YVES KLEIN

Edition Bierammer, Austria 2024

Edition of 250 copies with Yves Klein Blue innersleeve and A4 insert with score.

First ever release of Yves Klein’s groundbreaking conceptual symphonie “Monoton-Silence” conceived 1947-1948. Scored for 20 singers, 10 violins, 10 cellos, 3 double basses, 3 trumpets, 3 flutes and 3 oboes, the piece consists of a single 20-minute sustained D major chord followed by a 20-minute silence.

The Symphonie ”Monoton-Silence” was a precedent to Klein’s later monochrome paintings and to the work of minimal musicians & composers, particularly La Monte Young’s drone music or John Cage’s 4′33″ and transforms Klein’s monochromatic paintings and sculpture into a monotone auditory experience.

Performed April 1998 at Chapelle Ste Reita, Paris
Conducted by Philippe Arrii Blachette

Yves Klein (1928-1962) was the most influential, prominent, and controversial French artist to emerge in the 1950s. A leading figure of Nouveau Réalisme, Klein developed a ground-breaking practice that broke down boundaries between conceptual art, sculpture, painting, and performance. He is remembered above all for his use of a single color, the rich shade of ultramarine that he made his own: International Klein Blue. But the success of his sadly short-lived career lay in attacking many of the ideas that underpinned the abstract painting that had been dominant in France since the end of the Second World War. Animated by a quest to ‘liberate colour from the prison that is the line’, Yves Klein directed his attention to the monochrome which, to him, was the only form of painting that allowed to ‘make visible the absolute’. By choosing to express feeling rather than figurative form, he moved beyond ideas of artistic representation. His practice revealed of new way of conceptualizing the role of the artist, conceiving his whole life as an artwork.