Do You Really, Really, Really Love Yves Klein? Well, Now You Can Paint Your Entire Home in His Proprietary Blue

Here's your chance to bring fine art supplies into your living room.

A canister of Yves Klein® paint. Courtesy of Ressource.

If you’re looking to bring a bit of Yves Klein into your home, we have some good news for you.

Thanks to the high-end decorative paint company Ressource, you can now paint your walls with a color very close to the French artist’s International Klein Blue, and it won’t cost you seven figures at auction.

In cooperation with the Yves Klein Estate, the company is marking what would have been Klein’s 90th birthday by releasing a paint (dubbed Yves Klein®) that is inspired by the artist’s signature color. Available in matte and velvet matte finishes, the paint sets (available at the company’s New York showroom) are selling for $100 per liter (you also get a liter of undercoat). That’ll cover about 85 square feet—so not much, but still a deal compared with the $22 million it cost the buyer of Klein’s Archisponge (Re11) (1960), which sold at Sotheby’s in 2008.

Yves Klein® paint. Courtesy of Ressource.

So what’s the backstory? In the mid-1950s, Klein began making monochromatic paintings, to which he would apply layers of paint to build up an even surface without any variation, achieving what he called “the Unity.” After experimenting with a variety of colors, all of which were dubbed “Expressions of the Universal Color,” he decided to focus just on blue.

Working with a paint supplier named Edouard Adam, who helped Klein develop a resin binder called polyvinyl acetate, Klein was able to harness the intensity of the blue he wanted. Adam still sells the pigment from his Montparnasse store.

Before his death at age 34, Klein was a member of the French post-war Nouveau Réalisme movement along with Arman, Martial Raysse, Jean Tinguely, and Niki de Saint Phalle, among others.


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