Great Art: Flamethrower Paintings of Yves Klein from early 60’s

Let’s go, totally abstract art again today but with yet another different kind-of paint brush: a flamethrower with Yves Klein’s Fire paintings. I seem to enjoy artists who use all kind-of things on their artwork. It’s my art gallery blog post so titling it Flamethrower paintings but he called them his Fire paintings. I seem to like the word flamethrower better than just fire because it’s I guess, describing the process of making them a little or a lot better. Far below I’ve also included an image of Klein working in his studio with even a fireman spraying water on the painting so they wouldn’t just catch a light and burn too much. Klein was really a bit of a performing visual artist before it was a real big thing. I’ve blogged him before, he’s Frenchman who made his blue paint from scratch and did more than a few blue paintings which I’ll link that post here. Here’s also a link to the artist’s website and more about his Fire paintings too!

They’re labeled as Fire imprint on specially treated cardboard with some mouthed on wood backgrounds. I can’t remember off the top of my head how he came to use a flamethrower in his art but he was always pushing his ideas about art to way beyond the normal visual artist would do. Once again like his blue paintings he just shorten Fire to just F and number them as the artworks as the titles. I think, he made hundreds so I’ve just selected a very small few of my fave Fire paintings below.

BTW he did made Fire sculptures too which one was like a wall of flames but I don’t think those really worked well in any photos taken of them. Also he when on to added some real paint to some of them but I like/love the plain Fire paintings. I guess, you could say? Anyone can set shit on fire but Yves was first to call his burn shit art and you could say it’s not art just burn shit hung in an art gallery but I’ll like to point out is amazing an artist can think of using a flamethrower and the media of fire in his art. Fire is known as something totally uncontrollable so to use it in art, it’s pure genius even if to you it all looks like to you just some burn shit?

F 119, 1962

F 67, 1962

F 13, 1961

F 6, 1961

Klein with flamethrower and fireman to his right showing his process to the pubic in early 60’s.

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Once in the mid-late 2000’s an Aussie band from Brisbane called themselves Yves Klein Blue. Then just before breaking up covered Lou Reed’s Walk on the Wild Side on Triple J’s Like A Version radio show in 2010 which going to be the song of the day to go with my art post today:

Cheers 🙂

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