The largest of only five white monochromes on canvas recorded by Paul Wember, M 70 is the first work of its kind ever to come to auction. Of the few ever produced, one of the series is in the permanent collection of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, leaving very few in private hands; this rare auction moment offers a unique opportunity to acquire an unmitigat🍃ed mast𒁏erpiece of twentieth-century art.

Anti-illusionistic and anti-referential, the white monochrome is ostensibly the simplest of compositions, yet hidden beneath the rich layers of textured pigment lies a profound and complex conceptual belief structure that has influenced generations of subsequent artists and established Klein as one of the pre-eminent artists of his generation. Courageous in its conception, Yves Klein pioneered the painted monochrome series in the early 1950s to the shock and amazement of the establishment. In the Spring of 1955 he first presented an orange monochrome to the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles; two years later at the Galleria Appolinaire in Milan, Klein infamously exhibited eleven monochromes of the same size, each in his signature colour – International Klein Blue – but with differing prices, thereby making a powerful statement about the intrinsic value in a work of art. By 1957, the same year in which M 70 was executed, Klein was already widely celebrated and internationally known as ‘Yves꧙ le Monochrome’.&nbs👍p;

The monochrome works are a synthesis of the modern and the post-modern: they engage with abstract art, taking non-representational art to its logical conclusion, whilst challenging the viewer’s conception of what art is, or should be. For Yves Klein, monochrome did not infer simplicity, instead he understood it as depicting space without limits.  It provided the viewer with a transcendental experience of infinity, of the Void, as Klein referred to it. According to Yves Klein: ‘No drawing is visible, no variation in hue; there is nothing but the UNITY of a single colour. The dominant invades the entire picture, as it were. In this way I seek to in💃dividualize the colour, because I have come to believe that there is a living world of each colour and I express these worlds. My paintings, moreover, represent an idea of absolute unity in perfect serenity’ (www.yvesklein.org).

The unity of the single colour created a composition that was without limit, conferring on the viewer a sense of vast scale, the infinite and immaterial nature of the universe, or The Void.  It is in the mind of the viewer that this is experienced, investing the art object with a performative function.  He wanted to induce independent sensations, feelings and reactions in the viewer, without giving them a depicted object or an abstract sign as a starting point, solely through the effect and qualities of the colou🃏r.

The genesis for the white monochrome can be traced back to Klein’s early experiences in London, where he worked as a framer’s assistant, preparing and priming white canvases. However, the work is best understood in the context of Klein’s 1958 exhibition ‘The Void’ at Galerie Iris Clert, held just a year after the creation of the present work.  This exhibition consisted of painting the interior of the gallery white and leaving it empty (fig. 3). He wanted the viewers to experience the Void by selling them empty space. In the absense of all matter and substance Yves Kl꧃ein moved firmly into the realm of conceptual art. The white monochromes, the most pared down and elemental works to date, radically distill Klein’s complex thought structure and act as a bridge between the monochrome and this absolute reduction.

This work was previously owned by Werner Ruꩵhnau (fig. ꦐ1), the celebrated architect who worked with Yves Klein on the Gelsenkirchen Opera house, designing the building that Yves Klein was commissioned to decorate. He visited Ruhnau in 1957, the year the present work was created, to discuss the Opera house and discovered that they were an inspirational team. They continued to work together in the late fifties, when they developed plans for an ‘architecture of air' and lectured together on this topic at the Sorbonne, Paris. 

While the blue monochromes exhibited at the Galleria Appolinaire employed a roller to apply uniform layers of paint, thereby ostracizing the personalised artist’s touch from the picture surface, the present work has a rich and variegated surface texture which lends it a sculptural quality. There is an almost paradoxical duality to this work: on the one hand it is the most reduced and simple form of one-dimensional painting, on the other it can be viewed as an engaging sculptural work, questioning the form and structure of painting. The entire work is enveloped in a dense layering of white pigment mixed with synthetic resin, applied in thick luscious vertical strokes whose peaks and edges create a three-dimensional structure as they draw the eye across the surface. Simultaneously, it is also the ideal of high modernism in painting: a pure white pigment covering the flat surface, minimalist and simple, paralleling the work of Lucio Fontana, who was one of the first to buy a painting from Klein’s first monochrome exhibition. The comment that these monochromes made on Modern Art is significant in terms of the undoing of the pictorial tradition. The blank canvas invited the inscription of a new art, but one which would not restrict itself to the two-dimensional picture plane. While Fontana moved towards his Concetto Spaziale series which slashed the two-dimensionality of the support, Klein’s experience with the monochrome inspired the Anthropométries, an🍎 entirely new art form that used performance to move away from the picture plane entirely.