In the mid-1950s, Yves Klein (1928–1962) declared that “a new world calls for a new man.” With his idiosyncratic style and huge charisma, this bold artist would go on to pursue a brief but bountiful career, producing more than 1,000 paintings over seven years in an oeuvre now considered a mainstay of postwar modernism.Klein made his name above all with his large monochrome canvases in his own patented hue of blue. International Klein Blue (IKB), composed of pure pigment and binding medium, is at once rich and luminous, evocative and decorative, and was conceived by Klein as a means of evoking the immateriality and infinitude of the world.

The works of this “Blue Revolution” seem to draw us into another dimension, as if hypnotized by a perfect summer sky. Klein was also renowned for his deployment of “living brushes,” in which naked women, daubed in International Klein Blue, would make imprints of their bodies on large sheets of paper.

This Basic Art introduction presents key Klein works to introduce an artist who was at once a showman, inventor, and pioneer of performance art. With page after page of the ever-alluring International Klein Blue, it is both an essential guide to a modern art master and a meditation on the unique effects of a single color.

This stunning two-volume set evokes the differences, as well as the affinities, between the works of groundbreaking artists Yves Klein and Alberto Giacometti.
 
Volume one of this beautiful new book features archival images of both artists among new texts by curator Joachim Pissarro and others, as well as never- before-translated texts by Isaku Yanaihara, Dino Buzzati, and Pierre Descargues. Detailed illustrated chronologies for each artist complete volume one, while the colourful second volume includes colour plates of all the works displayed during Gagosian Gallery’s 2016 London exhibition of the same title, as well as installation images.

About the authors:

Joachim Pissarro is the Bershad Professor of Art History and Director of the Hunter College Galleries at Hunter College in New York City. He was a curator at MoMA’s Department of Painting and Sculpture. 

Danielle Peterson Searls is an art historian specializing in French Modernism, Romanesque art, and Islamic textiles. 
Catherine Grenier has been the director of the Fondation Giacometti since 2014. She has organized several major exhibitions of Alberto Giacometti’s work. 

Daniel Moquay is director of the Yves Klein Archives. He has organized more than forty retrospective exhibitions of Klein’s work and published more than thirty books on the artist. 

Cecilia Braschi is an art historian and former researcher at the Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti (2005–2011). She has curated exhibitions of and written extensively on Alberto Giacometti. 

Richard Calvocoressi is the former curator at the Tate Gallery, London (1977–1983), as well as the former director of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (1987–2007) and of the Henry Moore Foundation (2007–2015).