Yves Klein was born on April 28, 1928, in Nice. The son of two painters, he initially developed a passion for judo, practicing it until he earned a fourth-degree black belt at the Kōdōkan Institute in Tokyo.
In 1954, after traveling through Italy, Spain, and England, his artistic career began with a book titled Yves Peintures, published in Madrid and composed of a preface conceived by Klein and signed by his friend and composer Claude Pascal. The preface is structured in three pages, and it is composed exclusively of thick horizontal black segments of varying lengths, inserted with the intention of parodying traditional complex introductions. Following this, the book presented ten monochrome paintings, each labeled with “Yves,” the name of a city where the artist had lived in the previous four years, and, in one of the three versions of the text, the dimensions of the work. However, these monochrome paintings were not photographic reproductions of actual artworks; they were the artworks themselves: colored sheets of paper functioning as paintings, an example of ready-made art.
On October 15, 1955, Klein held his first exhibition at the Club des Solitaires, where he displayed monochrome paintings in various colors (pink, green, blue, red, orange, yellow), painted with a roller, considered a more impersonal and less psychological tool than a paintbrush. The exhibition was repeated on February 21, 1956, at Galerie Colette Allendy under the title Yves: propositions monochromes.
In the fall of 1956, Yves Klein created International Klein Blue (IKB), a color he described as the most perfect expression of blue. This was made possible with the help of Edouard Adam, the owner of a paint shop on Boulevard Quinet in Paris. Klein sought Adam’s advice on a binder that could preserve the vibrancy of his pigment. Adam, in turn, consulted chemists at Rhone-Poulenc, a chemical-pharmaceutical company in Paris, and they chose Rhodopas M11 as the binder. The patent for IKB was officially filed on May 19, 1960, at the Institut National de la Propriété Industrielle.
From January 2 to January 12, 1957, Klein exhibited his first monochrome works using IKB at Galleria Apollinaire in Milan. An enthusiastic Lucio Fontana participated at the exhibition, who purchased one of the eleven exhibited paintings.Starting in 1960, Yves Klein worked on his Anthropométries series, a term derived from the union of two Greek words, "human" and "measure." These works were the result of performance art in which human bodies acted as living paintbrushes. Klein instructed models to coat their nude bodies with paint and then press themselves onto a canvas. The first of these performances took place privately in 1958, when a model covered an entire canvas in IKB, effectively producing a monochrome painting.
Through these works, Klein sought to emphasize the relationship between color and flesh. To highlight this concept, he created Ant 82, Anthropométrie de l’époque bleue in 1960, a painting produced during a public performance accompanied by an orchestra playing Symphonie monotone. The piece consists of body imprints left by the models on the canvas. Since 1984, this artwork has been part of the permanent collection at the Centre Pompidou. Videos of Klein’s performances for this and similar works are available online and archived in various museums.Many of Yves Klein’s works revolve around the concepts of immateriality and emptiness. On April 28, 1958, his solo exhibition La Spécialisation de la sensibilité à l'état matière première en sensibilité picturale stabilisée, later known as L’Exposition du Vide (The Exhibition of the Void), was held at Galerie Iris Clert in Paris. For the occasion, Klein placed a large blue tapestry outside the gallery and painted the interior walls white, leaving the space completely empty so that it could "receive the pictorial climate of the immaterial blue sensitivity."
One of Klein’s most famous works is Le Saut dans le Vide (Leap into the Void), a photograph taken on October 23, 1960, depicting the artist mid-air, arms outstretched, as he leaps from a rooftop. The image is a photomontage of two different photographs. In reality, Klein’s jump was cushioned by a mat held by a team of people. This safety measure was removed in the final image, which was altered by replacing the lower portion with another photograph of the same street, taken from the same angle but without any people.
The photograph was accompanied by a media stunt in which it was placed on the front page of a fake edition of Journal du Dimanche under the headline Un Homme dans l’Espace (A Man in Space), published on November 27, 1960.Yves Klein passed away in Paris on June 6, 1962, from a heart attack.
