In 1960, a man in a tuxedo directed naked models covered in intense blue paint to press their bodies against canvases while an orchestra played a single continuous note. That man was Yves Klein, and this episode traces how the son of two painters stopped using blue to depict subjects and, from 1958 onward, made the color itself the subject of his art. We look at the chemistry problem behind his monochromes: raw ultramarine pigment loses its powdery glow the moment it is mixed with oil binders, so Klein worked with Parisian art supplier Edouard Adam to find a polyvinyl acetate resin made by the pharmaceutical firm Rhone-Poulenc that suspended the pigment in a matte matrix and let the light through.

From there the story moves into the legal and conceptual territory that defined Klein's legacy. In May 1960 he deposited a Soleau envelope at the ...