Yves Klein sold eleven identical blue paintings, each at a different price
In Milan in 1957, Yves Klein hung eleven canvases that all looked the same, every one coated in the same deep ultramarine, and gave each its own price. Buyers were meant to find something in their chosen painting that nobody else could see. The colour became known as International Klein Blue.
Klein was born in Nice in 1928 to two painters: his father worked in a loose post-impressionist manner, and his mother was a leading figure in the Parisian abstract movement Art informel. He never trained formally as an artist. As a teenager on a beach in the south of France, he and his friends Arman and Claude Pascal jokingly divided up the world; Arman took the earth, Pascal took words, and Klein claimed the sky, which he then signed.
Art was not his only pursuit. Studying oriental languages in Paris, he took up judo, and in Japan in 1953, aged 25, the Kodokan awarded him the fourth-degree black belt, making him the first European to reach it. He went on to serve as technical director of the Spanish judo team and wrote a book on the sport. Around 1947 to 1948 he conceived the Monotone Symphony: one sustained chord for 20 minutes followed by 20 minutes of silence, a forerunner of drone music. At its first performance in a Paris gallery in 1960, three nude women daubed in blue pressed themselves onto paper while the chord sounded.
His early monochromes, shown in 1955 and 1956 in orange, yellow, red, pink and blue, disappointed him because visitors read them as a single decorative mosaic. His answer was to commit to one colour. Working with the Paris paint dealer Edouard Adam, he suspended ultramarine pigment in a synthetic resin that kept its brilliance, where linseed oil would have dulled it. He even registered the recipe. The blue recalls the lapis lazuli used for the Virgin's robes in medieval painting, and in Milan he mounted the canvases on poles 20 cm out from the wall to make them seem to float.
Klein belonged to Nouveau réalisme, the movement launched by the critic Pierre Restany in 1960, and is regarded as a pioneer of performance art and a precursor of minimal and pop art. He died on 6 June 1962.
Source: Yves Klein
