K is for Klein (Yves Klein's Leap into the Void, 1960)
A leap into the void.
A year later - the year before he died - Klein masterminded another brilliant stunt:
Blue Monochrome (1961).
According to the MoMA website (http://www.moma.org/collection/object.php?object_id=80103) 'Klein likened monochrome painting to an 'open window to freedom'. He worked with a chemist to develop his own particular brand of blue. Made from pure color pigment and a binding medium, it is called International Klein Blue. Klein adopted this hue as a means of evoking the immateriality and boundlessness of his own particular utopian vision of the world.'
Blue: the hue of freedom and immateriality. Rebecca Solnit is Klein's true successor with her beautiful philosophical memoir
A Field Guide To Getting Lost (2005).
From her chapter, 'The Blue of Distance':
'For many years, I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away. The color of that distance is the color of emotion, the color of solitude and desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. The color of where you can never go. For the blue is not in the place those miles away at the horizon, but in the atmospheric distance between you and the mountains.' (pp29-30)
