Yves Klein was a French artist, born in Nice in 1928, who died in Paris in 1962 at the age of 34. In barely a decade he turned one deep ultramarine, International Klein Blue, into monochrome paintings, sponge sculptures, body prints made by nude models and an empty gallery.
He is remembered above all for a photograph in which he seems to dive from a height into an empty street, the Leap into the Void, and the photograph is a trick.
He never fell, because he never jumped without help, and Klein arranged the trick himself.
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On 19 October 1960, at Fontenay-aux-Roses, near Paris, Klein leaped while friends held a tarpaulin below. The photographers Harry Shunk and János Kender took two negatives, one with the jump and one of the same scene with the tarpaulin gone, and printed them together. The result looks like a single instant, a man stretched out over an empty street as if gravity had agreed to look away.
A month later the picture appeared in Dimanche, a one-day newspaper Klein made himself and distributed at Paris newsstands, under the headline "A man in space!" He had an answer for anyone who doubted it: "The free man is so free that he can levitate."
The photograph is a lie, and it is also the truest picture of him, because his whole career followed the same move. He signed the sky as a teenager, sold empty rooms for gold and registered a blue as if it were his, and each time the claim became the work.
What You'll Discover
What judo left in his art.
What he claimed on a beach.
Who made his blue possible.
What he really registered.
What a crowd queued to see.
Why the models were called brushes.