Yves Klein, la révolution bleue

French artist Yves Klein had a love affair with the color blue. As we see in the outdoor screening of the documentary Yves Klein, la révolution bleue, he was so intensely passionate about it, he invented his own shade, International Klein Blue (known as IKB). It was a glowing radiance somewhere between lapis lazuli and ultramarine. He devoted entire works of art to this wondrously luminous hue and even doused naked models in it and had them roll or be dragged across his canvases. Director Francois Levy-Kuentz's film uses previously unreleased archival material, such as Klein's personal films, to capture the artist's astonishing career, from its beginning in 1954 to his death in 1962. In those eight short years, Klein turned the modern art world upside down. Besides inventing IKB, he was at the forefront of monochrome paintings, was early to photo manipulation (his most famous, Le Saut dans le Vide, has him flying from a wall, diving into the street below) and created haunting sculptures from the torsos of his friends (blue, of course). He also once exhibited an entirely empty gallery space - and museumgoers lined up to get in. As this audacious artist said at the time, "Recently, my work with color has led me to search for the realization of matter, and I have decided to end the battle. My paintings are now invisible." ...Yves Klein, The Blue Revolution ( Yves Klein, La Révolution Bleue ) ( Yves Klein - The Blue Revolution )