What emerged was a new inorganic pigment, one that absorbed red and green light waves, leaving as reflected light the bluest blue to date. Intending to discover something useful for the electronics industry, Mas Subramanian and his team heated together oxides of manganese, yttrium, and indium at two thousand degrees Fahrenheit. Until YInMn came along: the fortuitous product of an experiment in the materials chemistry lab at Oregon State University in 2009. Until that day in Bilbao, I’d thought Klein a bit of a monomaniacal bore, but Klein International Blue, as he named the pigment-rolled out flat or pimpled, with saturated sponges embedded in the paint surface-turned my eyeballs inside out, rods and cones jiving with joy.
In 1960, he commissioned a synthetic binder that would resist the absorption of light waves, delivering maximum reflectiveness. But, in search of chromatic purity, Klein realized that even the purest pigments’ intensity dulled when combined with a binder such as oil, egg, or acrylic. Gestural abstraction, he felt, was clotted with sentimental extraneousness. Yves Klein, who died at thirty-four, was obsessed with purging color of any external associations. How blue can it get? How deep can it be? Some years ago, at the Guggenheim Bilbao, I thought I’d hit on the ultimate blue, displayed on the gallery floor.
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