IKB 79

IKB 79 is a paint on canvas on plywood painting by French artist Yves Klein, from 1959. It is one of his monochrome paintings, of which he made around 200, in the colour blue that he conceived, International Klein Blue, based on pigment ultramarine. The current painting has the dimensions of 139.7 by 119.7 cm. It is held at the Tate Modern, in London.

History and analysis

Klein started doing monochrome paintings in 1947, aiming to a complete rejection of the concept of representation in art. This is one of his later paintings in that style, because it has a more fine quality and shows more uniformity in texture than his previous works. The original blue monochrome paintings had no titles, but after Klein's death, in 1962, his widow, Rotraut Klein-Moquay, named them in a sequential order, from IKB 1 to IKB 194, which doesn't reflect a chronological order. Klein-Moquay however stated that she was sure that the current work was one of the four executed in 1959, when the couple was in Gelsenkirchen, West Germany.

Klein registered International Klein Blue has his own trademark in 1957. He also stated that "this colour had a quality close to pure space and he associated it with immaterial values beyond what can be seen or touched", according with the Tate website. In his monochromy, he was inspired by the originality and irreverence of previous works by Marcel Duchamp, and he would inspire the future minimal art.

Provenance

The painting was bought by Tate in 1972.