Blue Monochrome

Yves Klein, 1961 · Gallery 405 · Floor 4

Okay. Just stand here a second. Obviously, it’s blue. But notice how it’s not shiny. Not really smooth either. Kinda powdery. The guy is Yves Klein. French. From Nice. This one’s from ’61. Alright, so at nineteen, this guy’s lying on the beach in Nice. Looks up at the blue sky. And signs it. In his imagination. Calls that his first artwork. Then gets annoyed with the birds. Says they’re making holes in it. So that’s who we’re dealing with. Anyway, getting that blue onto a board takes some work. It’s ultramarine. A pigment painters have used for centuries. It’s beautiful as powder. But when you mix it with oil, the life of the color just kinda… comes out of it. Klein wants the powder to stay looking like powder. So he goes to a paint shop in Montparnasse. Works with a guy named Édouard Adam. They find a clear plastic glue that holds the grains together without killing the color. He shows eleven of the blue paintings at a show in Milan. Same size. Same blue. Later he tells the story that each one had a different price. Says each has its own… feeling. By ’59 he’s selling invisible art. Calls it “zones of immaterial pictorial sensibility.” Here’s how it works. You pay him in actual gold. Then he gives you a receipt. You can choose to keep the receipt. But, Klein says, to really own the work, you have to burn the receipt. Then he chucks half the gold into the Seine. There’s witnesses. A whole ceremony. Seriously. In ’62, a Hollywood screenwriter actually does it. Said nothing else in art ever hit him like that. So, that’s the door Klein helps open. The art can be an event. Something you go through. And all the while, he’s very particular about his powder and his glue. He even submits the recipe in a sealed envelope at the French patent office. Gets an official record with a date. So now the paint’s got a receipt too. He calls it International Klein Blue.

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