Yves Klein
“To feel the soul without explaining it, without vocabulary and to represent this sensation… It is, I believe, one of the reasons which brought me to monochrome. "
Yves Klein is a French visual artist. Despite a very short career, he is today considered one of the greatest representatives of French and international contemporary art. Born into a family of artists, he studied to become a merchant navy officer. Very gifted in judo, he perfected himself during a stay in Japan. Back in France, in 1955 he created his own judo school, which he was forced to close the following year for financial reasons. From the end of the 1940s, he began to paint monochromes. In 1956, he created the International Klein Blue (IKB), the famous “Klein blue”. This shade is according to him “the most perfect expression of blue”.
That same year, he began to make himself known thanks to the exhibition “Yves, Propositions monochromes” in Paris. Then he presented “Proposte monochrome, epoca blu” (monochrome proposals, blue period), at the Apollinaire gallery in Milan, with eleven identical blue paintings. Having become a world-renowned artist, he is at the origin of New Realism with Arman and Pierre Restany. He then experimented with several techniques, in particular that of “living brushes”: during performances in public, models coated with paint were applied directly to the canvas to create the work. At the beginning of 1961, he began a series of paintings of fire. His wish: to print the traces of fire on various supports. On June 6, 1962, at the age of 34, he died of a heart attack.
