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How Yves Klein Tricked the World with is Iconic Photograph
ART S Y E D IT ORIAL
BY JACQUI PA LUMB O
JAN 2ND , 2020 2:30 PM

Yves Klein
"Saut dans le Vide",&nbsp1960
Lee Gallery

On a brisk morning in November 1960, Parisians were greeted with a special four-page newspaper placed alongside the weekly Le Journal du Dimanche. It was
not a paper known to anyone, and its front page featured a smartly dressed man frozen in curvilinear form, having just ung himself from a second-story roof
onto the cement sidewalk below. “A man in space!” the headline proclaimed, announcing the newcomer’s victory over the heated international space race. “e
painter of space leaps into the void!”

e man was avant-garde artist Yves Klein, and it was his own satirical publication featuring his now-famous image Leap into the Void (1960). It was easy, at the
time, to take the photograph at face value—that Klein was abandoning himself to gravity. In truth, Klein’s wife and friends were holding a tarpaulin to catch his
falling body. e magician’s illusion was executed off the scene by photographers Harry Shunk and Jean Kender. In a darkroom, they composited an image of the
empty street with one of the artist’s fall.

Leap into the Void was unprecedented in photography. While photographers like Robert Frank and Henri Cartier-Bresson used “straight” photography to seek
emotional truths, Klein harnessed the inherent malleability of the medium’s veracity. Leap was a modern-day legend. For decades after his untimely death in
1962, the story behind the image was hotly disputed, and some accounts still differ today.

Klein would have never admitted to trickery, though he was winking between every line of his newspaper. “Today the painter of space must, in fact, go into space
to paint, but he must go there without trickery or deception,” he wrote. “He must be capable of levitation.”

Klein’s career only spanned about seven years, but he was a temerarious gure in the art world. He was best known for his monochromatic paintings with the
ultramarine pigment he eventually registered, International Klein Blue (IKB), and his avant-garde high jinks. He published an art catalogue of non-existent
paintings. He had nude models cover themselves in IKB and print their own bodies on paper. While they did so, an orchestra played a single note for 20
minutes, followed by 20 minutes of silence. For his last act, he had a series of heart attacks at age 34, the rst during the screening of a lm in which his role had
been cut.

“Klein was clever and charismatic—a mystic and a mythmaker who beguiled his admirers with the prospect of transcending the material limitations of earthly
life,” Mia Fineman wrote in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition catalogue for the 2012 show “Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop,”
which included his famed image.

Klein’s Leap wasn’t his rst dally with the concept of the void. In 1958, in a show known as “e Void” at Iris Clert Gallery in Paris, the only object in the gallery
was a cabinet that Klein had emptied. As a parting gift, gallerygoers went home to discover that the IKB-hued cocktails they’d been served came out blue on the
other end, too.

e artist’s fascination with the void came from his training in judo, which he studied fervorously to earn a fourth-degree black belt. He trained at Tokyo’s
Kodokan Judo Institute in 1953, and he became infatuated with the Japanese Buddhist idea of an in nite expanse of nothingness.

Klein reportedly didn’t take the leap into the void just once, but multiple times. Before photographers Shunk and Kender were present, Klein claimed to have
tested it on his own with no one to break his fall. On the day of, he jumped many times in the Paris suburb of Fontenay-aux-Roses, practicing the arc of his body
and testing different elements in the scene.

“ere were three versions in the end,” Shunk relayed to the London Times at a later date. “One with a bike, one with Yves’s car, and one with nothing. He
immediately decided that the official version should be one with the bike, but then he also sent out the other one. But never the one with the car; he hated the car
because it was cheap.”

ough the performance and newspaper were saturated in irony, Klein was serious about keeping the illusion in tact: Shunk said he was threatened with legal
action if he ever pulled back the Ozian curtain. e mysteries of the photograph weren’t fully revealed until two shows in 2010 delved into the making of the
image. One of them, at the Menil Collection in Houston, even had the Holy Grail: a piece of slate purported to be from the roof from which Klein jumped.

Klein’s Leap reveals more than an illusionist’s trick, but the very nature of photography that we often forget, no matter how many doctored images we see today.
“Convincing to the eye if not to the mind, Klein’s Leap symbolically enacts the leap of faith we make in accepting the truth of any photograph,” Fineman writes,
“acknowledging both the pleasures and the perils involved in the willing suspension of disbelief.”

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