In a dazzling Paris evening sale in October 2025, Yves Klein’s monumental California (IKB 71) (1961), a fourteen-foot expanse of pure ultramarine, sold for €18.4 million (about $21.4 million), the highest price ever paid for the artist in France. The work, created just a year before Klein’s untimely death, stands as both an apex of his painterly ambition and a revelation of how color itself could transcend the limits of matter.
For those who have long followed Klein’s radical pursuit of the immaterial, the sale was not merely a market victory. It was an affirmation that his singular vision, distilled into his signature hue, International Klein Blue (IKB), continues to challenge, seduce, and inspire both artists and collectors six decades later.
