Among all the colors perceived by everyone, few capture the human spirit and thought like blue. Maria Papova wrote in The Edge People that it is “the elemental hue of our planet.” It is the color of the sky and the illusory water. It is the color of flowers, birds, and butterflies. The color blue, Papova continues, “in our literature, floats in our literature, is greater than mere color phenomenon - a symbol, a state of existence, a foothold at the most lyrical and a priori heights of imagination.”
“We like to think about blue,” John Wolfgang von Goethe said in hisTheory of Colors, “not because it develops towards us, but because it attracts us.”
French philosopher Gaston Bachelard said, “First, there is nothing, then the depth of nothingness, then blue.”
These later words inspired a painter named Yves Klein. Klein was born on April 28, 1928, in Nice, France. He moved to Tokyo in 1952, where he studied judo at the Kodokan Judo Institute. After earning his black belt, he returned to France, where few people at that time had heard the word judo, and his expertise in hip-throwing people had almost no self-defense value in a room. He painted throughout his life, but this was when he began to take his artistic career seriously.
Soon after, Klein became a famous and renowned artist in Paris. In November 1954, he published his first book Yves Peintures. This book is a vivid catalog of monochromatic colors inspired by Klein's experiences living in various cities during his youth. In Yves Klein's mind, the color of Tokyo was a soft shade of pink. London was blue. Paris was both neon orange and dull gray. After the publication of his book, Klein held a painting exhibition in Paris called “Monochrome Propositions”. These paintings were the most minimalist, a series of canvases uniformly covered with red, pink, yellow, orange, and blue paint.