That blue
The artist who owned ultramarine

In the mid-Fifties, Yves Klein (1928 1962) declared that a new world calls for a new man . With his idiosyncratic style and huge charisma, this bold artist would go on to pursue a brief but bountiful career, producing more than a thousand paintings over seven years in an oeuvre now considered a mainstay of the postwar modernism.

Klein made his name above all with his large, monochrome canvases in his own, patented hue of blue. International Klein Blue...