Son of Fred Klein and Marie Raymond, both painters,Yves Klein took the European art scene by storm in a brief career that lasted just eight years, from 1954 to 1962. ?For color! Against the line and drawing!? ??the motto he adopted as member of the Order of the Archers of Saint Sebastian??, besides a Freudian pronouncement, it?s a true statement on the way he understood the art practice. Working in Paris during the apogee of geometric abstraction and Art Informel, in an intellectual scene dominated by existentialism, Klein was a precursor of many movements of the postwar avant-garde, including minimal art, conceptual art, and performance art. Although Klein had composed a ?monotone? symphony as early as 1948 (?whose ?theme? is what I wished my life to be?) his first public showing was Yves: Peintures, an artist book published on November 1954 where, parodying a traditional catalogue, he featured a series of intense monochromes linked to various cities where he had lived during the previous years. Future series displayed orange, yellow, red, and pink monochromes, but was on 1957 when he inaugurated his defining series of monochromes ??employing ultramarine blue of his own invention?? and, in the final years of his career, his body paintings, or anthropometries, recorded the body?s physical energy using his patented pigment known as International Klein Blue (IKB).Through pure color he searched for immaterial spirituality.
