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Artist or Maker: Yves Klein (1928-1962)
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Provenance: Mr & Mrs Werner Ruhnau, Essen.
Galerie Hans Meyer, Dusseldorf.
Acquired from the above by the present owner irca 1990.
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Literature: P. Wember, Yves Klein, Cologne 1969, no. RE 29 (illustrated, p. 82).
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Notes: The Brain is Wider than the Sky, by Emily Dickinson.
The brain is wider than the sky
For put them side by side
The one the other will contain
With ease and you beside
The brain is deeper than the sea
For hold them blue to blue
The one the other will absorb
As sponges buckets do
The brain is just the weight of God
For heft them pound for pound
And they will differ if they do
As syllable from sound
"I propose (that artists) go beyond art itself and work individually for the return to real life, where thinking man is no longer the centre of the universe but the universe is the centre of man... (Yves Klein: "Speech delivered on the occasion of Tinguely's exhibition in Dusseldorf, January 30th 1959, cited in Sidra Stich Yves Klein, Cantz Verlag 1994, p. 159.).
The idea of impregnating man with a sense of the vast scale, infinite dimension and for Klein, immaterial nature of the universe or the "void", as he often chose to refer to it, lay at the core of the artist's life and work. Combining the immaterial presence of the artist's blank featureless monochrome canvases with the unique and material presence of the natural sponge, Klein's sponge-reliefs are among the finest and most important creations in his oeuvre. They form a synthesis of his ideas and are the highest expression of his deeply Romantic transcendental aesthetic. One of the first series of Klein's sponge-reliefs that the artist made, Re 29 is a large and unique square-format work executed in 1957.
The sponge, like the monochrome is one of Klein's signature motifs and a key element in his unique and profoundly spiritual aesthetic. Klein's sponge relief paintings not only combine the natural earthbound form of the sponge with an ethereal and essentially abstract expanse of colour, but in their very conscious materiality and three-dimensionality they also represent the dramatic expansion of Klein's monochrome paintings into the real space of the viewer.
The sponge reliefs are a physical manifestation of the dialogue that Klein hoped to induce between the "sensibility" of the viewer and the vast monochromatic expanse of intense blue that emanates from his paintings. Blue, as his IKB monochrome canvases had established, was, for Klein, the colour of the infinite and of the void - a colour that he described as being "beyond dimensions". It was the colour of the sea and of the sky in Nice where Klein had grown up and it was, Klein was delighted to hear in the early 1960s when satellite pictures of the earth where produced, also the colour of the earth as seen from space. Klein's development of his own patented colour, the International Klein Blue, was intended to convey the most intense essence of blueness and the pigment of this colour, the immaterial nature of the void. The sponge was the logical counterpart to this; a highly textural and material earthbound element of nature, it offered itself to Klein's imagination, as indeed it had to Emily Dickinson's, as a metaphor for the absorptive function of the human brain and the ability of the viewer to "absorb" an understanding of the pregnant nature of space and the profound spiritual resonance of the universal void.
"When working on my pictures in the studio, I sometimes used sponges. Naturally they turned blue very rapidly! One day I noticed how beautiful the blue in the sponge was, and the tool immediately became a raw material. The extraordinary capacity of sponges to absorb everything fluid fascinated me. Thanks to the sponges I was going to be able to make portraits of the observers (lecteur) of my monochromes, who, after having seen, after having voyaged in the blue of my pictures, return totally impregnated in sensibility, as are the sponges." (cited in Yves Klein : A Retrospective exh. cat., Rice Museum, Houston 1982, p.111)
Inspired by the gnosticism of Rosicrucian and alchemical ideas of an inherent spirituality lying innate within all matter, Klein's monochromes and the sponge reliefs articulate this notion of base material being impregnated with a higher dimensional essence. Viewers of these works, "gifted with a body or vehicle of sensibility", Klein suggested, would be able to carry away this immaterial essence of what they had seen, and in doing so would, themselves become "extra-dimensional in sensibility, all in all, impregnated (like the sponges) with the sensibility of the universe." (Yves Klein quoted from Depassment and "The Monochrome Adventure" cited in Yves Klein exh. cat., Houston 1982, p. 247).
Unlike the seemingly abstract immateriality of the flat planes of coloured pigment in his monochromes, the highly textured, organic and strongly material features of the sponge reliefs grounds these strange apparitions and places them in the here and now world of everyday reality. Looking like strange panoramas of the surface of a foreign planet or of the ocean floor, the organic nature of the sponges that project outwards from the picture plane combines with the intensity of colour in a way that seems to actively invade the real space of the viewer and physically assert what Klein referred to as a "profundity of blue".
The irregularity involved in the placement of the sponges not only allowed Klein to introduce compositional ideas into his work without abandoning the basic principles of the monochrome, but it also conveyed as sense of a collective individuality and of personal intervention. With the sponges, the mechanical and impersonal quality of mass production - an element that Klein had always considered unfortunate about his IKB monochromes - was avoided. The deliberate placement of the sponges on his reliefs in a seemingly arbitrary manner actively encouraged this sense of individual variability within a universal and collective whole. This feature of Klein's sponges is consciously emphasised in Re 29 with the placement of various sponges alongside and over the edge of the work so that the strict regularity of the geometry of its square format is broken up.
The disruption of the geometric outline of the work stresses the organic and material nature of the work, something which Klein was later to develop further when he exhibited a collection of sponge sculptures and sponge- reliefs in the form of a mystic blue forest in his 1959 exhibition at the Galerie Iris Clert. In the most successful and refined of his sponge reliefs, the composition of sponges projecting from the monochrome picture plane is arranged in such a way that the work looks essentially uncomposed and yet suggestive of a natural rhythm. For Klein, the sponge being a natural phenomenon, was a symbol of the gently alternating phases of the rhythms in nature that exist between breathing in and out for example, or between waking and dreaming. Indeed, he entitled his sponge relief "Re 16", "Do,do, do" - after the singsong incantation with which many French mothers lull their children to sleep - for this very reason.
In Re 29 as in all of the most successful of Klein's sponge reliefs, the distribution of his sponges creates a composition which is neither asymmetrically balanced, nor mindlessly scattered but is rather a sublime combination of mind and nature. In his remarkably delicate and refined ordering of these natural forms Klein was almost certainly influenced, as in so much of his art, by Eastern aesthetics and in particular by the Japanese art of sekitei or stone gardening that he had seen during his stay in Japan between 1952 and 1953. In particular, the garden at Ryoan-ji in Kyoto, with its strongly minimal almost abstract quality, made a particular impression on Klein as it has on most Western visitors, being by far the most visited garden among Western visitors in the whole of Japan.
Re 29, like many of Klein's other large-format sponge-reliefs, establishes a field of vision for the viewer's immersion in the immaterial through its large and variegated surface of blueness. At the same time, with its large and heavily three-dimensional conglomeration of sponges seeming to invade the actual space of the viewer, it is also a profoundly organic and physical work that exerts a powerful sense of its own material existence. This strongly "material versus immaterial" presence in the work along with its square format distinguishes it amongst Klein's sponge-reliefs making it an imposing and particularly memorable example that seems to demonstrate Klein's aim of integrating art into life.
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