Yves Klein: Εξήντα χρόνια από το θάνατό του το μπλε χρώμα παραμένει πάντα ζωντανό

Ο χρόνος που είχαμε στη διάθεσή μας για τη συνέντευξη τελειώνει και η Rotraut παραδέχεται πως η επέτειος του θανάτου του Klein είναι κάτι που δυσκολεύεται να συλλάβει. «Είναι κάτι κάπως εξωπραγματικό. Δεν ξέρω πώς αισθάνομαι. Είναι πραγματικά πολύ παράξενο». Τη ρωτάω τι πιστεύει πως θα ήθελε να καταφέρει στην καριέρα του αν ζούσε. Η απάντησή της είναι πολύ απλή και εύγλωττη: «Δεν νιώθω πως πρέπει να μιλάμε γι’ αυτό σαν να αναφερόμαστε στο παρελθόν. Πρόκειται για το παρόν».

Είναι νωρίς το πρωί στην Αριζόνα όταν μιλάω με τον Yves Amu Klein μέσω Zoom, ο αέρας στα τέλη της άνοιξης είναι ευτυχώς δροσερός ακόμη. Εκτός του πλάνου, ακούω αμυδρά τη σύντροφό του, Anna Vivette, τραγουδίστρια της όπερας –της οποίας η φωνή είναι υπέροχη ακόμα κι όταν μιλάει–, και την κόρη τους, Amelie, που ζωγραφίζει και παίζει εκεί δίπλα. Δεν μου είναι δύσκολο να φανταστώ τις μεγάλες αντιθέσεις ανάμεσα σ’ αυτή τη ζεστή οικογενειακή σκηνή και στα πρώτα πέντε χρόνια της ζωής του Yves, όταν η 23χρονη χήρα Rotraut πενθούσε για τον χαμό του νεαρού συζύγου της στο Παρίσι. «Πιστεύω πως εκείνα ήταν τα πιο δύσκολα χρόνια για τη μητέρα μου», λέει. «Προφανώς πέρασε πολλά, υπήρχαν τρομερά σκαμπανεβάσματα. Ήταν στιγμές που τα πράγματα ήταν πολύ δύσκολα, αλλά και όμορφες στιγμές. Και η μαμά μου πάντα δούλευε σκληρά, όχι στο δικό της έργο, αλλά και για την προώθηση του έργου του Yves, πράγμα που έκανε όλη της τη ζωή, το έβαζε πάνω και απ’ τη δική της δουλειά. Είναι άνθρωπος με τεράστια δύναμη». Αναρωτιέμαι πώς ήταν να είναι παιδί ενός καλλιτέχνη που είχε καταφέρει τόσο σπουδαία πράγματα στην τόσο σύντομη ζωή του και να μεγαλώνει σε ένα διαμέρισμα γεμάτο μπλε πίνακες που τώρα αξίζουν εκατομμύρια, σε ένα περιβάλλον όπου πηγαινοέρχονταν συχνά ξακουστοί στοχαστές, καλλιτέχνες και συλλέκτες, μεταξύ των οποίων η ίδια η Madame Pompidou ή o καλός φίλος και συνεργάτης του Yves, Jean Tinguely, που πολλές φορές αναλάμβαναν χρέη baby sitter κρατώντας τον μικρό Yves απασχολημένο. «Στο μεγαλύτερο μέρος των πρώτων χρόνων της ζωής μου μπορούσα να καταλάβω ότι κάτι έλειπε, το ένιωθα, ήταν ένα βάρος το οποίο δεν νομίζω πως μπόρεσε ποτέ να ξεπεράσει η μητέρα μου. Και όμως, έκανε ό,τι μπορούσε για να το αφήσει πίσω της και να προχωρήσει στη ζωή της, να φτιάξει μια οικογένεια και να συνεχίσει όσο καλύτερα μπορούσε», λέει. Μιλάει για τα χρόνια στην Ίμπιζα, όταν η Rotraut και ο Daniel Moquay αναζητούσαν μια πιο ήρεμη ζωή, μακριά απ’ την «ταραχώδη» ατμόσφαιρα των τελών της δεκαετίας του ’60 στο Παρίσι. Τα περιγράφει ως μια περίοδο κατά την οποία μπορούσε να ανακαλύψει τη φύση, να κάνει καταδύσεις ανάμεσα στα βράχια του νησιού και να αναπτύξει ένα πάθος για τον φυσικό κόσμο, που είναι εμφανές στην τέχνη του σήμερα, όπως για παράδειγμα στο ρομποτικό ζωντανό γλυπτό του με τίτλο Octofunghi. Αργότερα, όταν σπούδαζε Αρχιτεκτονική και Σχέδιο στο Παρίσι, απέκτησε τεράστιο ενδιαφέρον για την κυβερνητική και τα σύνθετα συστήματα. Λίγα χρόνια αργότερα σπούδασε Επιστήμη των Υπολογιστών στο Arizona State University. Σήμερα, η τέχνη του περιλαμβάνει μεγάλη ποικιλία από γλυπτά που αλληλεπιδρούν με τους ανθρώπους μέχρι ψηφιακές φωτογραφίες του σύμπαντος –για τις οποίες κατασκευάζει δικά του τηλεσκόπια– και 3D printed κοσμήματα που ανταποκρίνονται στα συναισθήματα αυτού που τα φοράει. Τελευταία, άρχισαν με την Anna να συνεργάζονται σε διεπιστημονικά projects χρησιμοποιώντας ηχογραφήσεις και ρομποτική, εξερευνώντας τον νέο κόσμο των NFTs και του blockchain, με το συνδυαστικό ψευδώνυμο annaetyvesklein. Παρουσιάζει ενδιαφέρον το γεγονός ότι αναγνωρίζει άλλη μία δυνατή μητριαρχική φιγούρα στη ζωή του, τη Marie Raymond, μητέρα του Yves Klein, που έθρεψε αρχικά το πάθος του για την επιστήμη και τον πήγαινε σε όλες τις ενδιαφέρουσες εκθέσεις στο Παρίσι, όταν τον πρόσεχε μικρό.

Η Marie Raymond και ο σύζυγός της, Fred Klein, ήταν και οι δύο σημαντικοί καλλιτέχνες. Το 1949 εκείνη κατέκτησε το βραβείο Kandinsky για τους ζωηρούς και χαρούμενους αφηρημένους πίνακές της – ήταν η πρώτη γυναίκα που το κέρδιζε. «Πολλοί άνδρες καλλιτέχνες ασχολούνταν με την αφηρημένη τέχνη εκείνη την περίοδο, αλλά αυτό που παρατηρούσε κανείς στα έργα τους ήταν ένα σκοτάδι και μια απαισιοδοξία. Αντιθέτως, οι δικοί της πίνακες ήταν γεμάτοι ζωντάνια, φως και χρώματα, ήταν αναζωογονητικοί. Νομίζω πως ήταν ένας φάρος ελπίδας εκείνη την περίοδο», λέει ο Yves, που αντιδρά με ένα χαμόγελο όταν λέω πως η Raymond δεν είναι αρκετά γνωστή στο κοινό. «Το δουλεύουμε», παρατηρεί. «Πιστεύω πως το έργο της είναι αξιοσημείωτο, αλλά, δυστυχώς, την επισκίασε κατά κάποιον τρόπο ο γιος της από πολλές απόψεις, γιατί η ίδια ήταν πολύ στοργικό άτομο και έβαζε πάντα εκείνον μπροστά. Τον βοηθούσε, τον έσπρωχνε και φρόντισε να πετύχει ακόμα και εις βάρος της δικής της καριέρας». Το πάθος να κρατήσουν τη φλόγα ζωντανή και να εξυμνούν τα καλλιτεχνικά επιτεύγματα είναι ξεκάθαρα χαρακτηριστικό όλης της οικογένειας.

Με την επέτειο του θανάτου του πατέρα του, αλλά και τα δικά του εξηκοστά γενέθλια να πλησιάζουν, ο Yves παραδέχεται πως τέτοια ορόσημα σε κάνουν να καθίσεις να σκεφτείς. «Νομίζω πως για ένα μεγάλο μέρος της ζωής μου, επειδή γνώριζα ότι εκείνος πέθανε νέος, φοβόμουν ότι θα συμβεί το ίδιο και σ’ εμένα. Εκπλήσσομαι πάντα με όσα κατάφερε σε τόσο μικρό χρονικό διάστημα. Είναι αξιοθαύμαστο. Αλλά νομίζω πως αυτό συμβαίνει συχνά με τις διάνοιες. Λάμπουν πολύ, αλλά για λίγο». Μιλώντας για τη σύντομη αλλά εκτυφλωτική λάμψη του Klein, γυρνάμε στο θέμα της αθανασίας του International Klein Blue, που με την πάροδο των χρόνων γίνεται όλο και πιο εμβληματικό. «Κάτι που παρουσιάζει μεγάλο ενδιαφέρον είναι ότι στη φύση το μπλε είναι πολύ σπάνιο χρώμα», παρατηρεί. «Αλλά ο συμβολισμός του στην ανθρώπινη ιστορία είναι έντονος. Το μπλε έχει κάτι καθολικό, με το οποίο μπορούμε όλοι να ταυτιστούμε, μας τραβάει σαν μαγνήτης, πιθανότατα επειδή σπανίζει στη φύση. Έχει κάτι μεταφυσικό – είμαστε όλοι συνδεδεμένοι με το σύμπαν, φτιαγμένοι απ’ την ίδια ύλη με τα αστέρια, και έχουμε λίγο χρόνο για να λάμψουμε προτού ανακυκλωθούμε στον κύκλο της ζωής». Τι πιστεύει ότι θα μπορούσε να κατορθώσει ο πατέρας του αν ζούσε; «Πριν γίνει καλλιτέχνης, ήταν δάσκαλος. Είχε μαύρη ζώνη στο τζούντο κι αυτό ήταν κάτι που δίδασκε. Είχε αναφέρει ότι θα τον ενδιέφερε να δημιουργήσει μια καλλιτεχνική σχολή. Τον ενδιέφεραν επίσης η αρχιτεκτονική και η επιστήμη. Δούλευαν με τον Jean Tinguely πάνω σε ένα project με πυραύλους. Ποιος ξέρει πού θα μπορούσαν να φτάσουν;» αναρωτιέται χαμογελώντας. Είναι πολύ δυνατή εικόνα. Μπορώ να φανταστώ έναν σύγχρονο Yves Klein να σατιρίζει τους σημερινούς δισεκατομμυριούχους και τις πομπώδεις φιλοδοξίες τους να σκίζουν τον ουρανό με πυραύλους, απαντώντας με κάποιο μεταφυσικό ερώτημα. Θα ήθελα πολύ να έβλεπα τι θα έκανε. Υποψιάζομαι ότι θα τους έκανε σκόνη.

Η δεύτερη φορά που συνομιλώ με τη Rotraut είναι στις 2 Ιουνίου, ακριβώς στην επέτειο του θανάτου του Yves Klein. Ήθελε πολύ να ξαναμιλήσουμε και, όταν απάντησε στην κλήση μου, η φωνή της ακουγόταν νεανική. Η σημασία του μπλε του Yves Klein είναι κάτι που σκεφτόταν απ’ την τελευταία φορά που μιλήσαμε και μου λέει πως όσο περίμενε το τηλέφωνο να χτυπήσει, ήταν λες και είχε ένα όραμα, μια επικοινωνία με τον ίδιο τον Klein. «Μπορούσα να δω το μπλε με τη μορφή όλων των ανθρώπινων ψυχών που έχουν περάσει απ’ τη Γη, να μας περιβάλλει και να μας θρέφει. Ο Yves εστιαζόταν πολύ στο πνεύμα της αγάπης και του μεγαλείου. Με το έργο του επιδίωκε την πνευματική ανάταση του ανθρώπου», μου λέει, καταλήγοντας πως στόχος της ζωής του Klein ήταν να αποτυπώσει το άυλο και δεν έβλεπε τον θάνατο σαν τέλος. «Πριν πεθάνει, είπε πως σύντομα θα έφτιαχνε το μεγαλύτερο στούντιο στον κόσμο, όπου θα έφτιαχνε το άυλο», λέει. «Και νομίζω πως αυτό είναι κάτι πολύ δυνατό».

English Version

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YVES KLEIN, the artist synonymous with the powdery ultramarine shade of blue he christened International Klein Blue, was just 34 when he died. On the 60th anniversary of his passing, SARAH BAILEY spoke to his wife and muse, ROTRAUT – a redoubtable artist in her own right – and YVES AMU KLEIN, creator of robotic sculptures and the son Klein never met, about their own artistic oeuvre and keeping the blue.

Blue has no dimensions, it is beyond dimensions, whereas the other colours are not,” said Yves Klein, the brilliant French conceptual artist, who was fascinated by the transcendent, spiritual qualities of the colour and famously claimed the blue of the sky to be his first artwork as he lay on the beach in Nice as a young man.

This June marks the 60th anniversary of the death of the Nouveau Realist artist, who will forever be associated with the vibrant powdery shade of ultramarine International Klein Blue (IKB), that he registered as a trademark 65 years ago in 1957. In the intervening years, Inter- national Klein Blue has permeated our visual culture – becoming a pop cultural icon as recognisable as an Andy Warhol Marilyn. And today, Klein’s life and oeuvre continue to invite the fascination of art- ists, film-makers, designers and writers – his influence living on in the work of blockbuster art superstars such as Anish Kapoor and James Turrell. His most famous works – the blue monochrome paintings, Le Vide (the exhibition he staged in 1958 in an entirely empty gallery) and the front-page grabbing photograph ‘Leap Into The Void’ (1960) – are the stuff of legend. While today at auction, his output drives evermore astronomical prices. In May of this year an untitled blue sponge painting executed in 1961 sold for the sum of $19,999,500 in auction at Phillips in New York.

Contemplating the scale and achieve- ment of Klein’s legacy, it is only more remarkable when one considers that he was just 34 years old when he died of a heart attack in 1962 – his active career as a professional artist was just seven short years. He had only recently married his beautiful young German wife before he died. Rotraut was herself an artist, who had participated in Klein’s Anthropometry paintings. (You may have seen some of the archive footage, in which female models daub themselves blue and imprint their bodies on prepared sheets of paper like ‘human paintbrushes’, to the accompa- niment of classical musicians dressed in evening suits).

One of the unimaginable sadnesses about Klein’s premature and sudden passing was that Rotraut (then just 23) was pregnant at the time. Yves Amu Klein, the son that he would never meet, was born on 6th August 1962, exactly two months later.

Today, Rotraut lives in Arizona, she is a renowned artist, celebrated for her sculptures and prolific work ethic (at 83 years old, she is apparently tireless!). And together with her second husband the curator Daniel Moquay (whom she married in 1968 and with whom she went on to have a further three children) she is responsible for managing the Yves Klein estate.

Yves Amu Klein is also a practising artist, fascinated by robotics and AI. He followed Rotraut and his stepfather to Arizona, where he too now lives with his partner Anna Vivette, an opera singer, and their six-year-old daughter Amelie (Yves’ eldest daughter Seffa from his first marriage is an artist based in California).

Earlier this year, I was able to speak with Yves Amu Klein and Rotraut, to learn more about their respective art practice, the extraordinary dynasty of which they are a part and keeping the flame of Yves Klein’s artistic achievement burning bright. Paradise Valley, Phoenix Arizona has been home to the artist Rotraut Klein-Moquay (who goes by the single moniker ‘Rotraut’) since the early 80s. Showing me around her vast studio complex, where the effervescent morning light is illuminating the sunflower yellow walls, the 83-year-old artist is a charismatic and energised presence. Despite the restrictions and glitches of a FaceTime call, there is something almost guru-like about her way of speaking

The fecundity of the earth, the energy of the stars and the pulse of the very lifeforce itself throb through Rotraut’s work. She pauses to show me a painting of dark matter, explaining her fascination with the Big Bang. On another wall, one of her famous ‘Galaxie’ paintings is as mesmerising as a Van Gogh sky, “I started my Galaxie paintings in 1959, she says, “and have been working on them for most of my life.” We pass a heart-shaped canvas (“I always do very happy work to feel better,” she remarks), before pausing in front of a wall of framed, abstract polychromatic ‘Kite’ drawings (“always done very, very fast with just one line”); their shapes suggesting the movement of a contemporary dancer’s leaps and arabesques. Rotraut explains that she creates these lines at utmost speed, allowing the momentum of the line to have a life of its own. It’s a process that takes her right back to her childhood. The serendipity delights her. “I was always so interested in you know, the energy of life, that just comes out of your pen.” She describes the creatures and characters that seem to emerge from these very fast drawings, “like getting into my memories”. The process is not dissimilar from the ‘forms’ she creates, when she makes her vast paintings, releasing liquid plaster from a bottle onto a canvas over and over again. “It’s in the air, that it happens,” she says. More than anything, she explains, she is capturing an energy.

Perhaps the most arresting spectacle of my studio ‘tour’ is the collection of metal sculptures. These are supersized, 3D versions of the Rotraut’s ‘forms’, their gleaming alu- minium shells slick with automotive paint, arranged in groupings resembling hyperreal trees in a forest, or a collection of standing stones. Rotraut wanders about them with an almost childlike wonder, showing me how one resembles an elephant (“it just came out by itself”), another like a woman dancing with sensual abandon. “It’s almost spooky,” she says, with delight. Around 25 of these sculptures will be showcased in an exhibition in the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix this October, following the success of another comprehensive one woman show at Sculpture Tucson, which opened in 2021. “The strange thing is that Yves told me, ‘One day you will be a sculptor,’ ‘’ says Rotraut, although at the time she could not imagine how her work might evolve in this way.

Born in 1938 Rerik, in eastern Germany on the Baltic sea, Rotraut’s early childhood was coloured by the turbulence and disruptions of war, as her family struggled to cultivate farmland to survive. Her brother Günther Uecker, today himself a renowned artist, famous inter alia for founding the Zero Group, was to leave their rural home to study art in Düsseldorf and in the mid-1950s, a teenage Rotraut followed him there. It was through Günther that she later secured an au pair position at the home of the French artist Armand in 1957 in Nice, which is where she met Yves Klein, the couple falling in love at first sight.

Rotraut may have only been 19 at the time, but it would be a mistake to imagine that she was an unformed ingenue. Though not formally trained, she had been making art herself for years, sometimes at her brother’s side, and was by no means a stranger to the ideas of art and artists. Infact, she had already encountered Yves Klein’s work in galleries and as she explains: “I kind of recognised his spirituality in his work and it was as if we were almost connected already. Because I understood his work.” In short, it was a meeting of the minds. She was soon swept up in the whirlwind of Klein’s prolific activities both as an assistant and muse, but also an active participant in his work. She describes painting herself blue and printing her body on canvas for Klein’s Anthropometry series as something that felt elemental and intensely spiritual, “like a fusion of body and soul”. At the same time she continued to produce her own work, staging her first solo show at the New Visions Centre Gallery in London in 1959.

In the decades since Klein’s death, Rotraut has dedicated much of her life and energy to promoting, staging and explaining her later husband’s work to the world. If I had ever been tempted to characterise this as a self-abnegating act of wifely devotion, own career forever cast in Klein’s shadow, my conversations with Rotraut put paid to that. Infact, the way she describes her lifetime commitment to Klein’s work and reputation is akin to the fierce energy of a determined mother fighting to keep her child alive.

She admits that in the early months follow- ing Klein’s heart attack, when she was raising her infant son Yves Amu, her late husband’s work and legacy became her other baby. “If you know how you can take care of a baby… you can take care of work, you need to give it everything that it needs. And [the work] needs to be shown. And I needed to do interviews to talk about it. And it was something I needed to speak about and explain in my language.”

Significantly, Rotraut’s second husband Daniel Moquay (whom she met when she was 29 and he was 25) has become her partner in this legacy work, managing the Yyes Klein estate. Today the Yves Klein Archives, which he runs, is a sleek operation overseeing dozens of international gallery shows and managing the licensing partnerships, such as the one for the much sought-after plexiglass Yves Klein tables (used versions of these can sell in the region of $20,000 on collectors’ site 1stDibs). All this has allowed Rotraut to pursue her own artistic ambitions with vigour. “I’m very grateful to Daniel,” says Rotraut, who since the 1990s has been able to mount substantial sculpture shows of her own work and now has her own small factory where her vast metal pieces can be fabricated with her assistants.

Rotraut acknowledges that she is enjoying a golden period for her own artistic output and she is pleased to say that the pandemic didn’t slow her down. “I spent a lot of time at my studio, working, creating paintings with my forms. I felt the need for colour,” she explains. “I was sad not to see my friends as much as I used to, but art helped me through these challenging times.”

The joy she receives from making her work is palpable. “When I am working, time is timeless, it’s a tremendous great feeling, it gives me everything I need, like food, it gives me energy and happiness too. That is what is so fantastic about art. It’s so important – to transport people, to elevate.”

On the subject of art’s ability to elevate, our conversation returns to the attraction of Klein and blue. “Yves started with the blue of the sky and the ocean in Nice, where there is a lot of water and reflections. And you have this l’heure bleue at five o’clock in the morning when you wake up. This is amazing,” says Rotraut. “The stratosphere is all blue between the cosmos and the earth…I think this is very powerful because it is around us, forever…”

Our allotted interview time is running out and Rotraut admits that the anniversary of Klein’s death is something she finds hard to comprehend. “You know, it’s just something that is kind of unreal. I don’t know how I feel. Really, it’s a strange thing.” What does she think he would have gone on to achieve in his career had he lived, I ask. Her answer is simple and eloquent, “I don’t feel that it’s the past. I think it’s the present.”

It’s another early morning in Arizona when I connect with Yves Amu Klein by Zoom call and the late Spring air is still mercifully cool. Off camera, I can faintly hear the sound of Yves’ partner Anna Vivette, an opera singer (whose voice is exceptionally beautiful even when just speaking) and their daughter Amelie, who is drawing and playing nearby.

It is not difficult to imagine the contrast between this cosy domestic scene and the first five years of Yves’ life, when 23-year-old widowed Rotraut was grieving for the loss of her young husband in Paris. “Probably, you know, these were the most challenging years for my mother,” says Yves. “Obviously my mother went through a lot, it was a roll- ercoaster. It was challenging at times and at others a lot of fun. And my mum has always been very hard working, not only in her own work, but in promoting Yves’ art – it’s been a life career – even before her own work… She is a very strong person.”

I wonder how it felt to be the child of an artist, who had achieved almost mythical status in his short lifetime, and to be growing up in an apartment, alongside blue sponge artworks that now fetch millions, in an ever-changing environment where famous thinkers, artists and collectors – maybe Madame Pompidou herself or Klein’s great friend and collabora- tor Jean Tinguely – came and went and were occasionally put on babysitting duty to keep young Yves amused?

“You know for the most part of my early years, I did feel that there was something miss- ing, an element that you could feel, a heaviness that I don’t think that my mom ever recovered from… But even though that was the case, she did everything that she could to overcome that and move on with her life and build a family and continue the best she could.”

Yves talks about the Ibiza years, when Rotraut and Daniel Moquay sought a calmer life away from the ”tumultuous” atmosphere of late 60s Paris, as a period when he could discover nature, snorkelling between the rocks off the island and kindling a passion for the natural world that is evident in the art he produces today, like his AI powered Living Sculpture ‘Octofunghi’.

It was later at university in Paris, where he was initially studying Architecture and Design, that Yves became fascinated with cybernetics and complex systems; he went on to study Computer Science at Arizona State University some years after that.

Today, Yves’ art practice is hugely varied, from sculptures that interact with humans, to digital photography of the cosmos (for which he builds his own telescopes), to 3D printed jewellery pieces that are wired to respond to the wearer’s emotions. Recently, he and Anna have been collaborating on multi-disciplinary projects using voice recordings and robotics, exploring the new world of NFTs and block- chain under the joint moniker annaetyvesklein.

Interestingly, he credits another pow- erful matriarch in his life, Marie Raymond (Yves Klein’s mother), for initially nurturing his passion for science and taking him to see every interesting exhibition in Paris, when he was in her care as a child. Infact, Marie Raymond and her husband Fred Klein were both significant artists themselves. In 1949

Raymond had been awarded the Kandinsky prize for her effervescent and joyful abstract paintings (the first woman to receive it). “There were a lot of artists, mostly male, that were going into abstraction during that period, but the one thing you notice is a kind of darkness and pessimism… By contrast her paintings were full of life and light and colours – bright and invigorating. I think that she really was a beacon of light during that period,” says Yves, who responds with a smile when I remark that Raymond is too little known. “We are working on it,” he says. “I think her work is remarkable and unfortunately it kind of fell in the shadow of the son, in many ways because she was a very loving person and she put her son in front of her. She pushed him and made sure that he was successful, even at the detriment of her own career.” The passion for keeping the flame burning and celebrating artistic achievement – even if not one’s own – is clearly something that runs in the family.

With the anniversary of his father’s death and his own 60th birthday imminent, Yves admits such milestones give pause for thought. “I guess for a big part of my life, knowing that he died young, I was kind of concerned that it could happen to me… I’m always amazed by how much he was able to achieve in such a short time. It’s remarkable. But you know, I think that is the genius element – often the shining is bright, but short.”

Talk of Klein’s brief, bright shining leads back to the immortality of International Klein Blue, which only seems to grow more iconic as the years go by. “What’s interesting is that in nature, blue is a very rare colour,” he observes. “But the symbolism of blue in human history is very strong. There’s something universal about blue that we all connect to, almost magnetically and maybe because of its rarity in nature. There’s a certain metaphysical element to it – we are connected to the universe, we are made of the same thing as the stars and we have our time of shining and then, we are recycled in the cycle of life.”

What does he think his father would have gone on to achieve had he lived? “Before being an artist, he was a teacher. He was a black belt in judo and that was something that he had taught… He did mention that he would be interested in creating a school of art… He was also very interested in architecture and in science in many ways. He and Jean Tinguely did this project with rockets and who knows where that could have gone?” he says, with a smile.

It’s a potent image. I can just picture a contemporary Yves Klein satirising today’s tech billionaires and their bombastic ambitions to pierce the sky with their rocketships, with something that posed a metaphysical question instead. I would love to have seen what he might have done. I suspect he would have left them for dust.

It is June 2nd, the precise anniversary of Yves Klein’s death when I speak to Rotraut for a second time. She has been keen to reconnect with me and when she answers my call, her voice sounds exceptionally youthful and alive.

The meaning of Yves Klein’s blue has been on her mind since we last talked and she says that as she waited for the phone to ring, it was almost as if she received a vision, a communication from Klein himself: “I could really see the blue, the monochrome blue as all the human spirits that had lived and left the earth, surrounding us and feeding us. Yves was really attracted to the spirit of love and greatness, that was Yves’ work to elevate the spirit from the human.”

His life’s quest was to capture the im- material, she concludes and he did not see death as an ending. “You know before he died, he said he would soon have the biggest studio in the world, only creating the imma- terial,” says Rotraut. “And I think that is very powerful.”