Yves Klein By Himself: His Life and Thought

Yves Klein (1928-1962) was an agitator of ideas, a total artist who used his considerable charisma to propagate social change through art. In his writings and talks, Klein drew on a vast repertoire of philosophical, scientific, political and occult materials, synthesizing them into a declamatory propaganda for his own art. Yves Klein by Himself is a composite biography of one of the most influential artists of the second half of the twentieth century. Neither an intellectual biography nor an art-historical analysis, Yves Klein by Himself is rather a kind of "Klein reader" that lets the artist speak through his ideas and philosophical conceptions, and in doing so attempts to reconstruct his "organized network of obsessions." To this end, it intermixes biographical facts, a selection of texts by the writers and artists who influenced Klein, a glossary of keywords with Klein's own definitions derived from published texts as well as previously unpublished manuscripts and a selection of critical writings with analyses of Klein's philosophical ideas by the author and editor of this volume, Klein scholar Klaus Ottmann.