Yves Klein’s Leap Into the Blue (With Living Paintbrushes) (2024)

The word “decorative,” with its evocation of surfacey dazzle, is often a put-down in art. But Yves Klein, the legendary French avant-gardist who died of a heart attack in 1962, at age 34, proved it was possible for art to be both decorative and ocean-deep. He is best known for his all-blue monochrome paintings, those rectangles of unalloyed color that are invariably the first thing you notice when one is present.

Klein was so obsessed with blue that he named a shade of it after himself. International Klein Blue, or I.K.B. for short, is a combination of ultramarine pigment and a chemist’s polymer binder that keeps it from fading. It can strike you as quintessentially French, perhaps because it shares chromatic DNA with Matisse’s “Blue Nude” series of cutouts. Klein said his art was about “the link between spirit and matter,” a claim that might awaken your inner skeptic. But there is no denying that even his forays into décor — such as a commercially produced, now-popular coffee table that encases pounds of blue powder inside a plexiglass box — emit a celestial flavor.

The current show at Lévy Gorvy Dayan gallery in Manhattan, “Yves Klein and the Tangible World,” zeros in on a fabled part of the artist’s career, gathering about 30 large-scale works on paper, fabric or board with roots in performance art. “My paintings are only the ashes of my art,” Klein said. The claim was not pure hyperbole. The gallery show includes his rarely seen “Fire Paintings” of 1961-2, whose tendrils of smoke and blackened orbs — achieved with the use of a blowtorch and the ancillary support of a man dressed as a fireman with a hose — have a startling elegance.

The heart of the show belongs to his quasi-figurative “Anthropometries,” which are inseparable from their controversial origins. They were made with the aid of female models whom Klein called “living brushes” — actually, it would be more correct to describe them as human printing plates. As Klein supervised, models slathered their bare torsos and legs in I.K.B. and then lay face down or were pulled across sheets of paper, pressing images as they went.