International Klein Blue

There are only two colours I can examine forever: vermilion and ultramarine. Really, these colours are so hypnotizing — when you look at them, time slows down and nothing is important. No less important is fact that these colours attract attention. Today we will focus on second colour.

The colour contain full range of emotions, feelings, moods. On this idea were based creations of many famous artists like Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock etc. The history knows one artist made a name for new hue and ultramarine art (and I’m certainly in love with it). His name is Yves Klein.

Yves Klein

Yves Klein was the most influential and
controversial and French artist to emerge in the 1950s. He was born in Nice, France on April 28, 1928. Klein composed his 1st one-note Monotone Symphony in 1947. In 1955 he was given a solo exhibition at the “Club Solitaire”. In 1957 Klein entered his blue period. Three years later Yves Klein registered the paint formula of his colour ‘’International Klein Blue’’.

Klein’s used the hue in unconventional ways. He once released 1001 blue helium balloons to extend the color’s vibes to everyone in Paris, and liked to recreate classic sculptures such as the Venus de Milo and Winged Victory of Samothrace with an International Klein Blue twist. Don’t you feel like diving into the colour? Blue allows your imagination to run wild. Blue represents all our emotions. Klein thought that making painting intangible leads to sensitivity better. He said that technique isn’t enough prevents in away.

In 1958, at the Iris Clert Gallery, Yves Klein opened a new exhibition «The Void». But at this time no sculpture, no painting, nothing. Just white walls in empty rooms. What’s so exciting about an empty room? Surprisingly, nothing! It is the unseen, the void that is presented. There was precisely four empty plots so four rooms, named ‘’immaterial sensitivity areas’’.

So this is his way to represent the unseen. An empty gallery like a painting that is only blue — it’s a stepping stone. Stone towards something that is beyond us. This is why he is in fact a magician, because he makes us see what we can’t see. At the end Yves sold the property for a certain amount of gold, which he finally threw in the Seine in front of his buyers.

One of his most famous and iconic works is ‘’The Anthropométries’’ combines IKB and performance. Works were made with nude women playing the role of brushes ruled by Klein. Under Klein’s direction the artworks took shape without his touch. He was controller as much as painter, as the blue paint covering the women’s bodies transferred to the canvas without brush.

It all starts from the sky, in fact, it all starts from the blue. For Klein, blue was the most abstract colour, the most evocative of all, of nothing you see, of the vast. You look at a painting by Klein as you look at the sky.