Yves Klein’s ‘open window to freedom’: California, (IKB 71), 1961

On visiting the United States for the first and only time in his life, Yves Klein longed to visit Disneyland. While staying at a guesthouse in Malibu, he and his partner Rotraut duly — and unforgettably — flew to the theme park one morning by helicopter. Enjoying a day’s worth of rollercoaster rides and more, the artist also took the opportunity to propose. Rotraut had no hesitation in accepting.

It should be said that Klein was in the US principally for work. Following on from a successful start to his career in Europe, he was now mounting his debut exhibitions across the Atlantic: at Leo Castelli Gallery in New York (11-29 April 1961) and the Dwan Gallery in Los Angeles (29 May to 24 June 1961).

The shows each included a selection of blue monochrome paintings, the artworks for which Klein is best known today. One of these — the sublime California, (IKB 71) — will be a highlight of the Avant-Garde(s) including Thinking Italian sale at Christie’s in Paris on 23 October 2025.

With the exception of the examples he installed in 1959 at Musiktheater im Revier — a performing arts venue in the German city of Gelsenkirchen — Klein never produced a monochrome bigger than the one coming to auction. It measures more than four metres across and nearly two metres high.

Klein was born in Nice in 1928. As a young man, after the Second World War, he travelled for a year to Japan, where he studied at a prestigious judo school and earned a fourth-degree black belt. Initially, Klein’s plan was to pursue a career in judo — but, upon his return to France, the authorities refused to recognise his Japanese qualification. Martial arts’ loss was to be visual arts’ gain.

Basing himself in Paris, Klein hadn’t been working as a painter for long when he embarked upon the practice of monochrome abstraction (using a single colour over an entire canvas). He described it as an ‘open window to freedom’. At first, he adopted different colours in each case, but from 1956 onwards he concentrated his attention on blue.

It was, in his opinion, the richest and most sensory of colours. (Klein is known to have been impressed by the intense blue in Giotto’s frescoes for the Basilica of Saint Francis in Assisi, which he visited more than once.) He was dissatisfied with traditional oil paints, however — specifically, the way that pigments dulled when mixed with binders.

With the help of chemists, he went on to develop an innovative fixative, which suspended pigment without compromising its luminosity. The result was International Klein Blue (IKB), a deep and unique shade of blue that he patented.

With his IKB monochromes, the artist invited viewers into a transcendent realm where space and spirit became one.

Despite their shared colour, these works were all slightly different, distinguished by factors such as their size, shape and surfaces — as well as, in the artist’s view, the sensory aura they emitted. ‘Each painting’s blue world… revealed itself to be of quite a different essence and atmosphere,’ he said. ‘None resembled the other.’

Klein’s blue monochromes are landmarks of 20th-century painting and can be found in major museums across the world, from IKB 42 in the Menil Collection in Houston, to IKB 3 in the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and IKB 74 at SFMOMA in San Francisco.

California, (IKB 71) is larger than all of them. This is perhaps a reflection of the context in which it was made, early in 1961, shortly before Klein’s trip to the US. Was the Frenchman’s new canvas a response, on some level, to the large Colour Field paintings by the likes of Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman and Clyfford Still — artists to whose work his own was often compared, and whose country he was about to visit?

Another standout feature of California, (IKB 71) is its surface, to which Klein attached an array of small pebbles. The result is a painting evocative of a seabed beneath the blue abyss of an ocean.

Yves and Rotraut travelled to the US by ship in March 1961. The voyage from Le Havre to New York lasted a week. Reviewing the Leo Castelli Gallery show in Art International magazine, the critic Roland F. Pease, Jr. compared his encounter with the monochromes to the ‘experience of seeing a natural wonder for the first time, some gigantic marvel like the Grand Canyon. Everybody has told you it is big, overpowering, incredible; but nobody mentioned that its size was measured by its immense, almost unbearable quiet.’

On 12 April 1961, the day after Klein’s exhibition opened, the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human ever to enter outer space. ‘I saw the sky very dark,’ he reported, ‘and the Earth blue… a deep and intense blue.’

Humankind’s view of its place in the universe was changed forever — and for Klein, there was proof that IKB, as a colour, was not just oceanic but cosmic, too. (He claimed that Gagarin had been the sole visitor to an exhibition of his in space.) Dually symbolic, the IKB works evoked the boundless nature of sea and sky simultaneously.

In California, Klein and Rotraut stayed in a beachfront guesthouse owned by Virginia Dwan, the gallerist showing his work. According to Rotraut, the artist thoroughly enjoyed his stay, with the climate and coast allowing him to ‘rediscover a little piece of his native Côte d’Azur’.

Dwan also lent the couple her AC Ace Bristol convertible, which they drove up and down the Pacific Coast Highway at will. They also went whale-watching, and took a fishing trip on which Klein caught a small shark.

As for the exhibition, Dwan suggested that what made the monochromes so special was that they weren’t works to look at, so much as to be ‘absorbed by’. She added that Gagarin’s flight into space compounded ‘the feeling you always had that Klein was involved with something bigger and greater’ than just applying pigment to canvas.

Klein and Rotraut married at the Church of Saint-Nicolas-des-Champs in Paris, in January 1962. The bride’s dress and veil were traditional white, though she also wore a crown which the groom had painted his particular shade of blue.

Tragically, just a few months later, on 6 June 1962, Klein suffered a heart attack and died, at the age of 34. He didn’t live long enough to see his only child — Yves Amu Klein — enter the world that August.

After being purchased at Dwan Gallery, California, (IKB 71) was not exhibited again until it was loaned to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York between 2005 and 2008. The work is being offered at Christie’s by a distinguished American private collector, and is returning to Paris for the very first time since Klein painted it.

Now, as then, it offers a stunning bolt from the blue.

Avant-Garde(s) including Thinking Italian is on view 17-23 October 2025 at Christie’s in Paris, alongside Moderne(s), une collection particulière européenne, Art Contemporain and Art Moderne