*1928, Nizza, FR – †1962, Paris, FR

“I believe that in the future people will begin to paint pictures in a single colour and nothing else but colour…” noted Yves Klein at the end of the 1940s. Klein was already working with monochrome from 1950 onwards. While an orange monochrome was rejected by the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles with the comment that the artist should at least add a second colour or a dot, a line or something similar, he remained consistent and presented almost a dozen monochrome paintings in different formats and colours to the public at Colette Allendy’s gallery in 1956. Shortly afterwards, he limited himself to ultramarine blue, in a matt, powdery formulation that he developed together with a pharmacist and chemist and called ‘International Klein Blue’, or IKB for short.

At the age of 19, Klein claimed that he had already created his first and infinite monochrome in blue when he signed the sky.

 In May 1957, the Parisian galleries Colette Allendy and Iris Clert showed the double exhibition Yves Klein: Propositions monochromes, which was presented at Alfred Schmela in Düsseldorf in the same year.  From 1957 onwards, Klein increasingly dematerialised his art, culminating in the 1958 exhibition Le Vide (the void) at the Galerie Iris Clert in Paris. Klein stripped the rooms of all furniture, painted the walls in a brilliant white and exhibited his Blue totally immaterial. The windows were painted in IKB from the outside and, in addition to other blue elements like welcome drinks for example, Yves Klein applied miniature monochromes as stamps to the invitation card, from whose stocks Klein’s work in the Schroth Collection originates.

Yves Klein at www.mamac-nice.org