Name: International Klein Blue—the World’s Rarest Blue Paint—Has Been Impossible to Find Until Now
Uploaded: 2024-12-16T13:00:00Z
Duration: 9 min 23 s
Description: For 60 years, it’s been nearly impossible for anyone to recreate International Klein Blue. Now, a British artist says he’s cracked it — and made an even better version of the beloved paint.

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For 60 years, it’s been nearly impossible for anyone to recreate International Klein Blue. Now, a British artist says he’s cracked it — and made an even better version of the beloved paint. Photo: Adam Craig

https://m.wsj.net/video/20250103/ef1b147b-edf6-4231-9841-53a0fde8a611/3/hls/manifest-hd-wifi.m3u8

For 60 years, it’s been nearly impossible for anyone to recreate International Klein Blue. Now, a British artist says he’s cracked it — and made an even better version of the beloved paint.

International Klein Blue—the World’s Rarest Blue Paint—Has Been Impossible to Find Until Now

Speaker: Ultramarine blue is a very special pigment.

Prior to the 19th century, it was as expensive as gold.

If you look at old master paintings, they always saved this ultramarine blue for the Holy Mother's robes. Historically, we ascribed so much value to this color, and Yves Klein has something to do with that too. He's sort of the French mad scientist of post-war art.

He's an artist who is so self-aggrandizing that he will name a color after himself.

Klein worked with a chemist to create international klein blue. The color is an ultramarine, but he created a formula for the paint so that it wouldn't lose its vibrancy and its shine.

Klein was trying to create a certain harmony, almost a utopian effect.

It was so extraordinary that it made him famous. Once you know that IKB exists, you really do begin to see it everywhere! Everywhere! The Blue Man Group wears it. You see it on runways.

Standing in front of Klein's blue monochromes. You really do get this feeling of pure energy? I am kind of permanently impregnated with this color.

When he died in 1962, kind of the secret sauce went with him. It's almost like the challenge, the gauntlet has been thrown. Can you make international klein blue? The trick with international klein blue is that it is notoriously hard to color match, and this is where Stuart Semple comes in.

It's absolutely insane to dedicate so much of my life to doing this.

Stuart Semple is a pretty interesting figure. He was really popular within the early aughts. Referred to as this generation's Basquiat.

There's a huge issue going on in which the rainbow is essentially becoming corporatized by massive brands and industry.

Within the past seven or eight years. He's come to public attention, in part because of some really interesting kind of say like art stunts. And one of those stunts is using colors that are protected and that are trademarked or potentially patented.

He is known for creating what he calls the Pinkest Pink.

I feel very pink.

He's taken on Tiffany Blue, for instance.

It is possible to own the rights to a color, and that's one of the things that really, really upsets me.

He is known for creating what he calls the Blackest Black, a response to Vantablack. And then a few years ago around 2021, he dropped the bombshell, easy klein.

People in the art world talk about color ownership generally in reference to Yve Klein 'cause he created this concept. It wasn't that he formulated this blue to stop competitors, but to solidify that association between his name and this blue.

For me, Klein's always been kind of one of those holy grail colors that are supposed to be impossible to make. It's like one of those puzzles that needed to be solved I think. It's probably a bit of an obsession.

I mean, you can still buy the pigment from Yves Klein's old paint supply store in Walmart, but it's made by a different manufacturer now, so it may not be a perfect match, and that's where the insanity comes in.

Within ultramarine, there's a wide variety of blues. There's a lot of variety in the recipes that are used to make it. We have about 35 of those as synthetic ultramarine, and we have about 20 natural ultramarine samples.

Ultramarine has a sort of tendency toward purple. It naturally has a bit more reddishness in the blue than say, a cobalt.

To create it, I had to be sure that what I was doing was exactly the same, so there was no margin there in this. Probably at this point, sampled hundreds and hundreds of different pigments from all over the world. I never sat out to make a paint company or share the colors with anybody. I always just used them for my own work. So many people take paint for granted. They dip their brush in it and it just works, and they don't realize that there's a whole team of people behind the scenes who've made that moment happen for them. There's nine people that work with me here in the studio every day. For months and months on end, we will be painting out small little lab samples that we're making in beakers and we'll be measuring those against the reference. We're using things like the spectrometer to measure the color, and we're getting that data back so that we know that we're in the right ballpark, but nothing will beat the experience of the eye. At the end of the day, this is a visual thing, it's an aesthetic thing, and you know whether you are looking at a klein or not. There were a couple of breakthrough moments. The first one was when we got the color, and this is a really early one. The color is right, but it's really streaky. You could never let anybody use it, but I remember being so excited when I saw this swatch because I knew we'd cracked the color, so half of it was complete, and then several months later we managed to crack the texture.

I think a lot of people think of it as being a pigment, but IKB is actually a paint system, a mixture of synthetic ultramarine and polyvinyl acetate resin diluted with solvent.

The effect is very matte and that gives it that kind of chalky velvet equality. So with easy klein, Stuart Semple was trying to create an easier way to bind this pigment. He spent 10 years working on his own formula.

What I wanted to be able to do was overload my binder with loads of pigment, loads of color without it falling off the surface. My favorite part of the process is when you get little breakthroughs, you crack that perfect matte texture that just feels like klein or you see the right tone of ultramarine blue for the first time, and we got samples back from the lab and I painted them out and I just knew. I just knew it was it and it was so exciting.

It does come really close to creating IKB.

If you spend a lot of time looking at an yve klein monochrome, you'll actually see areas that really do appear quite saturated and they have kind of a purpley metallic look where there's like a higher proportion of resin has sort of migrated to certain areas, and I see a little bit of that here.

It's not the same material that Klein painted with, but it looks indistinguishable. And then all I wanted to do was get it out into the world so that other people could have it.

So what does the Yve Klein estate think about all this? I mean, they're supposed to be protecting his place in the art world and the role that he played in a huge part of that is protecting this blue.

The "Wall Street Journal" received an email from the Yve Klein archive about Stuart Semple's use of this blue color. The archive notes that it's not really the chemical formula that was so important to Yve Klein and his art. It's using it with the association of Klein's name and his reputation and his legacy.

My version of klein blue is called easy klein, or incredibly kleinish blue, which acronym is IKB. Now Klein owns the patent for international klein blue, IKB. So it's very important to remember that mine isn't called the same thing. Otherwise I'd probably be in trouble.

The ironic thing is it's maybe good that Stuart Semple hasn't been sued over this because he's apparently losing money on the paints.

The paint making side of my business is not at all profitable. It costs money to do most of it, and if I wasn't lucky enough to be making my art and being able to pay for my life from it, I probably couldn't really endeavor to make these paints.

I think what's interesting is I don't think Yve Klein ever wanted the mastery of recreating the color to be such a huge part of the conversation, but it has become that and it has also become part of the appeal just because it's so darn hard to make.

When you talk to artists, they're very, very concerned about what a work of art is made of, how they can get the idea out of their head into the real world. I think great artists make great art. They will find a way to make it whether they have access to that material or not.