yves klein had the desire to purify reality, painting everything blue. is kind of blue has been invented by klein to represent and to symbolize the spirituality and the material sensibility that permeates any substance. in a carefully orchestrated event in the early sixties, klein took these models and made them his paintbrushes. traces of their bodies remain. the canvas is transformed into a blue icon that represents the transformation of the flesh into purity. minimal art, or what came to be known as minimalism, was really a phenomenon of abstract sculpture that ran parallel to the rise of pop art in the early sixties. minimal art seems to have devised a kind of abstract sculptural analogue to what it was that pop art was doing. like pop art, one felt that the artist was taking a certain kind of almost perverse and nihilistic pleasure in sweeping away this sense of the artist/creator as the generator of form and instead, subjecting himself or herself to the idea of these abstract forms as something that he, of course, could not have invented. what they