⁸ The Museum of Modern Art in New York describes his blue paintings in the same terms, as pure pigment held in resin rather than oil, which Klein felt deadened colour.¹⁰

On 19 May 1960 Klein lodged the process with France's National Institute of Industrial Property (INPI) as Soleau envelope no. 63471, under the name International Klein Blue.⁸ A Soleau envelope is a sealed and dated record that proves who had an idea and when. It is not a patent. French law does not allow anyone to own a colour, so what Klein registered was the recipe, and other artists are free to use the shade.⁸ Some accounts, museum ones included, still say loosely that he patented it.⁵

The empty room

On 28 April 1958, his thirtieth birthday, Klein opened an exhibition at Iris Clert's small gallery in Paris with the title The Specialisation of Sensibility in the Raw Material State into Stabilised Pictorial Sensibility. It soon became known as The Void.¹¹¹ He took everything out of the room except a display cabinet and painted the walls white.¹¹¹ The window was painted blue, blue drapery hung at the entrance, and two Republican Guards in full uniform stood at the door.¹¹¹² Visitors were served a cocktail of gin, Cointreau and methylene blue, which reportedly turned their urine blue the next day, to Klein's delight.¹¹¹² Accounts put the crowd at between 3,000 and 3,500 people.¹¹¹² Albert Camus wrote in the visitors' book: "with the void, full powers".¹

Two years later Klein's friend Arman filled the same gallery with rubbish for a show called Le Plein (Full), which could only be viewed through the window. Klein backed it as the counterpart to his empty room.¹¹

Selling empty space

From 1959 Klein sold Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility. The buyer received nothing to hang. They paid a set weight of pure gold and got a receipt signed by Klein.¹³¹⁴ The first zone went to the Milan gallerist Peppino Palazzoli in November 1959 for 20 grams of gold, and later books of receipts were priced in heavier weights.¹⁴

The buyer could keep the receipt or burn it. If they burned it, in front of witnesses that included an art critic or a museum director, they became the definitive owner of the zone, and Klein threw half the gold into the Seine.¹³¹⁴ The rest went into his gold-leaf paintings, the Monogolds.¹⁴ Collectors who went through some form of the transfer included the Hollywood screenwriter Michael Blankfort, in February 1962, and the artist Edward Kienholz.¹⁴¹⁵ Not everyone burned theirs. A receipt dated 7 December 1959, first sold to the antiques dealer Jacques Kugel, made more than 1.06 million euros at Sotheby's in Paris in 2022, a remarkable price for proof of having bought nothing.¹³¹⁶

Moving the edges of art

Klein also used people as brushes. At the Galerie Internationale d'Art Contemporain in Paris on 9 March 1960 he staged the first public Anthropometry, in which nude models covered in blue paint pressed their bodies onto paper in front of an audience.¹⁵ The painting became something that happened in a room, with the artist directing and never touching the surface.

Bright blue powdered paint by Stuart Semple — THE BIG BLUE powdered paint, Stuart Semple. Photo: Culture Hustle.

Taken together, these works kept pulling the artwork away from the object. In Milan the canvases were physically the same and the prices were different, so the value had to sit somewhere other than the paint. At Iris Clert the room itself, emptied and prepared, was what people came to see. With the zones, what changed hands was a transaction made of gold, paper, fire and a river. The Leap reached the public only as a doctored photograph in a newspaper that existed for one day. Klein said he believed art was moving towards the immaterial.¹⁰ His habit of building the market into the work, through prices, receipts and ownership, raised questions that conceptual and performance artists took up through the 1960s and 1970s: whether a work could be an idea, an event, a document or a contract.

He saw little of that. In May 1962 he had a heart attack while watching the film Mondo Cane at the Cannes festival, then a second, and he died after a third on 6 June 1962 in Paris. He was 34.⁵¹⁵