Who is Yves Klein? | Tate Kids

This may be just a blue square to you. But it is actually a picture painted with a very special blue.

This blue was invented by artist Yves Klein and he called it International Klein Blue or IKB for short.

This is number 79 of about 200 paintings he made using IKB. We call these paintings monochrome paintings. Monochrome means one colour, so a monochrome painting is a painting that only includes one colour.

So I suppose you are wondering why he invented a colour?

It all started in 1947, when three young artist friends were on holiday in Nice, France. On a beautiful sunny day, they decided to carve up the world between them. One would take the land, another the air and the last would take the sky. Yves Klein was the artist who took the sky.

Klein saw the sky as a place where an artist could be free to think their own thoughts without being influenced by what people thought on the ground.

This photograph shows Klein leaping into the air. It looks as if he is flying, but really the photograph is a fake!