(Nice, 1928-Paris 1962)
French painter and performance artist, recognized as one of the most influential figures in avant-garde art, particularly Minimal art.
He is best known for: monochrome paintings, where he painted the entire canvas with a single color, usually a unique blue that he referred to as the ‘International Klein Blue; his exhibition called the ‘Le Vide’ or the ‘exhibition of emptiness’, where he left the complete gallery empty and painted in white, held at the Galerie Iris Clert, Paris; Anthroprometrics, where naked women covered in blue paint dragged each other on a canvas on the floor during the symphony monomotone. Widely regarded as a celebrity artist in Europe, he was never able to receive significant popularity in the U.S.