Yves Klein

Fontana shared Klein's commitment to monochromatic surfaces and Spatialism, using the physical canvas as a site for conceptual exploration beyond traditional painting. Both artists treated color and space as living, immersive forces rather than representational tools.

Manzoni paralleled Klein in his use of pure white monochromes and radical conceptual gestures that blurred the boundary between art and performance. Like Klein, he provocatively questioned what constitutes artistic authorship and the artwork itself.

Reinhardt pursued an extreme monochromatic practice, most famously his black paintings, that shares Klein's drive to reduce painting to a single pure chromatic presence. Both treated color as a philosophical and near spiritual statement.

Malevich's Suprematist pursuit of pure form and monochromatic abstraction, especially his White on White paintings, laid the conceptual groundwork for Klein's own investigations into color as an absolute and transcendent experience. Klein directly acknowledged the importance of this legacy of radical reduction.

Matisse's bold and expressive use of pure color as an emotional and spatial force was a formative inspiration for Klein's own devotion to color as primary subject matter. Klein saw Matisse's late cut outs in particular as evidence that color could exist as a liberated immaterial presence.

Kapoor's obsession with pigment as a material substance and his Vantablack works reflect a direct lineage from Klein's conception of color as immaterial void. His monochromatic sculptures and installations echo Klein's treatment of color as an infinite and absorbing presence.

Turrell's immersive light installations pursue the same dissolution of material form into pure perceptual color experience that Klein sought with his blue monochromes. Critics and scholars consistently cite Klein as a conceptual predecessor to Turrell's transformation of color into environmental and spiritual encounter.