Alfred Schmela, Yves Klein, and a Sound Recording

Abstract

AbstractFrom the late 1950s until well into the 1970s, the Dusseldorf gallerist Alfred Schmela was instrumental in helping German artists and collectors to escape the misery and isolation of the postwar era and to engage with a new international art scene. In 2007 Schmela's estate found a new home in the Special Collections of the Getty Research Institute, which also includes the archive for the exhibition Yves: Propositions monochromes, with which Schmela opened his gallery on May 31, 1957. Besides letters and photographs, the archive contains a remarkable document: what is in all probability the first sound recording of an artists' talk in Germany. This took place in the gallery, with an audience of mainly laypeople, on the evening after the opening and was led by Yves Klein, Norbert Kricke, and Pierre Restany. These archival materials cast a new light on that legendary exhibition, in which the display, the German‐French cultural exchange, and the reception and medialization of Propositions monochromes ...