Yves Klein

Galerie Schmela, Dusseldorf

Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1960

Dusseldorf, Galerie Schmela, Yves Propositions monochromes, May - June 1957

Berlin, Martin Gropius Bau, ZERO: The international art movement of the 50s and 60s, March - June 2015, p. 341, illustrated in colour

Paul Wember, Yves Klein, Cologne 1969, p. 75, no. MP 17 (text)

Colour: The colour in the catalogue illustration is fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is slightly deeper and richer in the original. Condition: Please refer to the department for a professional condition report.
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The mesmeric intensity of Yves Klein’s seminal Untitled Pink Monochrome (MP 17) transcends conventional boundaries of artistic beauty, creative concept, and pictorial truth. It stands as an inimitable relic of Klein’s vigorous oeuvre, doused in his flat matte pigment, and saturated with the voracity of his dissident style. In their absolute renouncement of tangible form, decorative ornament, and visible gesture, as well as in their complete dedication to pure and unmodulated colour, the Monochromes should be considered as Klein’s calling card – the essence from which his entire facture was extrapolated and the source to which each strand of his complex conceptual philosophy can be traced. Each one can be understood as a crystallisation of his quest for absolute immateriality in painting: “I do believe that it is only in the monochrome that I truly live pictorial life, the painterly life of which I have dreamed. This was precisely what I have hoped for in painting! I find myself within it, in the special matter, the pictorial matter, and I have blossomed” (Yves Klein, ‘Truth Becomes Reality or Why Not!’, in: Yves Klein, Overcoming the Problems of Art: The Writings of Yves Klein, New York 2007, p. 143).

As much as it was conceptual, and intellectual, Klein’s oeuvre was performative. He believed that his true artistry lay in the execution of his works, rather than in their finished product; that his presented artworks were but the smouldering embers of his artistic sensibility. This is a notion most readily applied to Klein’s series of Peintres de Feu, where fire, pigment, and water took centre stage as players, with the artist positioned solely as director, and the ultimate viewer left with little more than the remnant markings on the stage; mere clues as to the events that had passed. We think also of the Anthropometries, those inimitable marks left behind by performers' bodies as they were flung and dragged onto canvas and ground whilst doused in pigment. Klein was again reserved in a removed director’s role and the viewer was left again with no more than an aesthetic aftermath; a visual remembrance of a passionate happening; a relic of the art itself. The Monochromes should be considered in exactly the same vein, indeed they are the very root of this idea within Klein’s praxis. They are similarly powerful, similarly devoid of any tangible artistic gesture, and similarly filled with conceptual avant-garde tenacity. However, where those later series are more dramatic, the Monochromes, as exemplified by the present work, are pure, immutable, and untrammeled. These works are unimpeachable in their intensity and should be viewed as direct transliterations of Klein’s artistic sensibility into a pictorial format. In his own words: “My paintings are the ‘ashes’ of my art. It is the monochromes that make me the most intoxicated” (Ibid.)  

1957 was a year of immense artistic significance for Klein. Up to this moment, the Monochrome had been little more than a nascent murmur within his praxis, a creative concept tentatively elaborated across a handful of exhibitions and projects. However, over the course of 1957, the series was writ large across myriad works in multiple gallery shows; Klein and his Monochrome were thence forever canonised in the annals of the European art history. The artist showed his revolutionary series at the Galleria Apollinaire in Milan, the galleries of Iris Clert and Colette Allendy in Paris, Gallery One in London, and Galerie Schmela in Dusseldorf. He was flooded with critical acclaim and international institutional recognition and from this point onwards, was irrefutably installed as the shaman of the international avant-garde and the guardian of the Parisian zeitgeist.

Depthless, abyssal, and supremely sublime, MP 17 delivers a portal for Klein’s pursuit of the spiritual absolute. It is a work that is as complex in concept as it is simple in execution; as significant in art historical context as it is mesmerising in immediate interpretation. It is charged not only with beauty, but also with tenacity and wit, and can be viewed as an exemplar and an emblem for Klein’s magisterial praxis.