International Klein Blue: A brief history and how to bring his blue into your home

The day before Yves Klein married Rotraut Uecker, he bought a small crown from an antique shop, took it home, painted it blue and it gave it to his soon-to-be wife to wear on their wedding day. ‘He was the King of Blue and I was his Queen,’ she later said in an interview. The story goes that Klein was first seduced by the colour when he saw the cerulean skies above the Mediterranean in France. ‘As I lay upon the beach of Nice, I began to feel hatred for birds which flew back and forth across my blue sky, cloudless sky,’ he said. ‘They tried to bore holes in my greatest and most beautiful work.’ But it was the paint supplier Édouard Adam who truly ignited Klein’s passion for the colour. In 1956, he showed him two powdered pigments. The first was Prussian blue and the second was ultramarine, or as it later became known, International Klein Blue (IKB): a deep, lustrous shade that would dominate the artist’s work until his untimely death in 1962 at the age of 34.

Klein was prodigiously creative. The son of two painters, he had a fondness for showmanship and a love of magic, as well as a deep-rooted sense of spirituality. He also spent 15 months in Japan, where he worked steadily at Kodokan Judo Institute and obtained the maximum grade in judo granted to Europeans. When he returned to Paris in 1954, however, his focus became art.

Daniel Moquay, the head of Klein’s estate, identifies the 1957 exhibition Proposte Monocrome, Epoca Blu at Milan’s Gallery Apollinaire as a significant moment in the artist’s career. This was the first time he presented an entire room of blue monochromes and it was here that the artist Lucio Fontana, who went on to become one of Klein’s most notable collectors, purchased one of his works for the first time. Incidentally, two weeks later Fontana also bought a red painting, but soon returned it to Klein as he said he could not bear living with it.

Radical displays defined Klein’s short career. Also in 1957, he released 1,001 helium-filled blue balloons into the skies above Saint-Germain-des-Prés in Paris to mark the opening of a solo show. The following year his exhibition known as The Void, also in Paris, attracted 3,000 visitors to its opening night, even though it consisted of an empty gallery. The crowds had to be dispersed by the police. Other noteworthy performances included nine musicians playing a single note drawn out for 20 minutes, then 20 minutes of silence. Another involved Klein directing three naked women daubed in blue paint as they imprinted images of their bodies on a white canvas. As Daniel Moquay says, ‘Klein is an artist for the artists.’