A Year in the Lab Working Out How to Repair a Blue That Resists Repair

Yves Klein's International Klein Blue swallows light, which is exactly what makes it almost impossible to conserve: the matte surface defeats instrumental colour reading, so a damaged Blue Venus has to be matched by eye. James Hughes spent a year reconstructing how the pigment was made in order to work out how it could be mended, mixing synthetic ultramarine into adhesive, altering particle size by scraping and grinding and sifting, and spraying plaster mock-ups until the repair disappeared. The piece ends on before and after details of the shoulder, and on an argument for the smallest intervention that works.