What is blue?

Blue is the most essential color of the universe. Blue represents both the sky and the sea and is associated with open spaces, freedom, intuition, imagination, inspiration, and sensitivity. Blue has no dimension - it is beyond the dimensions of which other colors partake.

There is a special blue color that has inspired a number of designers, artists, painters, and poets, and has been proprietary and perceived as exclusive for decades – that is the International Klein Blue (IKB).

Who is Klein?

As the name of the color indicates, Klein Blue was created by Yves Klein, a renowned French artist and an important figure in post-war European art. He was a leading member of the French artistic movement of Nouveau réalisme founded in 1960 by art critic Pierre Restany. Klein was a pioneer in the development of performance art and is seen as an inspiration to and as a forerunner of minimal art, as well as pop art.

However, Klein himself received no formal training in his youth – even his first vocation was to be a judoka. It was only when back in Paris, in 1954, that he dedicated himself fully to art, setting out on his "adventure into monochrome".

The story behind Klein Blue

For Klein, monochrome was the only form of painting that was allowed to make visible the absolute – it was also the only way to liberate color from the prison that is the line. Klein believed that color was not only a tool but also the color itself and the spiritual world it symbolized. Monochrome was the core of Klein's creation, managing to present the abstract concept in an abstract way and let the viewers' eyes focus on the color itself.

Before creating his famous blue hue, Klein was known to use a multitude of colors in his work. In a 1956 solo exhibition in Paris titled Yves: Propositions Monochromes, the artist debuted monochromes using three colors: pink, blue, and gold. He connected these colors to the Christian concept of the Holy Trinity, saying, "Fire is blue, gold and pink, the bases of my monochrome paintings. I see it as a universal principle for the explanation of the world." Audiences expressed disappointment with Klein's work, and he in turn decided to directly pursue monochromatic work by focusing on one shade: blue.

Klein's love affair with blue originated from his early travels to Italy, where he experienced the rich blues showcased in frescoes on the walls of the Saint Francis Basilica. For him, blue was the most special color – Klein adopted this hue as a means of evoking the immateriality and boundlessness of his own particular utopian vision of the world. "Essential, potential, spatial, immeasurable, vital, static, dynamic, absolute, pneumatic, pure, prestigious, wonderful, maddening, unstable, exact, sensitive, immaterial", so the artist described his blue. It is recorded that in March 1959, Klein quoted the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard at the opening ceremony of the exhibition Vision in Motion-Motion in Vision "First there is nothing, then there is a deep nothing, then there is a blue depth."

In fact, as early as 1956, while on vacation in Nice, he experimented with a polymer binder to preserve the luminescence and powdery texture of raw yet unstable ultramarine pigment. Four years later, with the help of Parisian art supplier and chemist Edouard Adam, Klein developed the shade and registered (but never patented) the paint formula under the name International Klein Blue (IKB).

Works like Blue Earth, Blue Sponge Relief, The Buffalo, Table Blue Klein, and Blue Venus all epitomize Klein's artistic approach.

Now, this vivid, intense shade of blue still gains an appreciation that far outstrips those dealing with any other colors, and has been used in many everyday products like clothes, bottles, or ornaments. GiNT also has its Klein Bluewater containers.