Yves Klein: The Chelsea Hotel Manifesto

Got an e-mail from a relative of mine. She read This month's Yves Klein salute and had this to say:

And that Klein artist is just crazy.... period.... sorry..... Although I can see how he could inspire you crazy artist people.

Yves Klein at work.

Well, if I'm crazy like Klein then I don't want to be sane. I made the mistake of not allowing Klein to speak for himself. Although this great artist (in my crazy opinion) died of a heart attack on June 6th, 1962, he left us his very own Chelsea Hotel Manifesto.

Here's a small sample:

At present, I am particularly excited by "bad taste". I have the deep feeling that there exists in the very essence of bad taste a power capable of creating those things situated far beyond what is traditionally termed "The Work of Art". I wish to play with human feeling, with its "morbidity" in a cold and ferocious manner. Only very recently I have become a sort of grave digger of art (oddly enough, I am using the very terms of my enemies). Some of my latest works have been coffins and tombs. During the same time I succeeded in painting with fire, using particularly powerful and searing gas flames, some of them measuring three to four meters high. I use these to bathe the surface of the painting in such a way that it registered the spontaneous trace of fire.

So I hope I've done a better job of presenting the true Yves Klein this time 'round.

Yves Klein, Chelsea Hotel apartment/studio.

I hope once my 'sane' relative reads his Chelsea Hotel Manifesto she'll have a better idea if Mr. Klein is/was crazy or a rare artistic genius.