"The final Klein piece" is Leap into the Void from 1960. It's photoshoppery before photoshop; a composite exposure of an empty street and Yves Klein jumping out of a window onto a bunch of mattresses that got edited out. Best part is he published (and sold) it as a broadside against NASA because they dared to imply that "technology" was necessary to reach the moon.

Yves Klein managed to die of a heart attack at 34. It takes a lot of hard living to do that. Patrick Nagel only pulled off 38, and he did stupid shit like "aerobithons" while high as fuck on cocaine. Klein was a goddamn rock star. Prior to Banksy he'd do shit like paint girls blue, film the painting, have them roll around on canvas, sell the canvas, sell the movie, then rent a gallery and charge admission to see the canvasses and then instead have the gallery be empty and say that the emptiness was the art.

It's worth pointing out that his paintings simply don't translate. IKB is outside the gamut of everything but IKB. In other words, you can't see it unless you're looking at it; no print, no jpg, no book shows it properly.

I didn't buy an original for $2k right about the time Damien "fuckhead" Hirst was busy selling pickled sharks. I saw another edition of the same work for sale last year; it was going for $1.2m. Kinda makes me wonder what my $70 Magritte is worth in these heady days of art market insanity.