Yves Klein - New Realist and Avant-Gardist
Thanks to his extraordinary creative output and visionary ingenuity, as well as for his pioneering accomplishments in performance and conceptual art, Yves Klein is widely considered the most influential French artist of the 1950s and 1960s. Along with Arman and Jean Tinguely, Yves Klein was a member of the loose group of artists known as "Nouveau Réalisme" around the art critic Pierre Restany. They clearly turned against the abstract and informal painting prevailing in the early 1960s. The "New Realists" left the studios to create art in the streets. Using new techniques and found materials, they aimed to integrate everyday life reality into art, making considerable contributions to the development of Object Art and early Action Art. The body of work that Yves Klein created in a short period of only seven years includes legendary artworks such as monochrome paintings, sponge sculptures, rain paintings, fire paintings, and body prints. He was a conceptual artist even before the term existed. For him, it is not the subjective handwriting of the painter, but the individual expressiveness of pure color that should determine the work. Monochrome liberated him from the conventional easel painting and gave him the possibility to make the immaterial and the infinite tangible as a kind of sublime experience.

La Peinture du Feu
The genesis of Klein's remarkable fire paintings lies in his occupation of the immateriality. Both in the fire paintings, as well as in the "Cosmogonies" in which he showed the imprint of rain and wind on the canvas in the early 1960s, the artist summoned the elements of nature to manifest their creative power. The series "Peinture du Feu Couleur", which evolved from the "Peintures du Feu", was created in the last year of the artist's life. These works are the synthesis of Klein's diverse, transcendent and highly influential oeuvre. Probably about 30 works belong to this small series of works. Yves Klein merged the pure fire paintings with his "Anthropométries" techniques by printing traces of the human body on the burnt surfaces. Color also played an increasingly important role: shades of pink and blue swim through the fiery depths of his works. The element of fire has been part of his oeuvre since 1957, when he set fire to one of his monochrome paintings at an exhibition at Galerie Colette Allendy, addressing the symbolism of regeneration and transformation. In early 1961, on the occasion of his first retrospective exhibition at Museum Haus Lange in Krefeld, Klein presented his Fire Fountains and the Fire Wall. These works, consisting of huge vertically blazing blue flames and a wall of flames created with a number of Bunsen burners in a row, theatrically illuminated the museum's gardens at dusk. Klein recognized the elemental power of fire. In the laboratory of Gaz de France, a French gas supply company based in La Plaine Saint-Denis, where he had access to industrial equipment, he learned to master fire and made precise adjustments to harness its force. With the 'Peinture de feu', Yves Klein created a pure image of the element fire. He did not invent these images. He took them directly from the fire.

Anthropométries
In the further development of his pure fire pictures, Yves Klein revisited elements from previous work series. Thus, his famous "International Klein Blue" (IKB) can be found in the color fire paintings, as well as human body forms from the "Anthropométrie" series, named after the study of human body measurements. In this well-known series of works, Klein used female models as "living brushes." The bodies, soaked in paint, are pressed onto or pulled across the canvas. Thus, the artist himself did not touch the canvas and did not become active as a painter in the conventional sense. The paintings are usually created in a performance in front of a live audience. Probably the most legendary performance took place at the Galerie Internationale d'Art Contemporain in Paris on March 9, 1960, in front of a fascinated, astonished, but also shocked audience. This performance would manifest Yves Klein's reputation as a provocateur. The happening was accompanied by an orchestra playing the "Monotone Symphony" composed by Klein, while three nude models painted one another with the intense ultramarine blue "International Klein Blue" (IKB) that Klein and the chemist Edouard Adam had developed four years. They then pressed their bodies onto the canvas according to the artist's instructions. It is the culmination of his artworks, which he calls "Anthropometries," in which he took the distancing from the canvas that he had promoted to an extreme, while at the same time making "bodily contact with the most incorporeal of colors possible." The Fire Paintings represent the final step in his sublimating transition from the material to the spiritual. [SM]