Yves Klein at Gagosian - painting exhibit, New York, New York

Art in America, Oct, 1993 by David Ebony

The work that Yves Klein produced in his feverishly prolific but brief career sometimes seems disparate and uneven. By focusing on a single aspect of Klein's oeuvre, this recent exhibition of the fire paintings and its accompanying catalogue by Pierre Restany helped clarify the achievement of this influential artist.

Since World War II, fire has been used quite frequently to make art. The main inspiration for Klein's experiments with it was Gaston Bachelard's book The Psychoanalysis of Fire. But he and others using fire in the years just after the war, such as Arman, Alberto Burri and Otto Piene, may have been responding to the horrors of the bombing of Hiroshima. Fire and burning techniques are seen today in the work of younger artists (Willie Cole and Curtis Mitchell come to mind), and Klein's efforts in this mode seem as pertinent as ever.

Klein used fire for the first time in 1957, attaching firecrackers to a canvas and setting them off on the exhibition's opening night. But most of his work with fire took place in 1961 and in 1962, the year of his death at age 34. The 11 works in this show were from this last period and represented almost all the types of fire paintings Klein produced.

Color Fire FC 1, the largest work in the show at about 5 by 10 feet, is a variation on his famous "anthropometry" paintings, in which nude models pressed their blue-paint-coated bodies against canvas or paper. Here the models doused themselves with water and pressed up against large sheets of paper. The areas dampened by their bodies resisted the heat of a flamethrower wielded by the artist, thereby creating ghostly silhouettes of the human form.

In Color Fire FC 3, Klein burned pigments into the paper, creating a trio of colors: rose, blue and the gold/brown of the singed paper. The lyrical quality of this series relates to certain Abstract Expressionist paintings that had a profound meaning for Klein. The influence of Klein's favorite painter, Mark Rothko, is perhaps nowhere more evident than in the series that Restany refers to as the "pure" fire paintings. In a large vertical work called Fire F27 1, for example, Klein produced a dazzling, evocative image by sprinkling and pouring water over the paper just before applying the flame. It looks like a photograph of the Milky Way, like molten metal being poured from a smelting vessel or like an underwater volcanic eruption in which a sparkling cascade of lava produces myriad bubbles rising to the surface.

In many ways the fire paintings were the culmination of Klein's esoteric philosophy. Even more than his series of monochromes, the fire paintings were, for him, the closest he could possibly get to depicting the void, a state of pure, meditative nothingness.