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 Eve 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 Grand ising that he will name a color after himself Klein worked with a chemist to create International kle blue the color is an ultramarine but he created a formula for the pain 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 I KB 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 client'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 clanging blue the trick with International kleim blue is that it is notoriously hard to color match and this is where Stuart simple comes in it's absolutely insane to dedicate so much of my life to doing this Stuart sample is a pretty interesting figure he was really popular in the early alts referred to as this generation's Bas art there's a huge issue going on in which the rainbow is essentially become in 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 [Music] 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 pink is 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 vanta Black created by some scientists at MIT and then a few years ago around 2021 he dropped the bombshell easy climb people in the art World talk about color ownership generally in reference to ecin cuz 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 Eve 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 uh 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 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 is exactly the same so there was no margin of error in this I've probably at this point sampled hundreds and hundreds of different pigments from all over the world I never set 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 pain 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 beakas 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 dat back so that we know that we're in the right ballp part 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're looking at a client or not there are 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 we' cracked the color so half of it was complete and then several months later we managed to crank 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 velvety quality so with easy Clum Stuart simple was trying to create an easier way to bind this pigment he spent 10 years working on his own [Music] 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 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 eve clein 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 eve 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 eve Klein archive about Stuart simple's use of this blue color the archive notes that it's not really the chemical formula that was so important to Eve Klein in 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 kleim or or incredibly Kish blue which acronym is ikb now kleinon 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 simple hasn't been sued over this uh because uh 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 pains I think what's interesting is I don't think Eve Klein ever wanted the master 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 [Music] Back To Top