Yves Klein

Yves Klein (28 April 1928 – 6 June 1962) was a French artist, born in Nice, who was an important figure in European art after World War II. 

A leading member of the French artistic movement of Nouveau réalisme, began in 1960, he was a pioneer of performance art. He was also a main influence in the future movements of minimal art and pop art. His research (which was brief: he died in his early thirties from a heart attack in 1962) focused on creating new hues that could express the true essence of color. He developed International Klein Blue, a shade of blue that he used in his paintings. 

Many of Yves Klein's earliest works were simple monochrome canvases that, for the artist, were a way of using pure pigments combined with binders without the colors losing brightness: in just seven years he painted for the Monochrome series more than a thousand paintings in this way.

In 1955 he found the missing element in the fixative Rhodopas: according to Klein, with this chemical, color acquired a life of its own and came closer to human nature.

Experimentation went on, and the artist began to focus on one of the most difficult shades to make: blue. Thanks to the collaboration of his chemical friends at the Adam dye works and by mixing pigment and resin, in 1956 Yves Klein succeeded in obtaining a very intense, liquid and velvety shade of ultramarine blue within which he could finally see the synthesis of heaven and earth.

On 19 May 1960 Klein registered the blue formula he had developed under the name International Klein Blue (IKB).

Klein remains a central figure in modern art for his innovations in color, performance, and the conceptualization of art as experience rather than object.

References

Category:1928 births
Category:1962 deaths
Category:French artists
Category:French painters