Exhibit of the week: Yves Klein: With the Void, Full Powers

The work of the French painter, who died from a heart attack at 34, anticipated future movements such as minimalism and conceptual art.

Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C.

Through Sept. 12

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

He was also quite frequently full of bull, said Pepe Karmel in Art in America. An artist-showman who imitated Marcel Duchamp and anticipated Andy Warhol, Klein once staged public sessions in which he “painted” canvases by having naked women covered in paint roll around on them. In truth, Klein’s pretentious, proto-postmodern works of conceptual and performance art often seem like “nothing more than a series of provocative, neo-dada gestures.” His monochrome paintings, on the other hand, are works that will last. “The seductive intensity of their colors and textures can be experienced fully only firsthand.” The blue ones really do imitate the sky, filling your field of vision and “drawing you inward with textures that mimic the wavering caused by atmospheric diffraction.”

Klein quickly became synonymous with this particular shade of “blissful ultramarine,” said Blake Gopnik in The Washington Post. He even patented it, under the name International Klein Blue. The idea of a monochrome painting might initially have been just another of Klein’s gimmicks: “The Hirshhorn shows him trying it out with red and orange and black and green.” But with the blue paintings he truly hit on something—perhaps because, as researchers have shown, “humans have a huge preference for blue over any other color.” You don’t need to understand the theories behind Klein’s paintings: They’re like direct injections of joy into your brain’s pleasure centers. By bringing so many together, for the first time in decades, the Hirshhorn has created “one of the most important shows” in its history.