Yves Klein Italy

Following Yves Klein USA, Yves Klein Germany and Yves Klein Japan, this book, prepared in collaboration with the Yves Klein Archives, presents nearly 150 archival documents, photographs and correspondence relating to the artist. through his travels, for which he has cultivated a taste since the 1940s, his exchanges and artistic or personal encounters, the reader discovers the relations between Yves Klein and Italy and the relationships that the artist was able to have there weave, especially with artists such as Lucio Fontana or Piero Manzoni who, like him, have known how to mark their time. Assisi, Venice, Rome, or even Milan, each of these cities has thus marked the life of the artist of blue, whose first exhibition abroad in 1957, "Proposte monochrome, epoca blu", eu also held at the Apollinaire Gallery in Milan. "I received a great shock in discovering in Assisi, in the basilica of Saint Francis, frescoes scrupulously monochrome, plain and blue that I believe I can attribute to Giotto. They could be from one of his students, from some disciple of Cimabue or one of the artists of the School of Siena. The blue that I speaks of the same nature and quality as the blue of Giotto's skies in the same basilica on the upper floor. Assuming that Giotto only had the figurative intention of showing a pure and cloudless sky, this intention is still quite monochrome." Yves Klein