Yves Klein

Yves Klein was a French artist born in 1928 in Nice, France. Klein is touted as the most influential, prominent, and controversial French artist to emerge in the 1950s. He is remembered for his use of a single color, a rich shade of ultramarine that he made his own: International Klein Blue. His success, however, is largely attributed to attacking many of the ideas that underpinned the abstract painting that had been dominant in France since the end of the Second World War. Skeptics of abstract art have always alleged that the viewers do more work than the artist, investing the form with their own feelings rather than discovering the artist’s. Viewed in this light, Klein’s monochrome blue paintings might be read as a satire on abstract art, for not only do the pictured carry no motif, but Klein insisted there was nothing there at all, only ”the void”. He passed away in Paris on June 6, 1962.