Yves Klein
The blue monochrome.
Yves Klein patented his own ultramarine blue, IKB. He had naked models make body prints in blue paint.
Yves Klein was born in 1928 in Nice. Both his parents were painters. He had no art training but was drawn early on to judo and esoteric mysticism. In 1952–53 he lived in Japan and became one of the first Europeans to achieve a high grade in judo, and he wrote a book about the sport.
In the mid-1950s he began exhibiting monochromes, canvases in a single colour. In 1957 he showed in Milan eleven identical blue paintings, each priced differently, raising the question of what the value of art really is. He developed his own ultramarine pigment in a binder that kept the lustre of the powder, and in 1960 he registered it as International Klein Blue, IKB. For him blue was the colour of the infinite and the immaterial.
Klein was also a forerunner of performance and conceptual art. In 1958 he showed an empty, white-painted gallery in Paris under the title The Void, and thousands of people came. In 1960 he had naked female models, covered in blue paint, press their bodies against paper in front of an audience while an orchestra played a single sustained chord. He called the pictures Anthropometries. The famous photograph Leap into the Void of 1960, in which he appears to hurl himself from a wall, is a photomontage.
That same year he co-founded the Nouveaux Réalistes group in Paris. He also made fire paintings with gas burners and large blue sponge reliefs for the theatre in Gelsenkirchen in Germany. In 1962 he married the artist Rotraut Uecker.
Only a few months later he died of a heart attack, aged 34. Despite his short career he had a great influence on conceptual art, performance and Minimalism, and his intense blue is today one of the most recognisable features of 20th-century art.