Yves Klein (28 April 1928 – 6 June 1962) was a French artist, born in Nice, who was an important figure in European art after World War II.
A leading member of the French artistic movement of Nouveau réalisme, began in 1960, he was a pioneer of performance art. He was also a main influence in the future movements of minimal art and pop art. His research (which was brief: he died in his early thirties from a heart attack in 1962) focused on creating new hues that could express the true essence of color. He developed International Klein Blue, a shade of blue that he used in his paintings.
Many of Yves Klein's earliest works were simple monochrome canvases that, for the artist, were a way of using pure pigments combined with binders without the colors losing brightness: in just seven years he painted for the Monochrome series more than a thousand paintings in this way.
In 1955 he found the missing element in the fixative Rhodopas: according to Klein, with this chemical, color acquired a life of its own and came closer to human nature.
Experimentation went on, and the artist began to focus on one of the most difficult shades to make: blue. Thanks to the collaboration of his chemical friends at the Adam dye works and by mixing pigment and resin, in 1956 Yves Klein succeeded in obtaining a very intense, liquid and velvety shade of ultramarine blue within which he could finally see the synthesis of heaven and earth.
Klein remains a central figure in modern art for his innovations in color, performance, and the conceptualization of art as experience rather than object.