He went to the Dome where he found a friend

Miro Klein who was confused with the American painter Franz Kline sent me a letter of condolence for the loss of my husband. Klein has opened it. He was very moved. He went to the Dome where he found a friend. He had tears in their eyes. It was three days before his death. "Yves Klein died in June 1962, thirty-four years of a heart attack. His widow, Rotraut, tells his disappearance after four and a half years of common life, six months of marriage and a baby in pregnancy. "At the beginning when I met him he told me:" you know I think that I must soon die ".". And the widow added: "his life was as a Mozart Symphony with serious phases and minor phases." He had a side radiant.

Exhibition Yves Klein in the Centre Pompidou organized by young Camille Morineau curator until 5 October spoke of this. A constantly active Klein, for discovery, almost boiling that sleeps two hours per night, creates plastic works day and writes at night. But also a mystic Klein judoka discipline and faith secret for Christianity. Blue Klein, monochrome, became of such archetypes that you forget to explain the origins of this contemporary mythology. It is clearly exposed to Beaubourg with 120 paintings and sculptures and 40 drawings as well as 5 films involving the scene in his work.

In a small very personal book the poet Alain Jouffroy was Yves Klein as a judo teacher tells (): "It is is initiated to judo and the cosmogonic studies Lectorium simultaneously.". It is then that he began by painting, gouache and pastel, without no pictorial submission at the time, he says, the representations of the blue sky "pure and without cloud" as it most, lying on the beaches of the Côte d'Azur. He said his comrades of the same age (18 to 20 years) that he was "owner of the blue sky (...)". He is interested, also, to take impressions of hands, feet, plants and animals. "But it was missing, he said, constructive and positive realism."

Pink and gold

It is fascinating to note as the obsessions of the artist, blue in the footsteps of body later called anthropométries, proved early in his life. He is the son of two artists, Fred Klein, a specialist in classical pastels the technical has certainly influenced the powdery material from its monochrome blue and Marie Raymond, a follower of abstract painter, to support his son in his research. Klein is a bustling theorist almost grayed by his words. Seen before a vernissage 4th dan black belt achieve a demonstration of judo and say: "judo is the art, the discovery by the human body a space spiritual." His learning of the judo at the Japan has not been validated in France and he abandoned the high competition for art. In 1955, first exposure.

At the Pompidou Centre an entire room is dedicated to the famous Blue painted on the canvas with a roller or sponges. Comments of the interested party: "I find that the tables are the ashes of my art." The genuine quality of the table, his being even, once created, lies beyond the visible, in the pictorial sensitivity in the raw state. "For Klein there are also pink, but gold told him:"good businessmen are alchemists in their genre to the same degree as the artists."

Klein is also working with fire and with the air very technical manner... The passage of the exhibition the most successful is dedicated to the anthropométries, when women coat of paint to make the trace on the canvas. "The model is a living brush", he said. "Brings me sensuality in the atmosphere." A film shows beautiful bare damselflies rubbing to support, to the master of smoking with directions with great seriousness. Until it rises abruptly and prematurely for ever...