Wahgi Collective.

Yves Klein spent his whole short life trying to hold a colour. I think I understand why.

There is a particular quality to the sky at five in the morning in the Wahgi Valley. Before the mist burns off, before the plantation wakes up, the highlands sit under a blue so deep and so complete it doesn’t feel like atmosphere at all. It feels like matter. Not the sky you see through. The sky as a thing in itself.

I’ve never been able to adequately describe it. Turns out someone spent their entire brief life trying to solve the same problem from a different place.

Yves Klein grew up alongside the blues of the Cote d’Azur and understood early that no existing paint could hold what he was seeing. Every binder dulled it. The colour that arrived on canvas was always a lesser, diminished thing. So he spent years trying to fix that.

The breakthrough came through a Parisian paint dealer named Edouard Adam, who suggested suspending the pigment in a synthetic resin originally developed for pharmaceutical use. The resin did something unexpected — it didn’t dim the colour. It deepened it. Klein called the result International Klein Blue. In 1960, he registered the formula. Not the colour itself. Under French law you cannot own a colour. But you can own a process. And the process was everything.

Blue has no dimensions. It is beyond dimensions.

Yves Klien

What Klein was articulating is something anyone who has looked at a genuinely big sky already knows. Blue doesn’t behave like other colours. It doesn’t stay on the surface. It opens. It recedes. It suggests something behind itself that the eye can never quite reach. I have always been mesmerised by the ocean’s multitude of blues – how a colour can evoke so many thoughts, memories and feelings.

The philosopher Gaston Bachelard put it this way: first there is nothing, then there is a deep nothing, then there is a blue depth. Klein found this useful. He kept returning to it.

The obsession was sincere and slightly unhinged in equal measure. He released over a thousand blue balloons above Paris as an art event. He wrote to President Eisenhower asking for support in a Blue Revolution. He planned to paint an Egyptian obelisk. At nineteen, standing on a beach with two friends, he divided the world between them — one took the manufactured world, one took the natural but inert world, and Klein took whatever was natural and alive. Then he waved his arm across the sky as though signing it.

That gesture is the whole story, really. The sky was his medium. IKB was just the attempt to bring it down to canvas.

In 1957 he showed eleven canvases at the Apollinaire Gallery in Milan. Each identical in size. Each coated in the same ultramarine. Hung twenty centimetres from the wall so they appeared to float. People were disturbed. Critics called it arrogance. Some called it fraud.

What takes longer to understand — and you do have to actually sit with his monochromes for a while to get it — is that identical is not the same as static. The richness of a Klein blue canvas shifts with the light, with the distance you stand from it, with what you bring to it in a particular moment. It waits. It asks a different kind of looking.

This is what separated Klein from artists who worked in limited palettes before him. He wasn’t interested in minimalism as reduction. He was interested in a single colour as expansion — the condition under which something else could happen.

He wasn’t interested in minimalism as reduction. He was interested in a single colour as expansion.

His Anthropometries pushed it further. Models covered in IKB pressed their bodies against canvas. Klein stood back and directed. The body became a brush. The blue became the record of a presence — the trace of contact between a living thing and a surface. In photographs, these performances have an intensity that is hard to account for. Something about blue at that depth against white, and the ghost of a human form left in it. I recently watched a video of one of the artists watching their work being made on a gallery screen. She explains it was a true collaboration — that Klein was respectful and treated them as collaborators. I know modern eyes might read it differently. I disagree. I watched the clip and felt the freedom in their art, in that moment. Brilliance.

You can view it at tate.org.uk.

He died of a heart attack in 1962. Thirty-four years old. Approximately two hundred works made with IKB. By any measure of a career, almost nothing. By any measure of influence, considerable.

The thing I keep coming back to is this: Klein didn’t chase the blue because he had a problem to solve. He chased it because the blue had something in it that everything else lacked, and he’d been given just enough time to try to find out what that was.

I understand that impulse completely.

That five o’clock sky in the Wahgi Valley is still in me somewhere. I’ve never found adequate words for it. Maybe the point was never to find words.