Following the death of William Klein on September 10, 2022, aged 96, this exhibition will continue at the ICP in New York until September 15. This article was originally written in June 2022

Held at the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York, William Klein: Yes – Photographs, Paintings, Films 1948-2013, is the first solo exhibition of Klein’s work in the US in several decades and reveals an artist who fit the bill of ‘multidisciplinary creative’ long before the term became trendy.

The show is the product of a decade-long journey between Klein, now in his 90s, and the ICP’s curator-at-large, David Campany, who together mined the depths of Klein’s rich archive built over the course of nearly 70 years.

The exhibition of almost 300 works is loosely organised by chronological order, providing a necessary backbone to present his otherwise fluid creative practice. He dealt in disciplines such as photography (fashion, street), filmmaking (feature, documentary), graphic design and painting, each cascading into new styles and methods that resist categorisation, running counter to the way in which most people instinctively want to place people in neat boxes. It’s in this spirit that the name of the exhibition was chosen by Klein, a nod to his persistent, even stubborn, approach to experimentation.

“For a long time, Klein was known as either a fashion photographer or a street photographer or a filmmaker, as different audiences knew and valued different aspects of his work. Only in recent years has the scope of his achievements begun to be recognised,” Campany says. “Versatility runs against the idea that artistic significance is based on single themes and recurring preoccupations. But artists like Klein, who ranged freely and avoided specialism, are key to understanding the culture of the last century.”

The exhibition takes 1948 as its point of departure, when, at the age of 20, Klein took up a position at Fernand Léger’s studio in Paris. He remained in the city for eight years and eventually settled there after a stint back in New York. It was Léger who pointed him towards media like photography and film, but the aspiring painter in Klein continued to paint nonetheless, eventually staging an exhibition in 1952 that led to a commission from an architect to create a room divider based on his paintings.

In a roundabout way, his painting led him back to the photo-based practice that Léger tried to steer him towards, with his photographs of those interior panels spurring experiments in abstract photograms, some of which are on display in the show.

It was American Vogue art director Alexander Liberman who enticed Klein back to New York in the 1950s for several years, commissioning him to work on still-life projects before Klein revealed himself to be an innovative fashion photographer, pushing the confines of what a fashion image must say, do and be in order to satisfy the client.

He imbued those fashion shoots with the same character and curiosity seen in his experiments in street photography around the same time, where he would capture vibrant city scenes around New York. In these candid photographs, he made no efforts to hide himself away, according to Campany, who says that “he is unmistakably part of each situation – interacting, collaborating, sharing, celebrating” with the people and places in each frame. Those images became the foundation of his first photo book, Life is Good and Good for You in New York: Trance Witness Revels, which, despite being rejected by American publishers at the time, has since come to be appreciated for its freewheeling take on the format.

The sense of depth and movement present in so many of his still pieces led him, perhaps inevitably, to moving image work. Broadway by Light, which is being screened at the ICP, was his first film, released in 1958. An avant-garde study in light, pattern and editing, the film’s commentary is unspoken, instead told through the score and the universal language of advertising and signage that dominates Times Square at nighttime. His break into filmmaking was endorsed by some of cinema’s greats: Federico Fellini, who he had assisted in the capacity of a photographer, ushered him towards film, and that very first short would go on to win the praise of Orson Welles.

This experimental streak carried through to his documentary films, of which he made 27 in his career, as well as his feature films, which cast something of a critical, or at least cynical, glance over the worlds of fashion, beauty and consumerism. As a commercial photographer, he was certainly in bed with those worlds, but all the while he was one step removed.

“I accepted the obligation of showing the clothes. Sharp, all the buttons, pleats and whatever,” Klein has said of his fashion commissions. “As long as I did that, I found I could do pretty much what I wanted with the rest – backgrounds, attitudes, situations … whatever. I guess the editors didn’t care as long as the reader didn’t flip the page too fast.”

William Klein: Yes is on display the ICP, New York, until September 7; icp.org