"Blue has no dimensions. It is beyond dimensions," French artist Yves Klein once said.
"Colors are like people, and you irresistibly feel an attraction to some. This may change from time to time, and your relationship with a color may come with ups and downs. However, I fell in love with a specific color at first sight and my passion for it still continues."
This unworldly color is the result of an artist's passion for blue and the sky. It is the most beautiful shade called "Klein blue."
The eponym of the color's name is none other than Yves Klein, who was born in Nice, France in 1928 and is known as the naughty child of the art world with his interesting ideas and hyperactive attitude. Klein was the inventor of the color and the owner of its formula and royalties. This poetic blue tone, which at first glance looks like a saturated ultramarine, is, in the artist's own words, “the most perfect expression of blue." For those who, like me, cannot place this color in nature, the inventor of color described it as: "Not the pallid tint of the daytime sky. It is the dark, electric blue of the Paris sky at nine o’clock on a summer night when the energy of the vanished day still resonates through the atmosphere, and the headlights of the traffic seem like sparks descending from above."
The occurrence story of the color is quite interesting. Known for his monochrome works, French neo-realistic painter Klein loved experimenting and mixing colors in his workshop. Just like the sculptor Pygmalion from Cyprus, who fell in love with the sculpture of the sea-nymph Galatea that he had made in Greek mythology, Klein also fell in love with a blue hue that he found himself and gave it his last name. In 1960, he patented this blue shade as "International Klein Blue" (IKB). Klein described this initiative, which is known as a creative and revolutionary movement in the history of modern art in art circles, as the “Blue Revolution” of his own career.
When Parisians woke up one morning, a blue surprise was awaiting them. Hundreds of blue balloons floating in the sky fascinated those who heard Klein's revolutionary initiative for the first time and increased the appreciation of those who knew him. This extraordinary artistic performance was the artist's tribute to the blue color and sky that became the compass of his own invention and life. Klein celebrated his overflowing passion for art and the ownership of color with 1001 Klein blue balloons he released in the air at an event called “My Color."
Although Klein's obsession with the sky is considered as the expression of his passion for freedom in the simplest terms, a childhood memory of the artist is quite illuminating in understanding his mood. Imagine three young men who are not yet 20 years old. Klein and his friends Claude Pascal and Armand Fernandez attempted to divide the world between them one day. While the three artisan buddies were surfing in a dream world, Pascal embraced the air; Fernandez took the land; Klein, on the other hand, owned the sky. Thus, the sky, which fell to Klein's share in this conversation on a bench that day, became the star of both his passion for blue and his artistic career.
Klein's obsession with blue does not come as a surprise, considering the period in which he lived. Blue, the color of vast freedom and peace, is considered as a symbol of escape from the chaotic and crowded environment created by World War II, a simplification and the artist's courage to face the fear of extinction and death according to many critics. We can understand how Klein was affected by this chaos and why he sought solace in a monochrome blue tone from his following sentences: “We absolutely must realize – and this is no exaggeration – that we are living in the atomic age, where all physical matter can vanish from one day to the next to surrender its place to what we can envision as the most abstract.”
This naughty and genius boy, who was one of the young artists whose star was rising rapidly in the Paris of his time, never ceased to expand in the art world. Toward the end of the 1950s, he introduced the printing technique he called "living brushes" with his philosophy that "I am not splitting the atom, but I am adding color to your life." In the technique used by many contemporary artists today, the human body is not the object of the painting, it, instead, is the material. In his performance of "living brushes" at the opening of his new studio, Klein wanted the female models he painted in Klein blue to create their own nudes naturally by printing themselves on canvas and paper. The art event, which was criticized for being silly and even funny at first glance, laid the foundation for the techniques and performances called "body art" in modern art today. For these works, which he called his "Anthropometry" series, Klein said that drawing a picture of a nude woman is more of a psychological act but painting a naked body and using it as a brush is artistic.
After this innovation, Klein painted many ready-made or found objects with IKB again, ensuring that his color covers all areas of his life. Even if the critics make negative statements by saying "there can't be an exhibition with one color," Klein's objects painted in his blue hue meet the audience in many cities of Europe.
What do you think about Klein's musical understanding, who reduces the art of painting to a single color and metaphorically creates an alphabet from a single? Of course, it only consists of a single note. Conceptual artist Klein's single-note project called “Monotone – Symphony of Silence,” which he designed in 1948, was also a popular performance in music and art circles.
French artist Klein, who had a minimalist and simple approach that can reduce the turmoil in his mind and the turbulence in his soul to a single note and a single color, is still a role model for the masses in modern art and creative thinking. As if he felt that his adventure in the world would be short, his hectic and accelerated life in contrast to this simplicity ended at the age of 34, as a result of consecutive heart attacks at the 1962 Cannes Film Festival. The memoirs he wrote in the countries where he settled and lived, countless IKB works, creative ideas and blue light in the world are what he left behind.
I hope that the special story of this shade of blue, which is reasonlessly my favorite color, mirrors the extent to which the passion for a "thing" can reach, and deepens our view and love for the color blue a little bit.
I hope you are always surrounded by blue-spirited people.
