"He wanted to be the only and the last genius of the world.  And he was a very good manager, with a fantastic, fresh, modern, advertising genius.  Yes!  He could advertise his ideas in a modern way!  He said to me, 'Look it's strange what you are doing because it's not necessary anymore.  I did everything.  That's it.  The question of painting is resolved.'  Yves Klein was sure that he was a sort of messiah.  He was a dictator and a dangerous man.  If he had been Hitler, he would have destroyed half of the world.  It's really true!  He would have decided what was right and what was not right.  He wouldn't care.  He was physically beautiful.  Yves Klein, he was the best!"
Daniel Spoerri, 1992
 

"Jean Tinguely has told me to repeat every five lines that Yves was a genius."
Martial Raysse, 1967
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

There is a Klein mystery as evidenced by the wealth of contradictory literature surrounding his work.  The mystery grows if one attempts to resolve it through traditional/Western means of analysis, which have been forged to discover the underlying complexities of an issue.  Yves Klein was not a complex or deep thinker and never strove to be one.  His objective was quite simple, his message embodied in the utter plainness of his works and the simplicity of their fabrication.  Klein's activities were meant to encourage and celebrate the powers of the human imagination.  And what an imagination: the list is long in terms of the number of constructs we have engendered throughout human history and Klein certainly tried to embrace as many as he could.  It is difficult to say whether Klein sought a truth given that he embraced so many of them and even invented a few of his own.  However, Klein did believe and the power of belief may have been the only truth he needed to know.

Ultimately, Klein's life is a grand manifestation of the sheer beauty of human existence and the mind that is capable of fueling that existence when given full reign.  His work forces us to fold our attention back upon us, and if that fails he simply acts out our potential in all of the manifold ways he can imagine.  One cannot understand Klein since there is nothing to understand, Klein is all about experience, whether through colour, performance, ritual, or in the act of recreating and/or witnessing his works.  That experience means that we are all involved in some form or fashion in his work.  However, one should never take their leave of Klein with a sense of what he was, but rather with a sense of what we all are and can be.
 

The Klein Mystery was fourth year undergraduate seminar taught at UWO in the fall of 1999.  This site commemorates that adventure and the gallery show that grew out of it.  Explore and enjoy...