International Klein Blue Research

The letters IKB stand for International Klein Blue, a distinctive ultramarine which Yves Klein registered as a trademark colour in 1957. He considered that this colour had a quality close to pure space and he associated it with immaterial values beyond what can be seen or touched.

Klein invented the paint with the help of a chemical retailer by suspending pure, dry pigment in crystal-clear synthetic resin and compatible solvents (ether and petroleum). Unlike traditional binders, the new colorless carrier did not dull the individual particles of pigment, but left them with their original brightness and intensity.

The novel medium was versatile enough to be brushed, sprayed, rolled, or even thickened and built up on a surface. It quickly dried to a fragile-looking but durable matte finish that, like velvet, offered a plush, light-absorbent surface that seemed to dissolve into a dark, glowing liquid depth.

In the years leading up to 1957 Yves Klein had been refining his use of color, striving to capture a shade of blue that would encompass his entire experience - eradicating the horizon and combining the earth and the sky, laying bare the range of his own emotions, unlocking an experience of the endless void of space, but the right blue was hard to find. Whenever he found a pigment that satisfied him, the process of mixing it with any agent in order to apply it to a canvas changed the shade and destroyed the effect.  Klein attributed a particular role to the color blue, which embodied for him the most abstract aspects of tangible and visible nature, such as the sky and the sea.

IKB 79 was one of nearly two hundred blue monochrome paintings Yves Klein made during his short life. He began making monochromes in 1947, considering them to be a way of rejecting the idea of representation in painting and therefore of attaining creative freedom. Although it is difficult to date many of these works precisely, the early ones have an uneven surface, whereas later ones, such as the present work, are finer and more uniform in texture. Klein did not give titles to these works but after his death in 1962, his widow Rotraut Klein-Moquay numbered all the known blue monochromes IKB 1 to IKB 194, a sequence which did not reflect their chronological order. Since then further examples have been identified and these have also been given IKB numbers. In 1974 Rotraut Klein-Moquay wrote to Tate saying that she was fairly certain that IKB 79 was one of about four monochrome paintings Klein made when they were together at Gelsenkirchen, West Germany in 1959.

Yves Klein quotes:

"Blue has no dimensions; it is beyond dimensions, whereas the other colours are not... All colours arouse specific associative ideas... while blue suggests at most the sea and sky, and they, after all, are in actual, visible nature what is most abstract."

"I am against the line and all its consequences: contours, forms, composition. All paintings of whatever sort, figuratives or abstract, seem to me like prison windows in which the lines, precisely, are the bars."

"The world is blue."

"Every phenomenon manifests itself of its own accord. This manifestation is always distinct from form, and is the essence of the immediate, the trace of the immediate."

Examples of IKB in artists' work:

Booklet content:

International Klein Blue (IKB) is a distinctive ultramarine, which Yves Klein registered as a trademark colour in 1957. He invented the colour with the help of a chemical retailer by suspending pure, dry pigment in crystal-clear synthetic resin and compatible solvents. Unlike traditional binders, this new process did not dull the individual particles of the pigment, and allowed the original brightness and intensity of the colour to stay present. Klein considered this colour to have a quality close to pure space and he associated it with immaterial values beyond what we can see or touch. Klein attributed a particular role to the colour blue, which embodied for him the most abstract aspects of tangible and visible nature, such the sky and the sea. Being a student of Roisicrucianism and of Eastern religious, Klein entertained esoteric and spiritual ideas in which blue played a vital role as the colour of infinity. Monochrome abstraction is the use of one colour over an entire canvas, and a practice that he was heavily attracted to. Klein likened monochrome painting to an “open window of freedom, as the possibility of being immersed in the immeasurable existence of colour”. One of the most noticeable pieces of work by Klein, that incorporated his IKB were his anthropometries, or body paintings. Klein used the body as a “living paint brush”, and by covering his models in his IKB paint, he directed them to press and drag their bodies across paper and canvas, leaving impressions of the paint. The resulting work created and interesting atmosphere where they represented the temporary physical presence of the models.