Yves Klein

Yves Klein was a French artist born in Nice in 1928 who, in a career of only about eight years, became one of the most influential figures of postwar European art. He is best known for monochrome paintings in a deep ultramarine he called International Klein Blue (IKB), and for actions that blurred painting, performance and philosophy.

Life in brief

Both of Klein's parents were painters. He had no formal art training; as a young man he studied judo seriously, earning a black belt in Japan in 1953, and was drawn to Rosicrucian mysticism. In the mid-1950s he began showing single-color paintings in many colors, then from 1957 concentrated on blue, in his "blue epoch." In 1958 he presented The Void at the Galerie Iris Clert in Paris: an empty, white-painted gallery that drew crowds. In 1960 he registered the formula for IKB, and with the critic Pierre Restany founded the group Nouveau Réalisme. That year he also staged the first public Anthropometries, in which nude models covered in blue paint pressed their bodies onto canvas before an audience and musicians performing his Monotone-Silence Symphony, a single sustained chord followed by silence. He died of a heart attack in Paris in 1962, aged 34.

Style and ideas

Klein wanted color to work directly on the senses, free of line, subject or composition. IKB suspends pure ultramarine pigment in a synthetic resin binder so that it keeps the matte, velvety intensity of dry powder. He applied it with rollers to canvases, sponges and casts of sculpture, including the Venus of Samothrace and Michelangelo's Slave. For Klein blue stood for the immaterial and the infinite, sky and sea without limit. He also painted with fire and rain, and his photomontage Leap into the Void (1960), showing him apparently launching himself off a wall into the street, is one of the most famous art photographs of the century.

Infinite Blue

Yves Klein, l'infini bleu (Infinite Blue) was an immersive digital exhibition that opened at the Atelier des Lumières in Paris in February 2020. It projected around ninety of his works and sixty archival images across the walls and floors of a former foundry, surrounding visitors in IKB. It followed the venue's shows of Vincent van Gogh, whose Starry Night exhibition ran in 2019, and was succeeded by Salvador Dalí's The Endless Enigma.

Where to see his work

The Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim in New York, Tate Modern in London and the Museum Ludwig in Cologne hold important works; his blue sponge reliefs decorate the foyer of the Musiktheater im Revier in Gelsenkirchen, Germany.