Few of the great beasts of modern art have passed on their talent to their offspring. Even the most creative descendants are careful not to venture into the territory of their elders. Rather than take up the brushes, Paloma, daughter of Pablo Picasso, reasonably preferred to shine in fashion. Pierre Matisse, Henri’s son, made a name for himself, but as a gallery owner, not without taking care to put an ocean between him and his father by migrating to New York in 1924. Jean Renoir placed painting at the top of the hierarchy of the arts, but the son of Auguste, master of impressionism, judged it wiser to impose his name in the seventh art.
Seffa Klein, 28, did not allow himself to be crushed by the weight of his parentage. From a very young age, she claimed to be an artist. Like his grandfather Yves Klein, internationally recognized champion of the immaterial and the monochrome, cut down in 1962 by a heart attack at the age of 34. He himself was born to artist parents: Marie Raymond (1908-1988), one of the rare post-war female painters to have exhibited alongside abstract artists Pierre Soulages and Hans Hartung; and Fred Klein, a horse painter of Javanese-Dutch origin, friend and broker of Piet Mondrian. Like his father, Yves Klein married an artist, Rotraut Uecker, now 85 years old, a painter of the horizon and the cosmos, whose brother is Günther Uecker, 94 years old, a figure of the German avant-garde, whose white panels planted with nails are in the collections of the Center Pompidou, in Paris, and at the MoMA, in New York.
Faced with these totems of art history, the young Seffa could have wanted to express her singularity, to mark her difference. Worrying that people only see her as a nepo baby, these offspring of celebrities who are criticized for succeeding without having to provide any particular talent. “Being the granddaughter of Yves Klein is just a fact,” she calmly declared on May 13 in Paris. Without fearing comparison, Seffa Klein invited her illustrious relatives to share the exhibition (entitled “A Family Constellation”) dedicated to her until July 13 at the Poggi gallery in Paris. Three works by Yves Klein, a studded assemblage by Günther Uecker, two cosmic landscapes by Rotraut Klein-Moquay, as well as a canvas dotted with signs by Marie Raymond accompany her own paintings, powerful alchemical precipitates composed of flowers and woven glass and bismuth, a crystalline metal.
You have 80.83% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.