The blue that swallowed the world: A journey into the heart of a colour that became religion
Imagine a Parisian studio in 1957, where the air smells of turpentine and scorched paper. Yves Klein, dressed in a dark suit, circles a blank canvas like an alchemist before his furnace. Suddenly, he seizes a roller and coats it in a blue so intense it seems to absorb light rather than reflect it. T
By Artedusa
••7 min read
The blue that swallowed the world: a journey into the heart of a colour that became religion
Imagine a Parisian studio in 1957, where the air smells of turpentine and scorched paper. Yves Klein, dressed in a dark suit, circles a blank canvas like an alchemist before his furnace. Suddenly, he seizes a roller and coats it in a blue so intense it seems to absorb light rather than reflect it. This is no ordinary pigment—it is a living substance, almost liquid, spreading in a velvety layer as deep as a starless sky. When he steps back, the canvas no longer depicts anything—yet it contains everything. Klein’s blue is not a colour. It is a door.
This blue has a history older than cathedrals. It has travelled through the tombs of pharaohs, crossed Afghan deserts in caravans laden with precious stones, and survived the bonfires of iconoclasts. It has been more valuable than gold, rarer than diamonds, and more sacred than the blood of martyrs. Then, one day in 1960, it became a religion. A religion without dogma, without a church, without any worship other than the silent contemplation of a monochrome surface. How could a mere hue achieve such a feat? To understand, we must return to the origins of the world—or at least to the origins of our fascination with the infinite.
Lapis lazuli, or the blue gold of the gods
In the arid mountains of Badakhshan, Afghanistan, miners still scrape the slopes of Sar-e-Sang today, where the sky blurs into the rock. For six thousand years, they have extracted from these depths a stone of such pure blue that it seems to hold the celestial vault itself: lapis lazuli. The Sumerians called it za-gin, "the stone of the sky," and fashioned it into cylindrical seals depicting their gods. The Egyptians adorned funeral masks with it—Tutankhamun’s contains over four kilos—as if this blue could guide the soul to the afterlife. For them, lapis was not mere decoration: it was a divine substance, a fragment of the firmament fallen to earth.
Its rarity made it an object of power. In the Middle Ages, Venetian merchants brought it back from the East at great cost, and miniature painters reserved its use for the faces of the Virgin or the halos of saints. A gram of ultramarine pigment—literally "beyond the seas"—was sometimes worth more than a gram of gold. Painters like Giotto or Fra Angelico had to negotiate fiercely with their patrons to obtain even an ounce of this celestial blue. Some, like Vermeer, used it with the precision of a jeweller, applying it only to the holiest parts of their canvases—the Virgin’s cloak, the turban of the girl with a pearl earring.
But this blue had a flaw: it was capricious. Once ground, lapis lazuli often lost its brilliance beneath layers of binder. Artists had to mix it with oil or animal glue, which dulled its luminosity. For centuries, the dream of a perfect blue—a blue that would be both matter and light—remained out of reach. Until a young man from Nice, a judoka and mystic, decided to create it from scratch.
The man who invented the sky
Yves Klein was born in 1928 into a family of artists, but it was judo that first shaped his worldview. At twenty, he travelled to Japan to study and earned his fourth dan, a rare achievement for a Westerner. For him, judo was not a sport but a philosophy—a way of understanding that emptiness was not the absence of something, but the very condition of its existence. When he returned to France in 1955, he had already signed his first artistic manifesto: The Chelsea Hotel Manifesto, in which he declared that "the artist must become a receiver of immaterial sensitivity."
It was in this context that he began his quest for the perfect blue. Not a blue that imitated the sky, but a blue that was the sky. A blue so intense it would erase the boundary between canvas and space, between matter and spirit. After months of experimentation in his studio on Rue Campagne-Première, he finally found the formula: a blend of synthetic ultramarine and a special binder, Rhodopas M60A, which allowed the pigment to retain its luminosity without being absorbed by the surface. In 1957, he patented this colour, which he called International Klein Blue (IKB). It was not a brand, but a declaration of war on representation.
His first exhibitions were scandals. At the Galerie Colette Allendy in 1957, he presented eleven identical monochrome blue canvases, all sold at different prices. Critics howled in outrage. "It’s wallpaper!" one exclaimed. "Another hoax!" added another. Yet those who came close enough to the canvases felt something strange: this blue did not merely reflect light—it drank it. It did not just beckon the gaze; it swallowed it. As if each canvas were a miniature black hole, a passage to another dimension.
The performance of the void
Klein did not stop at painting. He wanted his blue to live. In 1960, he staged a series of performances called Anthropométries, where nude models, coated in IKB, pressed their bodies against canvases or walls under his direction. The audience, invited to witness these "sessions," was both fascinated and horrified. Some saw a celebration of the body; others, a desecration. But for Klein, this was "living painting." These imprints were not representations, but traces—tangible proof of human energy captured by the blue.
That same year, he created Leap into the Void, a doctored photograph showing him diving from a building, arms outstretched, as if about to take flight. The image became legendary. It encapsulated his entire philosophy: art must be an act of absolute freedom, an attempt to defy the laws of physics and gravity. For him, blue was both the means and the end of this quest. It was the colour of the immaterial, of the infinite, of what eludes all definition.
Blue as a mystical experience
To understand the power of IKB, you must see it in person. Reproductions do not do justice to its velvety texture, its almost liquid depth. Standing before a Klein canvas, you feel as if you are diving into a bottomless ocean. The blue does not merely exist—it acts. It alters the perception of space, as if the canvas were literally drawing the viewer in.
This sensory experience was no accident. Klein had studied the psychological effects of colours at length. He knew that blue, unlike red or yellow, does not provoke aggression or excitement. It soothes. It opens. It invites contemplation. In the 1950s, as Europe was still recovering from war, his blue became an answer to existential dread—a way to find serenity in a shattered world.
Other artists before him had explored monochrome—Malevich with his Black Square, Rodchenko with his Pure Colours—but none had pushed the experiment so far. For Klein, blue was not an end in itself, but a means. A means of accessing transcendence, of brushing against the infinite. "My painting is not abstract," he declared. "It is real—more real than reality itself."
The legacy of a blue that refuses to die
Yves Klein died in 1962, at thirty-four, from a heart attack. He left behind a dazzling, unclassifiable body of work that continues to fascinate and divide. His blue, however, survived. Today, it appears in Anish Kapoor’s installations, Hiroshi Sugimoto’s photographs, and the sets of films like The Square or Twin Peaks. It has inspired designers, architects, musicians. Even fashion has claimed it: Yves Saint Laurent created a "Mondrian" dress in homage to Klein, and Pantone named "Classic Blue" the colour of the year in 2020—a barely veiled nod to IKB.
Yet the true mystery of this blue remains. How can a simple colour hold so much meaning? How can a pigment become a metaphysical experience? Perhaps because blue, since time immemorial, has been the colour of what eludes us. The colour of the sea, too vast to take in at a glance. The colour of the sky, too distant to touch. The colour of the infinite, which reminds us of our smallness and our capacity to dream.
Klein understood this: blue is not a hue, but a promise. A promise of escape, of transcendence, of freedom. And that promise, more than sixty years after his death, still haunts us. As if, somewhere, the sky were still waiting.
The blue that swallowed the world: A journey into the heart of a colour that became religion | Art History
