French artist associated with the Parisian Nouveau Réalisme movement championed by the French critic Pierre Restany. The only painter in the founding group, Klein was a highly influential artist whose radical techniques and conceptual gestures laid the groundwork for much of the art of the 1960s and '70s. His media were pure pigments, gold leaf, fire, water, live nude models (his “living brushes”), actions, and events.

Although Klein had no formal training in art, both his parents were artists, and he early began to understand the power of the imagination as made manifest through form, idea, and particularly colour. In his early twenties, Klein began his study of Rosicrucianism (Rosicrucian), an esoteric Christian sect, which would play a key role in his evolving mystical beliefs. In 1955 Klein settled in Paris after a stay in London and travels to Ireland, Spain, and Japan. While in Japan, Klein studied judo, achieving the black belt (master) level. He taught classes in that system of unarmed combat for several years.

During just a few years in Paris, Klein developed an extraordinary range of avant-garde work. He rejected the linear and reconceived form as “a value of impregnation,” the filling of space with “the pictorial immaterial sensibility.” To demonstrate this philosophy, expressed in several manifestos, he made monochrome paintings of evenly dispersed pure pigment. He also displayed the sponges he used to make the paintings as richly coloured works in themselves. During this period he worked chiefly in monochromes of three colours—gold, which he equated with physical/material transformed to the spiritual; red, which he called “monopink” and equated with materiality, flesh-and-blood; and ultramarine blue, which represented space—but blue dominated, and in 1960 he patented International Klein Blue, called IKB. In 1958, as part of a live performance, Klein choreographed female models who applied his paint to their bodies and then pressed their painted bodies on canvas or paper spread on the wall and on the floor. These “living brush” paintings, which left a distinct figural impression, were followed by his Anthropométries series, which employed the models in a variety of motions and left the canvas with a gestural impression. On March 9, 1960, Klein conducted a 20-minute performance of his Monotone Symphony while his models “painted” new pieces of art.

Klein ventured into other types of conceptual art as well. For The Void (1957) he emptied out the Galerie Iris Clert in Paris, repainted its white paint white, and presented the empty space as a work of art. For Leap into the Void (1960) he staged a photograph showing the artist leaping, arms spread, from a building. Captured with the artist suspended in space, the photograph appears to show him levitating by his own spiritual power. Klein died at age 34, but the variety of work he produced in his brief life and his many manifestos made him one of the groundbreaking artists of the 20th century.