Yves Klein, a French artist known for his experimental 20th-century paintings, presented a unique work of art in an exhibition titled “The Void” in Paris in 1958, urging people to see his masterpiece. When people came to see Klein’s work, they weren’t treated to anything. He had flaunted an invisible painting that nonetheless gained fame and popularity.
More than 60 years later, a receipt for one of Klein’s paintings of nothingness is estimated at €500,000 or $551,000, according to CNN.
The receipt is related to Klein’s play Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility, and few are believed to exist. It contains Klein’s signature and is signed “7. December 1959” just a year after Klein first showed the world his unique “art”.
CNN wrote, “Less than 8 inches wide, the receipt grants ownership of one of Klein’s imaginary spaces, which he termed ‘Zones of Intangible Pictorial Sensibility.’ Resembling a bank check, it is signed by the artist and dated December 7, 1959.”
Some have drawn the oddly accurate comparison of Klein’s receipts to NFTs, the most confusing digital asset. “An NFT is a digital asset that represents real-world objects such as art, music, in-game items, and videos,” Forbes explained. “They’re bought and sold online, often with cryptocurrency, and they’re generally encoded with the same underlying software as many cryptos.”
Similar to an NFT, the receipt gives the buyer the seal of ownership over the work, even if the owner does not physically own the invisible art.
In order for anyone to buy one of Klein’s invisible works, a gold receipt given to the buyer “had to be burned in front of witnesses chosen by the artist, while the latter threw the same gold into the Seine [River]’ said Sotheby’s. Three of these “handover ceremonies” took place before the buyer officially became the owner of an invisible painting. Klein “kept a register of successive owners” of his works.
Sotheby’s, which is capitalizing on the similarity of Klein’s work to that of NFT, announced it will accept cryptocurrencies for the auction of the receipt. The person who ends up buying the receipt also becomes the owner of “Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility,” wrote Sotheby’s.
Not all of Klein’s artworks were just blank pages. His most famous work was an artist jumping from a wall called “Leap into the Void”. CNN reported: “Klein, who died in 1962, was a key figure in the Nouveau Réalisme (New Realism) movement, which used art to subvert the viewer’s perception of reality. In 1957 he opened an exhibition in Milan with 11 blue canvases identical in shape, shade and size. His best-known work, however, is the 1960 photograph Leap into the Void, which appears to have the artist leaping off a high wall, when in fact it was composed of two separate images.”
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