Yves Klein

Yves Klein (1928–1962) was a French artist who pursued immateriality through monochrome painting, performance, and the ultramarine pigment International Klein Blue.

International Klein Blue: A vivid ultramarine pigment and binder formulation developed by Yves Klein and registered as a trademark in 1960. Klein made this saturated blue central to his monochrome paintings and public identity.
Anthropometries of the Blue Period: A series of Yves Klein performances and paintings made with paint-covered models pressed or dragged across paper and canvas. These works show Klein’s method of turning bodily movement into blue images.
Fred Klein: A Dutch painter and the father of Yves Klein. Klein grew up around his father’s practice, though he developed a sharply different artistic approach.
Piero Manzoni: An Italian artist known for challenging artistic conventions through works including Achromes and Artist’s Shit. Manzoni pursued radical alternatives to traditional painting in the same postwar milieu as Klein.
The Void (Yves Klein exhibition): Yves Klein’s 1958 Paris exhibition, which presented an empty gallery as an exhibition of immaterial pictorial sensibility. Klein made absence itself the work, extending his challenge to art as a material object.
Monochrome painting: Painting that uses a single color or closely limited range of tones as its primary visual structure. Klein turned single-color canvases into investigations of perception and immateriality.
Symphony Monotone-Silence: A musical composition by Yves Klein consisting of a sustained single chord followed by an equal period of silence. Its sound and silence enact Klein’s pursuit of an experience stripped of conventional composition.
Marie Raymond: A French abstract painter and the mother of Yves Klein. Her career in postwar abstraction connected Klein’s early life to contemporary art.
Happenings: Experimental art events that combine performance, theater, and audience participation, associated especially with the 1950s and 1960s. Klein’s staged actions helped broaden expectations of what an artwork could be.
Blue Monochrome (IKB 3): A 1960 painting by Yves Klein composed of International Klein Blue on canvas. This painting exemplifies the intense, uniform blue that became Klein’s visual signature.

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Pierre RestanyRelated: Klein and Restany jointly launched Nouveau Réalisme in 1960.