PARIS, FRANCE.- The Centre Pompidou/ Musée National d'Art Moderne devotes a major exhibition to the work of Yves Klein, one of the most important artists of the second half of the twentieth century. Klein died in 1962, at the age of 34, after a brief but exhilarating seven-year career. His international fame has, however, too narrowly identified him with his monochrome paintings and his IKB blue, and he was indeed but poorly understood during his own lifetime. His work in fact went far beyond painting : as he himself insisted, " My canvasses are no more than the ashes of my art. "*

Despite numerous retrospectives, among them the exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in 1983, much of Klein's work remains unknown, as has been revealed by the recent publication of the his writings. The exhibition "Yves Klein. Corps, couleur, immatériel " is supported by LVMH / Moët Hennessy . Louis Vuitton.

In bringing together 120 paintings and sculptures, some 40 drawings and manuscripts and a great number of contemporary films and photographs, this exhibition offers a new reading of Yves Klein's work. Adhering as faithfully as possible to the artist's own intentions as revealed in his recently published writings, the design of the exhibition brings out the importance that Klein accorded to the diverse aspects of his artistic practice: not only painting and sculpture, but also performances, sound works, interventions in public spaces, architectural projects and more.

In reconstituting such works as the Sculpture aérostatique of 1957 (the release of 1001 balloons), or the Illumination de l'Obélisque of 1958, in the Place de la Concorde, the exhibition reinstates Klein's ephemeral actions as the equals of his monochrome paintings. Klein's work in fact depends on a dynamic equilibrium between two poles : the visible and the invisible, matter and void, the body and the immaterial. This tension is at the heart of the work: even as he explored the void in Le Vide (Galerie Iris Clert, Paris 1958), Klein would continue to create visible artworks.

The exhibition is organised around Klein's three emblematic colours : blue, gold and pink, marshalled in this order in his writing and in the few rare triptychs. From 1959 onward, his work would be based upon this triad. The Ex-voto dédié à Sainte-Rita, 1961, deposited by the artist at the Convent of Santa Rita in Cascia, Italy, and presented for the first time at this exhibition, is valuable evidence of the importance of pink and gold alongside blue in Klein's imaginative universe.

The subtitle of the exhibition, CORPS, COULEUR, IMMATÉRIEL (Body, Colour, Immaterial), brings out the very contemporary aspects of Klein's art, close to the concerns of today's practitioners : the artist's physical, everyday involvement with his work ; his desire to expand the artist's role, through the use of colour, to bring about a (technical, urbanistic and philosophical) transformation of the world ; his use of natural or ephemeral materials ; and his exploration of the immaterial. The exhibition will also be presented at the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Wien (Vienna, Austria) from 9 March to 3 June 2007.

THEMES
BODY
The body – the flesh of the model, but also the athletic body of the artist himself, who held a blackbelt in judo – early proved itself necessary as a counterpoint, a balancing factor in the face of the vertigo of the immaterial. Used first to " stabilise the pictorial material " in the monochromes, the model soon acquired a certain autonomy, " flinging itself into the colour ", as in the Anthropometries, paintings derived from the imprint of the paint-covered body (be it male or female) on the canvas, a body always under the direction of the artist, whether still or in movement. An essential chapter in the history of performance art, this series of works is also a profoundly important event in the history of painting, the composition of the painting being delegated to chance and to the body of another.

COLOUR
The link between the body and the immaterial is colour, but colour in the expanded sense given it by Klein : far from being reduced to pigment and binder, for him it is a spiritual, cosmic force that charges the whole atmosphere, transforms life itself into a work of art through the mere presence of the artist. Colour was very soon restricted, in 1959, to three tones, each of which evokes one of these crucial aspects or themes of his work : blue, gold, and pink.

IMMATERIAL
In 1957, not long after the appearance of the first monochromes in 1955, Klein turned to the exploration of the "immaterial aspect " of art : his exhibitions of " the Void ", evanescent performance works, ephemeral sculptures in fire or water, sound works, " air architectures " and artistic appropriation of the entirety of space (extending to the whole cosmos) were all manifestations of the " invisible" that for him were the essential experience of art. These vertiginous experiences have to a considerable extent escaped the attention of critics and public : it is time to rediscover their full implications and the importance they have both to the conceptual art they prefigure and to the performance art whose essential concerns they illuminate. It is difficult to show the invisible; very aware of this problem, Klein dealt with it in advance by issuing a multiplicity of statements and organising photographs and films of his most ephemeral works. So it is that it is possible today, by assembling and juxtaposing such documentation, not only to recall these moments but to treat them as the artworks that Klein intended.