Yves Klein, a French artist known for his experimental 20th-century paintings, premiered a unique piece of art in an exhibition called “The Void” in Paris in 1958, charging people to come look at his masterpiece. When people arrived to view Klein’s work, they were treated to nothing at all. He had showcased an invisible painting, yet it still gained fame and popularity.
More than 60 years later, a receipt for one of Klein’s paintings of nothing is estimated to sell for 500,000 euros or $551,000, according to CNN.
The receipt is for Klein’s piece “Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility,” and only a few are believed to be in existence. It contains Klein’s signature and is dated “December 7, 1959,” only a year after Klein first showed the world his unique “art.”
CNN wrote, “Measuring less than 8 inches wide, the receipt grants ownership of one of Klein’s imaginary spaces, which he dubbed a ‘Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility.’ Designed to resemble a banker’s check, it is signed by the artist and dated to December 7, 1959.”
Some have drawn the strangely accurate comparison of Klein’s receipts to NFTs, the highly-confusing digital good. “An NFT is a digital asset that represents real-world objects like art, music, in-game items and videos,” Forbes explained. “They are bought and sold online, frequently with cryptocurrency, and they are generally encoded with the same underlying software as many cryptos.”
Much like an NFT, the receipt gives the purchaser the seal of ownership over the work even if the owner doesn’t physically possess the invisible art.
For someone to buy one of Klein’s invisible works, a gold receipt given to the purchaser “had to be burned in front of witnesses chosen by the artist, while the latter threw the same gold into the Seine [River],” explained Sotheby’s. Three of these “transfer ceremonies” took place before the buyer was officially the owner of an invisible painting. Klein “kept a register of the successive owners” of his works.
Sotheby’s, capitalizing on the similarity of Klein’s work to NFT’s, announced they will accept cryptocurrency for the auctioning of the receipt. The person who ends up purchasing the receipt will also become an owner of “Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility,” wrote Sotheby’s.
Not all of Klein’s artwork were just blank sheets. His most famous work was of 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 viewers’ perceptions of reality. In 1957, he opened an exhibition in Milan consisting of 11 blue canvases, identical in shape, shade and size. His best-known work, however, is the 1960 photograph ‘Leap into the Void,’ which appeared to show the artist jumping from a high wall, though it was in fact a composite of two separate images.”