1928 - 1962

Died in Paris (), born in Nice ().

The Yves Klein of 1959 already had an extreme reputation on the art scene. He had swept the table clear of arguments about form and color with his monochrome paintings. In 1958, at the opening of his exhibition The Void – the empty space of Galerie Iris Clert in Paris – some 3000 persons pushed and shoved to get a peek. In Antwerp, on March 21st 1959, he takes another step forward. He shows no paintings, making instead his first ‘pure’ conceptual work. With Klein’s personal presence at the opening (where he quotes Gaston Bachelard: ‘First, there is nothing, next there is a deep nothing, then a blue deepness.’), he guarantees the actual existence of an ‘immaterial pictorial sensitivity’ of which three ‘zones’ are for sale, payable in pure gold.