"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.
Well put. To be honest I haven't read too much on him yet so I didn't want to make any claims, but I can only imagine what kind of insanity he was cooking up back then. It seems like he had the collective energy of a culture about to burst into a new era, and he'd just been poking at the social tension that was building towards intense progressiveness (dead center of the 40s & 50s!). I could add a link to your comment in the Klein intro if you dont mind. That Magritte is worth something proper I bet, find a reliable art collector/broker and see what they say.Klein was a goddamn rockstar.
I actually meant the penultimate picture, my bad. That probably makes my comment on it make slightly more sense too. I actually completely overlooked 'Leap into the Void'. However, now I look at it along with your explanation it is quite incredible. Thanks for sharing the knowledge.