Yves: Peintures
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Yves: Peintures (in English Yves: Paintings) is an Artist's book by the French artist Yves Klein, originally published on the 18 November 1954. This publication, with its twin, Haguenault: Peintures was Klein’s first entry into the Paris art world, which, whilst rapidly losing ground to New York, was still considered the most important centre of modern art.[1] The work can be seen as an early example of Post-Modernism, using a series of carefully executed strategies to undermine it's own authority.[2]
Yves: Peintures starts with 3 pages consisting entirely of horizontal black lines designed to parody a traditional introduction. Whilst credited to ‘Pascal Claude’, (Claude Pascal, a close friend of Klein’s), the introduction was actually designed by Klein himself, persuading Pascal to sign it to ‘certify the production’.[3] 10 vivid monochromatic plates follow, mechanically signed ‘Yves’, each given unspecified numerical dimensions and assigned a large city. If, as is usual in exhibition catalogues, the dimensions refer to centimetres, the plates would represent medium sized easel paintings; if metres, large frescoes; if millimetres, then the plates are life size, leading to the conclusion that, rather than illustrations, they are the work itself. Klein would later create work in all three categories. In contrast to traditional photographic reproductions (which would usually have been in black and white at the time), the plates were made by rolling printer's ink onto sheets of paper[4], creating an extraordinarily vivid effect.
The cities are all places Klein had lived and worked in the preceding 4 years, implying either that the idea for each work had come to him in the relevant city, or that the work was an abstract representation of the city’s atmosphere.
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[edit] Haguenault: Peintures
Haguenault: Peintures is basically the same book as Yves: Peintures, and was published at the same time, but attributed to an unknown, different artist. Curiously, some of the plates are still mechanically signed ‘Yves’, part of a series of deliberate strategies to undermine the works’ integrity, leading some critics, such as Pierre Restany, to call Klein an early post-modernist.[5] The main structural difference was the accrediting of ownership in the captions (Collection Particuliere, Collection Orickson, Collection Raymond Hains, etc).[6] This implies the (fictional) artist was a painter of some stature, with work collected in major collections. According to Raymond Hains, a close friend of Klein's at the time, Klein had named his pseudonym after a brand of gingerbread.[7]
“ The fact that there were two different monochrome artists featured in two nearly identical booklets augmented the manifestations of doubling, duplication and duplicity that lay at the core of the project.” Sidra Stich[8]
[edit] Influences
Klein is known to have given his friend Arman a copy of Le Surrealisme, 1947, with the famous cover of a 3D breast, designed by Marcel Duchamp. The work takes a traditional book format-an exhibition catalogue-and turns it into a tactile fetish object. He was also in contact at this time with key advocates of Lettrism, a group of French avant garde artists who were challenging the assumed authority of texts by creating ‘an experiential language that was to be the basis of (the) new culture.’[9] Klein had seen films by Isidore Isou, and by Dufrêne, Gil J. Wolman & Debord in 1952,[10] and had become a close friend of Dufrêne in particular. The lettrists advocated challenging textual authority, and would serve as a direct reference point for the introduction. Marcel Broodthaers would later employ a similar strategy in his work 'Un Coup de Dés' (A Throw Of The Dice), 1969, in which the typographic structure of a poem by Mallarmé is retained whilst the text itself is reduced to black bars.
[edit] Editions
The books were published by Fernando Franco de Sarabia’s engraving workshop in Jaen near Madrid, in editions of 150.[11] Yves:Peintures has since been re-published by Editions Dilecta, Paris in 2006 in an edition of 400.[12]
[edit] Other Artist's Books and Multiples by Yves Klein
- Blue Globe (1957)
- Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility (1959-62)
- Dimanche (1960)
- Catalogue for "Yves Klein: Monochrome und Feuer" at the Museum Haus Lange, Krefeld, Germany (1961)
[edit] References
- ^ Klein, Hannah Weitemeier, Taschen p76
- ^ McEvilley, T. Yves Klein: Messenger of the Age of Space. Artforum 20, no.5. January, 1982. pp. 38-51
- ^ Yves Klein, Sidra Stich, Hayward Gallery, p42
- ^ Yves Klein, Sidra Stich, Hayward Gallery, p42
- ^ Pierre Restany, quoted in Yves Klein, Jean-Paul Ledeur, Editions Guy Pieters, p66
- ^ Yves Klein, Sidra Stich, Hayward Gallery 1995, p46
- ^ Yves Klein, 1928-1962, Selected Writings, Tate Gallery p82
- ^ Yves Klein, Sidra Stich, Hayward Gallery 1995, p46
- ^ Lettrism
- ^ Yves Klein, Sidra Stich, Hayward Gallery p31
- ^ Yves Klein, Berggruen, Hollein, Pfeiffer, Hatje Cantz, p216-7
- ^ Éditions Dilecta - Maison d'édition - Histoire des idées - Anthropologie de la culture - Société contemporaine - Rééditions de prestige
