About me

the first artist who invented his own color

author
of the books Yves Peintures and the Zone of immaterial pictorial sensibility

the pioneer of conceptual art

Yves

Klein

Hi, I’m

I was born in Nice in a family of painters. My parents taught me a lot, although I didn't have a formal art education. I studied sailing, Oriental languages, judo, and it was only at the age of 26 that I decided to take up art.

Around the end of 1947 or beginning of 1948, I discovered the book "La Cosmogonie des Rose-Croix" ("The Cosmogony of the Rosenkreuzers"), which became my desktop book — for the next four or five years I studied it daily.

I hitchhiked around Europe. I visited Italy, then went to England, where I worked in a frame shop learning gold leaf gilding, worked in a jockey club in Ireland, then went to Spain.

Judo has helped me to understand

that pictorial space is above all the product of spiritual exercises. Judo is, in fact, the discovery by the human body of a spiritual space.

First steps

in art

my first monochromes

By 1954, I had already created several monochromes — sheets of paper or cardboard painted in one or two colors.

I published two collections of these monochromes — simple rectangles of different colors, with blank lines instead of a preface.

The exhibitions

that made me an artist

In 1957, in a gallery in Milan, I exhibited eleven blue paintings of the same format (78 x 56 cm). The works hung on brackets at a distance of 20 cm from the wall. For the first time I presented a room of blue monochromes, one of which Lucio Fontana bought.

Then the famous "The Void" exhibit took place. It was decided to let ten people (there were 3,000 people who wanted to attend) by beautifully designed invitations, and the guests were treated to blue cocktails. Inside, there was only an empty room and an equally empty museum shelf.

In 1960 I held a public exhibition of anthropometrics — models smeared with Klein's "International Blue" were dragged across a canvas lying on the floor to the accompaniment of the Monotone Symphony.

Learn about upcoming exhibitions