Lot 65 | Yves Klein | Éponge bleue

The search for emptiness
According to legend, in 1947 three young men sat on a picturesque beach in southern France and divided the world among themselves. One got the earth, one got the air, and one got the sky. What sounds like an anecdote about youthful hubris is in fact the cornerstone of an obsession that would go down in art history. The three young men were Arman, Claude Pascal, and Yves Klein. Klein would later describe the sky as his “first and greatest monochrome.” (Yves Klein, quoted in: Seegers, Ulli: Alchemie des Sehens. Hermeneutische Kunst im 20. Jahrhundert, Cologne 2003, p. 102)
Yves Klein was born in Nice in 1928. His parents, both painters themselves, introduced him to art at an early age, but he was initially uninterested. The young Klein was more interested in music, judo, and religion. In 1948, he joined the Rosicrucian Society, an esoteric Christian community. They taught him cosmogony, a Christian-mystical concept of the return of the universe to a state of pure spirit, which calls for the end of the material world and the reunification of science, art, and religion. This concept deeply fascinated and influenced Klein.

Klein was also significantly influenced by his involvement in judo. From 1947 onwards, he trained intensively and traveled to Japan in 1952 to train as a judoka. Here he became acquainted with the philosophy of Zen. The doctrine of emptiness became a revelation for him. When Klein returned to France in 1954, his judoka title was not recognized, which meant that he was unable to teach as planned. This was a bitter setback that ultimately led him to art. The brochure “Yves Klein: Peintures,” published in 1954, marked his first public appearance as an artist. From then on, he worked with almost manic energy, creating around 1,500 works in just seven years. In 1962, Yves Klein died of a heart attack at the age of only 34.

Blue, blue, blue
Klein recognized monochrome as his artistic form of expression early on and, from 1957 onwards, turned increasingly to the color blue. With his exhibition “Proposte monochrome, epoca blu” at the Apollinaire Gallery in Milan, he officially heralded his blue period. In this color, he believed he recognized a sphere that was free of boundaries, free of matter, and free of ego, and thus a place of pure existence. For him, the color itself became the vehicle for experience. He explained his fascination with the color blue as follows: "Blue has no dimension. It stands outside of any dimension. Whereas the other colors have one. These are psychological spaces. Red, for example, conjures up the image of a fireplace radiating heat. All colors carry concrete associations with concrete, material, or psychologically tangible ideas, while blue at most makes one think of the sea and the sky, which are ultimately the most abstract things in tangible and visible nature." (Yves Klein, quoted from: Sichére, Marie-Anne/Semin, Didier (eds.): Yves Klein, Le dépassement de la problématique de l'art et autres écrits, Paris 2003, p. 203)
He searched for the perfect blue for a long time until he finally decided to develop it himself and patented it in 1960 under the name “International Yves Klein Blue” (IKB). This was an act of both aesthetic radicalism and self-promotion. Klein thus officially declared the color blue to be his trademark.

The manifesto of freedom
Also in 1957, he began working with Parisian gallery owner Iris Clert, who became one of his most important patrons. At his first exhibition at the gallery in 1957, a blue sponge mounted on a metal rod was exhibited alongside his ultramarine monochrome paintings. This marked the beginning of a series of works that remain among the best known of Klein's oeuvre to this day. Some 20 years later, the work presented here, “Éponge bleue” from 1959, was acquired by Iris Clert. Like its prototype from 1957, the natural sponge, dyed an intense ultramarine blue, is mounted on a fine metal rod on a simple white pedestal. Klein describes how he originally used the sponge as a working tool to apply paint to the picture carrier. One day, when he took a closer look at the sponge, he was fascinated by the combination of its color and structure and decided to elevate the sponge from a tool to a work of art. In the spirit of “Nouveau Réalisme,” which Klein would co-found three years later, the everyday is transferred into art, but not as a representation, as in Duchamp, but transformed. Klein's approach remains spiritual: he transforms the banal into the sublime. The sponge becomes a metaphor: just as the sponge soaks up the paint, the viewer is supposed to absorb the sensual and spiritual experience and carry it within themselves. The sponge is transformed from an object into a state of being. It embodies the idea of emptiness as fullness. Yves Klein's blue sponge, the “Éponge bleue,” is not merely a sculpture, but a manifesto of his philosophy: it is the gateway to freedom, to pure sensitivity.
Sophie Ballermann