In a short but intense creative life of just seven years, Klein painted over a thousand pictures which are among the classics of modern art. This book offers a sample of his work.

Yves Klein is one of the most extraordinary and influential figures in post-war avant-garde art. In less than a decade - up until his untimely death in 1962 - he forged a career and built up a body of work that together have influenced and inspired contemporaries and subsequent generations of artists worldwide. Klein sought in his art to liberate the senses, to heighten our sensibility and to intensify our experience of life. In this comprehensive review of his art and ideas, Sidra Stich examines the full range of his diverse creative output - his paintings and sculptures, installations, meticulously documented performances, his copious writings, and his proposals and drawings for visionary projects - and sets them within the context of the art of the time to assess Klein's originality and his legacy.

One of the last century's most influential artists, Yves Klein (1928-1962) took the European art scene by storm in a prolific career that lasted only from 1954 to 1962, when he suffered a heart attack at the age of 34. Klein was an innovator who embraced painting, sculpture, performance, photography, music, theater, film, architecture and theoretical writing. Self-identified as "the painter of space," Klein sought to achieve immaterial spirituality through pure color (primarily an ultramarine blue of his own invention-International Klein Blue) and even went so far as to present white galleries emptied of all artworks for his renowned 1958 exhibition of "the Void." His diverse oeuvre represents a pivotal transition from modern art's concern with the material object to contemporary notions of the conceptual nature of art."Yves Klein: With the Void, Full Powers" is published to accompany the first major retrospective of the artist's work in the United States in nearly 30 years. It includes examples from all of Klein's major series, including his "Anthropometries, Cosmogonies, " fire paintings, planetary reliefs and blue monochromes, as well as selections of his lesser-known gold and pink monochromes, body and sponge reliefs, "air architecture" and immaterial works. Essays by curators Kerry Brougher and Philippe Vergne, Klein scholar Klaus Ottmann, art historian Kaira M. Cabanas and curatorial fellow Andria Hickey, as well as archival materials and translations of Klein's published and unpublished writings, offer insights into the artist's endeavors and process. Born in Nice, France, in 1928, Yves Klein created what he considered his first artwork when he signed the sky above Nice in 1947, making his earliest attempt to capture the immaterial. The artist carved out new aesthetic and theoretical territory based on his study of the mystical sect Rosicrucianism, philosophical and poetic investigations of space and science, and the practice of Judo, which he described as "the discovery of the human body in a spiritual space."

French painter Yves Klein (1928?1962) stands as one of the most exciting artists of the 20th century. A founding member of the New Realism movement, he was also a pioneer in performance art and installations, and a forerunner of body art, land art, and conceptual art. During his meteoric eight-year career, Klein expressed his vision through a wide range of media, including pure color (notably a deep, bright blue now known as Yves Klein Blue), architecture, sculpture, literature, and music. This book looks afresh at Klein's works, and especially those that involve fire. Klein used fire to represent the mysterious and intangible elements of the world: He believed that an artist's transfiguration of reality could change a viewer's personal values, and his aim was to usher in an age of happy and fulfilled humankind. Here, images of his spectacular mur de feu or ?wall of fire,” along with his monochromes, monogolds, drawings, letters, and articles, as well as pictures of Klein producing his works, are testament to the artist's belief in the spiritual power of art. This magnificent volume includes a fascinating DVD of archival footage of Klein creating art with fire. The 12-minute DVD shows Klein creating the Mur de feu (Wall of Fire) and the Fontaine de feu (Fountain of Fire) for an exhibition in Germany in 1961, filmed by Yvan Butler, and the Peintures de feu (Fire Paintings) in France in 1962, filmed by Albert Weill. Newly composed music by Daniel Humair accompanies the films.