Yves Klein the work does seem of a different time with different criteria that we use now. It's that proud progressive modernity that was served up to us in the mid-1950's. Modernism is good for you your town ought to have an art center where you could see modern European art and new American Abstract Expressionism. But you can lead a museum visitor to modern culture but you can't make him dig it. Yves Klein fitted his historical epoch as comfortably as Warhol fit his. For his time Yves Klein was way out ahead of all but a few of his contemporaries most notably Jackson Pollock whose drip paintings made between 1949 and say 1956. Pollock's paintings from his drip period are the most advanced modern art of the 20th century.Maybe this is a received opinion but I bring it up in the context of Yves Klein who is simply not at the same pitch of abstaction and modernity. Which is not to say that Klein's blue works are'nt great they are just of a different order than Pollock's paintings. To make this distinction is difficult for me it's a sort a feeling that much as the Yves Klein blue paintings are seductive they lack the transcendence of Pollock . One feels that Klein's big blue paintings are less involving that is they are not aesthetic objects but rather props, supports to the total presentation. It is a curious group of works that represent Yves Klein's works. My contention is the works are uneven and that somethings are wildly better than the other witness the blue paintings which are eternal in outlook and affect but maybe the claims for this work are exaggerated. The thing with Pollock is his violence his wildness not the good manners of a Frenchman from Nice.
The differences between Pollock and Klein do favor Pollock partly because he was just out there by himself and abstraction whatever one thinks of it is not inherently conceptual (which is how I think Yves Klein regards it) the Klein works do seem to be like material supports for a theory of genius. And this genius performs his art rather than makes it. Some of this version of Yves Klein is old tapes, the idea that he was a fake haunted his work. The film Mondo Cane was the most intense ridicule of his status as Maestro indeed the idea that the whole enterprise was just a fake spectacle haunted Klein it was a question he found at the root of the relation of the artist to his audience, his public This issue whether the contemporary artist's work can ever be taken as true. Given the ongoing nature of this question one supposes it's an issue in Klein's work is it real or is it show business? With Pollock the work engages the brain the vision and the gut. Klein is civilised and maybe that's the difference Pollock could jump Peggy Guggenheim's bones but not Yves Klein he's not that rude.