In a trance of blue

Of all the dazzling stuff on this planet, not much beats the art of Yves Klein. In 1956, Klein invented a blue paint that made his paintings and sculptures as gorgeous as anything could be. Over the seven years of his career — Klein died of a heart attack in 1962 when he was only 34 — the Frenchman made something like 1,000 works, one richer than the next. Two hundred are now in Washington and the huge Klein survey that just opened at the Hirshhorn Museum could hardly be more alluring.

Americans haven't seen a full spread of Kleins in almost three decades and it might never happen again: The powdered pigment is so fragile that the works are almost unshippable and they are getting so expensive you can hardly insure them.

That makes this one of the most important shows in Hirshhorn history. It is also one of the most beautiful. Curator Kerry Brougher has installed the survey with a courageous restraint that lets the art speak for itself.

But here is the strange and most important thing about Klein's art: Its direct, material appeal is not what's at its heart. These are earthbound objects that want desperately to point to a world of immaterial spirit. Klein's gorgeous matter hopes to transcend everything that is down here on this planet.

Weirder yet, its beauty seems to end up showing that transcendence is impossible. No matter how much you might wish to find deeper truths in Klein's heavenly blue, it always ends up being smartly formulated paint.

That makes Klein's art much more than simply gorgeous: It is also poignant, almost tragic, because it is about the grandest of defeats. It lets us watch an artist try to do more than any artist humanly could, and then fail in the attempt.

You might say that, taken together, the all-blue artworks in the Hirshhorn's Klein survey — not to mention the show's peculiar films and photographs and its works in gold or white or pink — paint a picture of Icarus flying high in the sky, at the moment when the wax on his wings is melting.

Yves Klein is most famous, and influential, as the inventor of monochrome abstraction. From the very beginning, he looked into what would happen if you covered a canvas in a single colour of paint, then presented it as art.

The Hirshhorn shows him trying it out with red and orange and black and green, before perfecting the blissful ultramarine that he patented as IKB — International Klein Blue. (What he patented wasn't, in fact, the colour itself, which dates back to before Giotto, but a way of mixing the ground pigment with a synthetic binder so it wouldn't lose the dry, velvety intensity it had as a powder. One Klein installation re-created at the Hirshhorn consists of a huge trough of IKB pigment itself, which the artist's estate continues to stock.)

There is no other artistic experience quite like looking at (more like tumbling into) one of Klein's blue monochromes. Even in nature, just about the only place you ever see something like this — an all-encompassing colour that doesn't seem to have a surface and a distance you can pin it to — is when you look up into a cloudless sky. These blue pictures evoke such unfathomable skies, but Klein seems to have distilled the colour out of them, then concentrated it on a canvas. They aren't just a feast for sore eyes. They are more like a lifetime's worth of ocular nourishment.

That isn't nearly enough for Klein, or for many of his admirers. Klein said he didn't want to be thought of as just another abstractionist, intent on feeding his viewers' senses — although his monochromes were at the root of so much later art that aimed to do just that. (Frank Stella, the later American abstractionist who once met Klein, famously said that in his own near-monochromes, "what you see is what you see".)

For Klein, the monochrome is meant to reveal "that immeasurable ‘void' in which lives the permanent and absolute spirit freed of all dimensions".

That is what IKB is all about: the desperate human desire to bring transcendence within arm's reach by giving it a material presence in art. And then, more interesting yet, it's about how even art's most beautiful matter will never do the trick.

Paint remains tethered to the Earth it is taken from. Or maybe Klein's art doesn't set out to prove that struggling for transcendence is either useless or valid; instead, those blues present a picture of the struggle itself.

Yves Klein: With the Void, Full Powers is on at the Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, until September 12.