The Palette/blue/Made in a lab or a works
International Klein Blue
Not a new pigment: a new binder, invented so that dry ultramarine could keep its full intensity on a canvas.
Also called IKB
- Hex
- #002FA7
- RGB
- 0, 47, 167
- First used
- 1957–1960
- From
- Paris
What it is
Ordinary synthetic ultramarine (PB29) suspended in Rhodopas M60A, a polyvinyl acetate medium developed with the paint supplier Édouard Adam.
How it is made
Grind dry ultramarine into oil and it darkens and dulls, because the oil's refractive index is close to the pigment's and the particles stop scattering light independently. Klein's whole project was to stop that happening. With the chemist at Adam's shop on the Boulevard Edgar-Quinet he found a synthetic resin that binds the powder while leaving each grain optically separate, so the surface behaves like heaped pigment rather than like paint.
The result is applied with a roller and dries to a matt, slightly furry, almost unphotographable surface. Every reproduction you have seen of an IKB monochrome is wrong, and it is wrong in a way that is central to the work. The colour reads as a volume of blue rather than as a coated plane.
Klein lodged a Soulèvement d'Enveloppe Mobile in 1960: a French deposit recording the formula. It is routinely described as him patenting a colour. He did not, and could not, what was registered was a process and a recipe, and there is no such thing as owning a hue.
International Klein Blue, Deep blue pigment first mixed by the French artist Yves Klein. Wikipedia's description, not ours.
The history
Klein's claim was that blue was the only colour with no dimensions, the colour of air and sea and therefore of the abstract. He exhibited eleven apparently identical blue canvases at different prices in Milan in 1957 and sold them, which was both a serious argument about the uniqueness of a painting and a good joke at the market's expense.
The interesting thing for anyone working with brand colour is that Klein got permanent ownership of a colour with no legal protection at all. He did it by using it absolutely, exclusively and consistently, in one context, until the association was unbreakable. No trademark, no registration that means anything, and yet the colour is his sixty-five years later. That is what owning a colour actually requires, and it is a far higher bar than a guideline.
The Kapoor–Semple fight over Vantablack half a century later is the same argument run by lawyers instead of by work, and it went considerably worse for everybody involved.
Where it is used
Klein's monochromes, sponge reliefs, the Anthropométries, and a great deal of borrowed design work since. Ressource and other paint makers now sell licensed versions.
The practical takeaway is about surface, not hue. Klein's blue is intense because of how the surface handles light, not because the pigment is unusual. The pigment is off-the-shelf. Most brand colour problems are the same shape: the hex is fine and the material it lands on is doing the damage. A flat colour printed on uncoated stock, embroidered in thread, anodised into metal and lit by a shop's fluorescent tubes is four different colours, and the guideline that lists one hex has not addressed any of them.
Go and look at it
IKB 79 and other monochromes
Tate Modern, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris
Stand close enough that the edge of the canvas leaves your peripheral vision. The effect Klein was after only happens there.
Édouard Adam's shop
Boulevard Edgar-Quinet, Paris
Still trading, still sells the medium. The colour has a street address.
How it behaves
- Made of
- Ordinary synthetic ultramarine (PB29) suspended in Rhodopas M60A, a polyvinyl acetate medium developed with the paint supplier Édouard Adam.
- Opacity
- Opaque. It covers what is under it.
- Lightfastness
- Permanent. It will outlive the thing it is painted on.
- Extremely fragile in practice, the matt surface marks if touched and cannot really be cleaned.
- Effectively unphotographable; every reproduction understates it.
- The pigment is ordinary. The binder is the invention.
The numbers
All derived from the hex, never typed beside it
- HEX
- #002FA7
- What a browser and a design file want.
- RGB
- 0, 47, 167
- The same three numbers in base ten. Light, not ink.
- HSL
- 223°, 100%, 33%
- Hue, saturation, lightness, how a person describes a colour.
- CMYK
- 100, 72, 0, 35
- Arithmetic only. A real separation depends on the press, the paper and a profile.
- LAB
- 26, 37, -67
- Perceptual. L* of 26 is how light this actually looks, which HSL gets wrong.
This hex is an approximation, and a page about pigment has to say so. International Klein Blue is a substance. A ground mineral scatters light from thousands of separate grains at slightly different angles, and no single sRGB value is that event. It is a flat average of a photograph of it, and the real thing is outside what a screen can emit. Use the number to specify a screen colour. Do not use it to judge the pigment.
Where it sits on the wheel
Hue 223°
Its opposite, by the diagram
The arithmetic opposite, 180° round in HSL. Useful, and not the same as the opposite a painter mixing pigment would name, that wheel was built for paint.
Lighter and darker
Towards white
Mixing with white does not only lighten, it dulls and cools. This is why a pale tint of a brand colour so often looks chalky, and why a designed light shade beats a generated one.
Towards black
Mixing with black kills the hue as it darkens. A better dark is usually the colour plus its neighbour round the wheel, which is what every painter does instead.
Can you set type on it
Handgloves
White on it
10.69:1 · AAA
Handgloves
Black on it
1.96:1 · Fails
Handgloves
It on paper
10.15:1 · AAA
Handgloves
It on ink
1.71:1 · Fails
4.5:1 is the floor for body text and 3:1 for large text, by WCAG. Treat it as a minimum you may not go under rather than as a target: plenty of pairs pass at 4.6:1 and are still unpleasant to read for a page, and the checker will not tell you that.
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