<em>Portrait of Rotraut Klein-Moquay in her studio in Arizona, 2002 © David Bordes</em>
The convent basilica of St Rita in Cascia – it is her feast today – nestles in the lovely hills of Umbria, an Italian region of so many saints and artists. And of earthquakes: St Rita’s Basilica was badly damaged in 1980, necessitating expensive repairs, including regilding of the statues.
One of the nuns remembered that twenty years earlier a young couple had presented an <em>ex-voto</em>, a thanks-offering for St Rita’s intercession, which had contained some golf leaf. She fetched a Perspex box containing gold leaf and tiny ingots along with two others blocks of pigment. One was a striking blue like Giotto’s, but far more intense; the other, deep rose. Inside was a handwritten prayer:
<em>Saint Rita of Cascia, I ask you to intercede with God the Almighty Father that He may always grant me, in the name of the Son, Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Virgin, the grace of living in my works and that they may always become more beautiful; and that He may also grant me the grace that I may discover continually and regularly new things in art, each time more beautiful, even if, alas, I am not always worthy to be a tool for creating Great Beauty. May all that emerges from me be beautiful. So be it. YK</em>
The petitioner asks for invulnerability, for blessings on his artworks: <em>Theatre of the Void, </em>the<em> monochromes; </em>the<em> IKB; </em>the<em> sponge sculptures; </em>the<em> immaterial; </em>the<em> fountains of fire and water …</em> He adds the hope that “my exhibition in Krefeld be the greatest success of the century and be recognised by all". Along with the initials YK, all this pointed to the French avant-garde artist Yves Klein. His widow, the German-French artist Rotraut Klein-Moquay, confirmed it was his work. She had never previously spoken of it, out of respect for his privacy.
Yves Klein was not associated with religious art during his artistic career in Paris, but rather with his experiments with colours, the direct participation of human bodies and plants to the art-making process (the <em>Anthropometries </em>and <em>Cosmogonies</em>), experiments with fire and water, with void and with gold and its wide significance.
The critics are deeply divided. For some, Klein was a trailblazing conceptual artist, standing against rising materialism; for others, a showman.
But he intrigued me. While normally I’d struggle to see monochrome canvases as art, in his intense blue (<em>IKB</em>, “International Klein Blue”), inspired by the sky over Nice, I find the Absolute; Infinity; something speaking to me of God. And why, if Klein was a showman, was he so private about his <em>ex-voto</em>? <em>YouTube</em> interviews with Rotraut, and the one she generously granted me, revealed something the critics had missed. Far from simply defending her first husband’s memory, this gentle and deeply spiritual artist spoke of a shared, visionary work.
In 1957, aged 19, Rotraut went into a gallery in Düsseldorf, where she lodged with her brother and fellow artist Günther Uecker. She was immediately struck by one of Klein’s blue monochromes, supposing it to be the work of some venerable old Chinese guru. That summer she was in Nice as an au pair to the family of Arman, an artist friend of Günther’s. There she met a young man – Yves Klein. They fell in love instantly. They weren’t just young and beautiful – they shared a profound spiritual connection to the cosmos, and “the immaterial” within and beyond it. Soon Rotraut was living with Yves in Paris as his muse and collaborator. Yves strongly promoted Rotraut’s work, helping her get a solo exhibition in London.
While Rotraut herself does not follow a particular religion, she confirmed that Yves was a regular Mass-goer, and that his devotion to St Rita was much more than just part of his Catholic upbringing in Nice. She recounts that Yves turned to St Rita, patron saint of difficult and impossible cases, at every important stage of his career. I find something here of "Wisdom playing before God as He created the world" (Proverbs 8:30).
Yves created the <em>ex-voto dedicated to Saint Rita</em> in 1961, while he and Rotraut were preparing his big exhibition in Krefeld. She accompanied him to Cascia to offer it to St Rita. While Yves prayed about the huge challenges around his work and the opposition he faced, Rotraut made a wish for a child.
In 1962, after four intense years of creativity together, Yves and Rotraut married at the Parisian church of St Nicholas-des-Champs, with his fellow Knights of St Sebastian as guard of honour. But only a few months later, utter tragedy. Poisoned by fixative fumes and wounded by a cruel film parody of his work, Yves died of a heart attack, aged just 34. Rotraut was expecting their son, Yves Amu. Dominicans came to help lay out Yves’s body.
Five years later, another convergence in her life: she married the curator Daniel Moquay, who champions Yves’ work. They have three children, and live and work in Arizona. Rotraut’s work has continued on the cosmic theme. Hers are abstracts for people who don’t like abstraction – no unfiltered emotion or cold geometry, but bright patterns of stars, planets, hearts and dancing figures. She’s fascinated by the discovery of “dark energy”, and her current work is inspired by the recent space voyage of the actor William Shatner (Captain Kirk in <em>Star Trek</em>).
Rotraut has always had a sense of the protective presence of God, “the immaterial”, within her, and sees Jesus as “an extraordinary messenger of the love of God … who has taught us that God is in us, because He was in Him". She experiences a profound communion with those who have gone before us, including Yves. She loves the Sign of Peace at Mass. I asked her, did she see a connection between Catholicism and the cosmos? She paused, and said, “I don’t know Catholicism that well, but I have the impression that people in general avoid sometimes going that far.”
I interviewed Rotraut just before Easter: she made me see the fire and water and the Creation stories of the Easter Vigil through new eyes. And is there so much difference between the performance art of Yves Klein – his physical <em>Leap into the Void</em>, conveying an experience of the invisible – and the prophet Ezekiel, inspired by God’s Word, digging a hole in the wall of Jerusalem and exiting before an astonished audience (Ez 12).
But what really convinces me is this: Yves and Rotraut presented the <em>ex-voto</em> to St Rita, just after his “Leap into the Void”, from a house in the Paris suburbs. Today, apparently by coincidence, the house is the site of a chapel of St Rita, welcoming those who, like Yves Klein, seek the humanly impossible, but meet there the absolute love of God.
<em>Fr Dominic White OP is Prior of Blackfriars, Oxford. He is grateful for the help of Rotraut Klein-Moquay, Jennifer Frank, Dorothée Dujardin, Charlotte Ménard and Emilie Lanquetot in the preparation of this article.</em>
