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Lot Essay
Today Yves Klein is widely recognised, alongside Jackson Pollock in the USA and Lucio Fontana in Italy for example, as one of the leading artists of the 1950s and early'60s, responsible for enlarging the traditional field of painting into the wider realms of performance and conceptual art.
Having settled on pure colour as the immaterial medium through which he hoped to 'impregnate' the viewer with a sense of the mystic. Klein selected blue amongst all the colours to be the material vehicle through which to create a portal to the immaterial world. It was an inevitable choice given that Klein had grown up on the Mediterranean coast in Nice. Klein considered blue to be the least material colour and the most infused with a sense of the infinite, being the colour of the sky and of the sea. After much experiment he devised the purest and most intense shade of blue he could and had the new colour officially patented in his name, the colour was called IKB: 'International Klein Blue'.
Klein created the material form of a Vénus d'Alexandrie as the perfect female nude, in sync with his idea of pure beauty. In this work he combines two of the best known elements of his oeuvre by encasing the form of the female nude in IKB, Klein employs this potent combination in many of his most acclaimed works such as the iconic FC1 (sold, Christie's New York, 8 May 2012, lot 34).
Klein conceived a Vénus d'Alexandrie (Vénus bleue) shortly before his death in 1962. The present work is part of a posthumous edition produced in 1983. In an agreement of July that year Klein's widow, Madame Rotraut Klein-Moquay, authorizes the edition to be produced for Françoise del Campo (later de Pfyffer) and Galerie Bonnier, Geneva and it is from the Hors Commerce works produced as part of this edition that the present work comes.
Having settled on pure colour as the immaterial medium through which he hoped to 'impregnate' the viewer with a sense of the mystic. Klein selected blue amongst all the colours to be the material vehicle through which to create a portal to the immaterial world. It was an inevitable choice given that Klein had grown up on the Mediterranean coast in Nice. Klein considered blue to be the least material colour and the most infused with a sense of the infinite, being the colour of the sky and of the sea. After much experiment he devised the purest and most intense shade of blue he could and had the new colour officially patented in his name, the colour was called IKB: 'International Klein Blue'.
Klein created the material form of a Vénus d'Alexandrie as the perfect female nude, in sync with his idea of pure beauty. In this work he combines two of the best known elements of his oeuvre by encasing the form of the female nude in IKB, Klein employs this potent combination in many of his most acclaimed works such as the iconic FC1 (sold, Christie's New York, 8 May 2012, lot 34).
Klein conceived a Vénus d'Alexandrie (Vénus bleue) shortly before his death in 1962. The present work is part of a posthumous edition produced in 1983. In an agreement of July that year Klein's widow, Madame Rotraut Klein-Moquay, authorizes the edition to be produced for Françoise del Campo (later de Pfyffer) and Galerie Bonnier, Geneva and it is from the Hors Commerce works produced as part of this edition that the present work comes.