Yves Klein Quotes & Sayings

Hours of preparation for something that is excecuted, with extreme precision, in a few minutes. Just as with a judo throw. — Yves Klein

Blue has no dimensions, it is beyond dimensions, whereas the other colours are not ... All colours arouse specific associative ideas, psychologically material or tangible, while blue suggests at most the sea and sky, and they, after all, are in actual, visible nature what is most abstract. — Yves Klein

My paintings are only the ashes of my art — Yves Klein

I did not like the nothing, and it is thus that I met the empty, the deep empty, the depth of the blue. — Yves Klein

It was then that I remembered the colour blue, the blue of the sky in nice that was at the origin of my career as monochromist. I started work towards the end of 1956 and in 1957 I had an exhibition in Milan which consisted entirely of what I dared to call my 'Epoque bleue'. — Yves Klein

I was trying to show colour, but I realized at the private view that the public were prisoners of a preconceived point of view and that, confronted with all these surfaces of different colours, they responded far more to the inter-relationship of the different propositions, they reconstituted the elements of a decorative polychromy. — Yves Klein

I have written my name on the far side of the sky. — Yves Klein

I arrived on earth in 1928. Born into a milieu of painters, I acquired my taste for painting with my mother's milk. — Yves Klein

I had proof that I had five senses, that I knew how to get myself to function! And then I lost my childhood ... — Yves Klein

For me, each nuance of a color is in some way an individual, a being who is not only from the same race as the base color, but who definitely possesses a distinct character and personal soul. — Yves Klein

Color is sensibility in material form, matter in its primordial state. — Yves Klein

At first there is nothing, then there is a profound nothingness, after that a blue profundity. — Yves Klein

Color is enslaved by line, that becomes writing. — Yves Klein

Pure, existential space was regularly winking at me, each time in a more impressive manner, and this sensation of total freedom attracted me so powerfully that I painted some monochrome surfaces just to 'see,' to 'see' with my own eyes what existential sensibility granted me: absolute freedom! — Yves Klein

The dominant invades the entire picture, as it were. In this way I seek to individualize the color, because I have come to believe that there is a living world of each color and I express these worlds. — Yves Klein

Every phenomenon manifests itself of its own accord. This manifestation is always distinct from form, and is the essence of the immediate, the trace of the immediate. — Yves Klein

My monochrome pictures are not my definite works, but the preparation for my works. They are the leftovers from the creative processes, the ashes. My pictures, after all, are only the title-deeds to my property which I have to produce when I am asked to prove that I am a proprietor. — Yves Klein

I made the flames lick the surface of the painting in such a way that is recorded the spontaneous traces of the fire. But what is it that provokes in me this pursuit of the impression of fire? Why must I search for its traces? — Yves Klein

The immaterial told me that I was indeed an occidental, a right-thinking Christian who believes in the 'Resurrection of the flesh'. A whole phenomenology then appeared, but a phenomenology without ideas, or rather without any of the systems of official conventions. What appeared was distinct from form and became Immediacy. 'The mark of the immediate' - that was what I needed. — Yves Klein

The immaterial blue colour shown at Iris Clert's in April had in short made me inhuman, had excluded me from the world of tangible reality; I was an extreme element of society who lived in space and who had no means of coming back to earth. Jean Tinguely saw me in space and signaled to me in speed to show me the last machine to take to return to the ephemerality of material life. — Yves Klein

To feel the soul without explaining it, without vocabulary, and to represent this sensation. — Yves Klein

I had left the visible, physical blue at the door, outside, in the street. The real blue was inside, the blue of the profundity of space, the blue of my kingdom, of our kingdom! ... the immaterialisation of blue, the coloured space that can not be seen but which we impregnate ourselves with. — Yves Klein

The imagination is the vehicle of sensibility. Transported by the imagination, we attain life, life itself, which is absolute art. — Yves Klein

The essential of painting is that 'something', that 'ethereal glue,' that 'intermediary product' which the artist exudes with all his creative being and which he has the power to place, to encrust, to impregnate into the pictorial matter of the painting. — Yves Klein

I am against the line and all its consequences: contours, forms, composition. All paintings of whatever sort, figurative or abstract, seem to me like prison windows in which the lines, precisely are the bars. — Yves Klein

As I lay stretched upon the beach of Nice, I began to feel hatred for birds which flew back and forth across my blue sky, cloudless sky, because they tried to bore holes in my greatest and most beautiful work. — Yves Klein

I want to take as the canvas for my next picture the entire surface of France. — Yves Klein

Judo has helped me to understand that pictorial space is above all the product of spiritual exercises. Judo is, in fact, the discovery by the human body of a spiritual space. — Yves Klein

I remain detached and distant, but it is under my eyes and my orders that the work of art must create itself. Then, when the creation starts, I stand there, present at the ceremony, immaculate, calm, relaxed ... ready to welcome the work of art that is coming into existence in the tangible world. — Yves Klein

Color is sensitivity in material form, substance in its purest form. — Yves Klein