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Christie’s Brings Three Kleins to London

June 11, 2012 by Marion Maneker

Christie’s follows its success in New York with Yves Klein by bringing three works to market in London:

On the 50th anniversary of Yves Klein’s death, two masterpieces by the artist will be offered in Christie’s Post-War & Contemporary Art Evening Auction, London on 27 June. This follows the outstanding result achieved at Christie’s New York last May when the legendary FC 1 (Fire-Color 1), sold for $36,482,500 (£22,619,150), setting a new world record for the artist at auction.

Representing the figurehead of the London auction season is Le Rose du bleu (RE 22) (1960; estimate upon request; illustrated above); by far the largest pink sponge relief ever created and included in all the artist’s major exhibitions over the past 50 years. Previously part of the renowned Madeleine Everaert and Menil collections, the work finds a perfect counterpoint in Relief éponge bleu (RE 51) (1959; estimate: £6,000,000-9,000,000; illustrated page 2), the ultramarine blue sponge relief previously owned by Lucio Fontana. Together, these otherworldly sponge reliefs capture the zeitgeist at the turn of the 1960s; a moment dominated by the Cold War space race. In 1961, the year after Klein created Le Rose du bleu (RE 22), Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin would go down in history as the first man to travel into space. A matter of weeks later, United States president, John F. Kennedy avowed to land a man on the moon within the decade.

 

Yves Klein at Work

April 23, 2012 by Marion Maneker

Humble Yves Klein

August 2, 2010 by Marion Maneker

Peter Schjeldahl put together a very good synopsis of Yves Klein’s life and work in his late-June column on the Hirshhorn in Washington, DC. We didn’t link to it then for some reason. So let’s rectify the situation with this quote that follows Schjeldahl’s observation that the Hirshhorn show exhibits a drawing where Klein wrote the word ‘humility’ twenty times:

It’s not easy now to associate humility with the perpetrator of such audacities as monochrome paintings in a color he patented as International Klein Blue (it is ordinary ultramarine pigment, with a polymer binder to preserve its chromatic intensity and powdery texture), big pictures made by I.K.B.-smeared naked women pressing or rolling their bodies against canvases, and a heavily promoted Paris gallery show that consisted of exactly nothing (“The Void,” 1958). Continue Reading

Klein Leads Sotheby's London Contemporary Sale

May 4, 2010 by Marion Maneker

Sotheby’s announces an Yves Klein Sponge will be the lead in their June sale in London:

Sotheby’s London Contemporary Art Evening Sale on Monday, 28 June, 2010 will be spearheaded by a remarkable Yves Klein work, RE 49, Relief Eponge Bleu, which comes to auction from the collection HypoVereinsbank. This work is one of exceptionally few largescale blue Relief Eponge works remaining in private hands and was created at the climax of Klein’s artistic career. The painting will be offered for sale with an estimate of £4.5-6.5 million.

HVB Klein June 2010

Here Comes Klein

March 11, 2010 by Marion Maneker

Carol Vogel devotes the bulk of her Friday column in the New York Times to Yves Klein, a painter who having his moment of apotheosis, especially among American collectors. One reason Klein is coming into vogue is his pivotal role between abstraction and minimalism, not to mention a clutch of other artistic movements that emerged in the 1960s, 70s and beyond. Vogel quotes some auction house heads on this phenomenon among collectors:

“It fits in with aesthetic of those who collect Abstract Expressionist and Minimalist works,” said Brett Gorvy, co-head of postwar and contemporary art at Christie’s. “In London we saw the depth of this market, and it was really quite amazing.”

One of the highlights of Christie’s sale on May 11 will be “ANT 93, Le Buffle” (“The Buffalo”) from 1960-61, from Klein’s “Anthropométrie” series. […] The work is expected to bring about $10 million. While no one at the auction house is saying who the seller is, experts in the field say the painting belongs to the San Francisco collectors Richard and Pamela Kramlich.

That might even be a conservative estimate because Vogel also points out that Washington’s Hirshhorn Museum will host the first large-scale Klein exhibition in nearly  30 years:

Four years in the making, “Yves Klein: With the Void, Full Powers” will open in May at the Hirshhorn and will include more than 100 works arranged thematically. Loans are coming from the artist’s archives, institutions in Europe and the United States, and private collections.

“More and more we’re starting to understand how Klein opened up the gates for what came in the late ’60s, ’70s and ’80s in Minimalism, Conceptual art, light and space art, and performance,” said Kerry Brougher, deputy director and chief curator at the Hirshhorn. “He used a full host of media, not just painting but sculpture, performance, film, photography.”

A US Moment for Yves Klein (New York Times)

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