NOT SOLD (BIDDING OVER)
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This item WAS NOT SOLD. Auction date was 2003 May 15 @ 19:00UTC-05:00 : EST/CDT
YVES KLEIN
(1928-1962)
RE 21
signed and dated "Yves Klein /
le monochrome 1960"
on the reverse
sponge, stones and blue pigment
on board
78 x 65 in. (198.1 x 165.1 cm)
executed in 1960
ESTIMATE: $6,000,000-8,000,000
PROVENANCE
Thomas Ammann Fine Art, ZüRICH
Collection Schniewind, NEVIGES
Ursula Painvain
Thomas Ammann Fine Art, ZüRICH
Private collection
EXHIBITED
NEW YORK, Gagosian Gallery, YVES KLEIN: SPONGE RELIEFS, October 3-28, 1989, pp. 28-29 (illustrated)
Kunstmuseum Basel, TRANSFORM: BILDOBJECTSKULPTUR IM 20. JAHRHUNDERT, June 14-September 27, 1992, pp. 105 and 218,
no. 128 (illustrated)
LITERATURE
P. Wember, YVES KLEIN: CATALOGUE RAISONNÉ, COLOGnE, 1969, p. 82 (illustrated)
A pioneer of the monochrome, Yves Klein began making paintings of uniform color in 1955, when he discovered the incredible vibrancy of freshly ground pigments. In an effort to preserve this chromatic brilliance, Klein avoided traditional oil mediums and mixed his powdered pigments with a special, colorless binding agent. Using paint rollers rather than brushes, he covered rectangular panels with this unique substance, creating grainy fields of raw and radiant color. In the summer of 1956, while spending a long vacation in Nice, Klein decided to restrict his palette to a deep ultramarine blue that evoked the Mediterranean coast. After achieving a satisfactory shade, the artist patented his new pigment as International Klein Blue (IKB), entered into a self-proclaimed Blue Period, and produced some of the most ravishing works of his career, including the present lot. As RE 21 vividly demonstrates, Klein's trademark color often transcended the objects that it covered. Vibrating with a life of its own, his brilliant blue pigment was meant to permeate the viewer's space and consciousness. "Color is like humidity in the air," he wrote. "Color is materialized sensibility. Color bathes in everything with the same strength that is in everything that bathes" (Quoted in Sidra Stich, Yves Klein, exh. cat., London: Hayward Gallery, 1994, p. 67).
In the late 1950s, Klein expanded his artistic repertoire by introducing natural sea sponges to his work. This unorthodox material first appeared in May 1957, when the artist displayed a single sponge sculpture at the Iris Clert Gallery in Paris, amidst a selection of his monochrome paintings. "It is on this occasion that I discovered the sponge," Klein recalled. "In working on my paintings in my studio, I occasionally used sponges. Of course, they became blue very quickly! One day I noticed the beauty of the blue in the sponge. This instrument of work suddenly became raw material for me. It was the extraordinary property of the sponge to impregnate itself with anything fluid that seduced me" (Quoted in Stich, p. 89).
In the wake of this discovery, Klein created hundreds of freestanding sponge sculptures. By 1958, he was also producing numerous reliefs eponges, or sponge reliefs. As the present lot demonstrates, these works typically consisted of wooden panels coated with a mixture of IKB pigment and fine pebbles. Klein would then attach sponges, which were saturated with the same blue pigment, to the textured surface. The results often resembled works in progress. When scattered across a given panel, the sponges appeared to be soaking the surface with the brilliant blue paint. Sidra Stich has observed this remarkable aspect of the sponge reliefs. "With the sponge, which Klein would subsequently adopt as one of his signature images, he transformed a common object into a work of art (not unlike Duchamp with the bicycle wheel or the Cubists with their newspaper collages). Significantly, the choice of object here was an accessory item habitually used in the process of creating paintings. It made use of the same approach that Klein had begun to experiment with in 1956 when he made a sculpture out of an assemblage of used paint rollers - the actual implements utilized in the making of his monochrome paintings. In both cases, the display of the accessory art-making tools as works of art draws attention away from consideration of the art work as a finished product and toward contemplation of it in terms of the total creative process, and most especially, the viewer's role as an active participant in creating the pictorial image" (Stich, p. 90).
Despite this nod to material reality, the present lot also reveals how Klein's sponge reliefs can trigger a wide range of poetic associations. As natural products of the ocean, the sponges invoke the Mediterranean environment that inspired Klein's exclusive use of IKB pigment. Indeed, by covering an ultramarine panel with equally vivid sponges, the artist seems to create an image of the deep blue sea, teeming with aquatic life. Yet Klein's aversion to direct representation suggests that he was mostly drawn to the metaphoric potential of these organic forms. With their seeming capacity to imbibe his fields of blue, the sponges become anthropomorphic substitutes for the receptive viewer, and symbolize the absorption of Klein's trademark color and ideas. As Sidra Stich has explained, "Above all, the sponges were intrinsically a material of absorption. For Klein, they were therefore vivid signifiers of the kind of saturation he sought to achieve: saturation of both the environment and people.... 'Thanks to the sponges - living, savage material - I was able to make portraits of the readers of my monochromes who, after having seen, after having traveled in the blue of my paintings, come back totally impregnated in sensibility like the sponges.' The sponges thus truly complemented the monochrome paintings. They exemplified the success of the impregnation process and held their own as suggestive, indefinable, ambient, penetrative phenomena" (Stich, p. 165).
Auction Location:
United States
Previewing Details:
Saturday May 3, 2003 10am to 5pm, Sunday May 4, 2003 1pm to 5pm, Monday May 5, 2003 10am to 5pm, Tuesday May 6, 2003 10am to 5pm, Wednesday May 7, 2003 10am to 5pm, Thursday May 8, 2003 10am to 5pm, Friday May 9, 2003 10am to 5pm, Saturday May 10, 2003 10am to 5pm, Sunday May 11, 2003 1pm to 5pm, Monday May 12, 2003 10am to 5pm, Tuesday May 13, 2003 10am to 5pm, Wednesday May 14, 2003 10am to 5pm, Thursday May 15, 2003 10am to 2pm
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