Son of Fred Klein and Marie Raymond,both painters,Yves Klein took the  European art scene by storm in a brief career that lasted just eight years,from  1954 to 1962.“For color! Against the line and drawing!”––the motto he adopted  as member of the Order of the Archers of Saint Sebastian––,besides a Freudian  pronouncement,it’s a true statement on the way he understood the art practice.  Working in Paris during the apogee of geometric abstraction and Art Informel,  in an intellectual scene dominated by existentialism,Klein was a precursor of  many movements of the postwar avant-garde,including minimal art,conceptual  art,and performance art.
Although Klein had composed a “monotone”symphony as early as 1948  (“whose ‘theme’is what I wished my life to be”) his first public showing was  Yves:Peintures,an artist book published on November 1954 where,parodying a  traditional catalogue,he featured a series of intense monochromes linked to  various cities where he had lived during the previous years.
Future series displayed orange,yellow,red,and pink monochromes,but was on  1957 when he inaugurated his defining series of monochromes ––employing  ultramarine blue of his own invention–– and,in the final years of his career,his  body paintings,or anthropometries,recorded the body’s physical energy using  his patented pigment known as International Klein Blue (IKB).Through pure  color he searched for immaterial spirituality.