Yves Klein - Basic Art Series, Book

The blue of Yves Klein, the artist who dominated overseas.

In the mid-1950s, Yves Klein (1928-1962) declared that "a new world calls for a new man." With his idiosyncratic style and enormous charisma, this daring artist had a brief but abundant career, producing more than 1,000 paintings over seven years, in an oeuvre that is now considered a landmark of post-war modernism.

Klein stood out above all for his large monochrome canvases in his own patented shade of blue. International Klein Blue (IKB), composed of pure pigment and binding medium, is both rich and luminous, evocative and decorative, and was conceived by Klein as a way of evoking the immateriality and infinitude of the world. The works in this "Blue Revolution" seem to draw us into another dimension, as if we were hypnotised by a perfect summer sky.

Klein was also known for his use of "living brushes", in which naked women, covered in Klein International Blue, left impressions of their bodies on large sheets of paper.

This introduction to Basic Art presents key works by Klein to introduce an artist who was at once a showman, inventor and pioneer of performance art. With page after page of Klein's ever-appealing International Blue, it is both an essential guide to a master of modern art and a meditation on the unique effects of a single colour.

"What is blue? Blue is the invisible becoming visible." - Yves Klei