YVES KLEIN, his quotes on painting art, Blue and his life + biography facts of the French artist
Yves Klein (1928 – 1962), quotes of the French artist / painter who inspired later Zero artists – famous for his characteristic ‘Blue’ – the color Yves Klein frequently used in his mainly monochrome painting art. Klein was eagerly searching for all kind of ways to ‘dematerialize’ his art (the Void), for instance by using human bodies as brushes (anthropometries) and choosing flames as a medium to paint with. His artist quotes express this Void idea very clearly.
* At the bottom extended biography facts & useful art links for Yves Klein.
YVES KLEIN |
Yves Klein: ‘Untitled: Blue monochrome – IKB 45, 1960 |
Yves Klein, his quotes on art and life – statements on his Blue & The Void
– In 1946, when I was still an adolescent, I went and signed my name on the other side of the sky during a fantastic ‘realistico-imaginary’ voyage.
* source of his artist quotes on art, his Blue, painting, & the Void: “Yves Klein, 1928 – 1962, Selected Writings”, ed. J & J, the Tate Gallery, London 1974, p. 14 (French painter and sculptor, famous for his monochrome paintings and anthropometries, Zero-artist; biography facts and art links at the bottom)
– It was in 1947 that the idea of a conscious monochrome vision came to me. … …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! But each time I could neither imagine or think of the possibility of considering this as a painting, a picture, until the day when I said: Why not?
* Y. Klein, source of his artist quotes on art, his Blue, painting, & the Void: “Yves Klein, 1928 – 1962, Selected Writings”, ed. J & J, the Tate Gallery, London 1974, p. 15.
– 1947:
To project my mark outside myself – but I did it! (walking in the streets of Venice he wore a shirt imprinted with the marks of his own hands and feet, fh) … …I found myself confronting everything that was psychological in me. I had proof that I had five senses, that I knew how to get myself to function! And then I lost my childhood…
* Y. Klein, source of his artist quotes on art, his Blue, painting, & the Void: “Yves Klein, 1928 – 1962, Selected Writings”, ed. J & J, the Tate Gallery, London 1974, p. 19.
– 1952:
Friday, 14 March,
Day is blue
silence is green
life is yellow
light traces
lines, and never ends,
and I trail behind
transpierced by indifference!
* Y. Klein, source of his artist quotes on art, his Blue, painting, & the Void: poetical lines from “Yves Klein, 1928 – 1962, Selected Writings”, ed. J & J, the Tate Gallery, London 1974, p. 21.
– 1953:
It was pure chance that led me to judo. Judo has helped me to understand that pictorial space is above al the product of spiritual exercises. Judo is in fact the discovery by the human body of a spiritual space.
* source of his artist quotes on art, his Blue, painting, & the Void: “Yves Klein, 1928 – 1962, Selected Writings”, ed. J & J, the Tate Gallery, London 1974, p. 21.
– 1956:
Dubbed as a Knight of the Order of Saint Sebastian, I espoused the cause of pure colour, which has been invaded by guile, occupied and oppressed in cowardly fashion by line and its manifestation; drawing in Art. I aimed to defend and deliver it, and lead it to triumph and final glory.
* Klein, source of his artist quotes on art, his Blue, painting, & the Void: “Yves Klein, 1928 – 1962, Selected Writings”, ed. J & J, the Tate Gallery, London 1974, p. 27.
– 1956:
At the Galerie Colette Allendy I exhibited some twenty monochrome surfaces, all in different colours: greens, reds, yellows, purples, blues, oranges… …and so found myself at the start of my career in this style… …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.
* source of his artist quotes on art, his Blue, painting, & the Void: “Yves Klein, 1928 – 1962, Selected Writings”, ed. J & J, the Tate Gallery, London 1974, p. 30. (French painter and sculptor, famous for his monochrome paintings and anthropometries, Zero-artist; biography facts and art links at the bottom)
– 1957:
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’.
* Klein, source of his artist quotes on art, his Blue, painting, & the Void: “Yves Klein, 1928 – 1962, Selected Writings”, ed. J & J, the Tate Gallery, London 1974, p. 31.
– 1957
This period of blue monochrome was the product of my pursuit of the indefinable in painting which that master, Délacroix, (famous Romantic French painter, fh) was able to indicate even in his day.
* Yves Klein, source of his artist quotes on art, his Blue, painting, & the Void: “Yves Klein, 1928 – 1962, Selected Writings”, ed. J & J, the Tate Gallery, London 1974, p. 33.
– 1957:
The glaring obviousness of my paternity of monochromy in the twentieth century is such that even if I myself were to fight hard against that fact I should probably never manage to rid myself of it.
* source of his artist quotes on art, his Blue, painting, & the Void: “Yves Klein, 1928 – 1962, Selected Writings”, ed. J & J, the Tate Gallery, London 1974, p. 34.
– 1957:
My monochrome pictures are not my definite works, but the preparation for my works. They are the left-overs 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.
* Klein, source of his artist quotes on art, his Blue, painting, & the Void: “Yves Klein, 1928 – 1962, Selected Writings”, ed. J & J, the Tate Gallery, London 1974, p. 35.
– 1958:
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… …A space of blue sensibility within the frame of the white walls of the gallery.
* Yves Klein, source of his artist quotes on art, his Blue, painting, & the Void: “Yves Klein, 1928 – 1962, Selected Writings”, ed. J & J, the Tate Gallery, London 1974, p. 41.
– 1958:
I want to take as the canvas for my next picture the entire surface of France. This picture will be called ‘The Blue Revolution’. It isn’t the fact of my taking power in France that interests me, but rather the possibility of creating a monochrome picture in my new manner: ‘The Refinement of Sensibility’.
* source of his artist quotes on art, his Blue, painting, & the Void: “Yves Klein, 1928 – 1962, Selected Writings”, ed. J & J, the Tate Gallery, London 1974, p. 43.
– 1958:
Through all these researches into an art that would lead to immaterialisation, Werner Ruhnau and I came together in the architecture of the air. He was hindered by the last obstacle that even a Mies van der Rohe (a German architect who did a lot of glass sky-scrapers in the United states, fh) hadn’t been able to overcome: the roof, the screen that separates us from the sky, from the blue sky. And I was hindered by the screen that the tangible blue on the canvas constitutes, which deprives man of a constant vision of the horizon.
* Klein, source of his artist quotes on art, his Blue, painting, & the Void: “Yves Klein, 1928 – 1962, Selected Writings”, ed. J & J, the Tate Gallery, London 1974, p. 45.
– 1958:
The immaterial blue colour shown at Iris Clert’s (where he had a exhibition together with the sculptor Jean Tinguely , fh) 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 (Tinguely created art-machines made from old metal engine parts, fh) to take to return to the ephemerality of material life.
* source of his artist quotes on art, his Blue, painting, & the Void: “Yves Klein, 1928 – 1962, Selected Writings”, ed. J & J, the Tate Gallery, London 1974, p. 47.
– 1960:
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.
* source of his artist quotes on art, his Blue, painting, & the Void: “Yves Klein, 1928 – 1962, Selected Writings”, ed. J & J, the Tate Gallery, London 1974, p. 53.
– 1960:
I remain detached and distant, but it is under my eyes and my orders that the work of art must create itself (Klein directed on 9 March 1960 for the first time nude models who were ‘painting’ the walls with their moving naked bodies; “Anthropometry”, fh). Then, when the creation starts, I stand there, present at the ceremony, immaculate, calm, relaxed, perfectly aware of what is going on and ready to welcome the work of art that is coming into existence in the tangible world… …Hours of preparation for something that is excecuted, with extreme precision, in a few minutes. Just as with a judo throw.
* Klein, source of his artist quotes on art, his Blue, painting, & the Void: “Yves Klein, 1928 – 1962, Selected Writings”, ed. J & J, the Tate Gallery, London 1974, pp. 55-57.
– 1960:
I dash out to the banks of the river (river the ‘Loup’, at Cagnes, France, fh) and find myself amongst the rushes and the reeds. I grind some pigment over all this and the wind makes their slender stalks bend and appliqués them with precision and delicacy on to my canvas, which I thus offer to quivering nature: I obtain a vegetal mark. Then it starts to rain; a fine spring rain: I expose my canvas to the rain… …and I have the mark of the rain! – a mark of an atmospheric event.
* source of his artist quotes on art, his Blue, painting, & the Void: “Yves Klein, 1928 – 1962, Selected Writings”, ed. J & J, the Tate Gallery, London 1974, p. 61 (French painter and sculptor, famous for his monochrome blue and gold paintings and anthropometries, Zero-artist; biography facts and art links at the bottom)
– 1961:
– (his remark on making paintings with a flame-thrower, fh) 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? Because every work of creation, quite apart from its cosmic position, is the representation of pure phenomenology – 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, source of his artist quotes on art, his Blue, painting, & the Void: “Yves Klein, 1928 – 1962, Selected Writings”, ed. J & J, the Tate Gallery, London 1974, p. 67.
– 1961:
Today anyone who paints space must actually go into space to paint (Gagarin said on 12 April 1961 from his space capsule: ‘The earthy is a beautiful blue colour’’, fh), but he must there go without any faking, and neither in an aeroplane, a parachute nor a rocket; he must go there by his own means, an autonomous, individual force; in a word, he must be capable of levitating.
* source of his artist quotes on art, his Blue, painting, & the Void: “Yves Klein, 1928 – 1962, Selected Writings”, ed. J & J, the Tate Gallery, London 1974, p. 67.
– Space is waiting for our love, as I am longing for you; go with me, traveling through space… (a line in a poem of Klein himself, translation, Fons Heijnsbroek)
*Klein, source of his artist quotes on art, his Blue, painting, & the Void: ”De Tweede Helft”, Ad de Visser, SUN, Nijmegen 1998, p. 107.
– 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.
* source of his artist quotes on art, his Blue, painting, & the Void: ”Yves Klein: Long live the Immaterial,”, Gilbert Perlein and Bruno Cora, Delano Greenidge Edition, New York, 2001.
– The essential of painting is that something, that ‘ethereal glue’, that intermediary product which the artist secretes with all his creative being and which he has to place, to encrust, to impregnate into the pictorial stuff of the painting.
* Klein, source of his artist quotes on art, his Blue, painting, & the Void: ”Yves Klein”, catalogue of exhibition in the Jewish Museum, New York 1967, p. 18.
– A bill for 20 grams of Pure Gold, for one painted area of sensibilized immaterial. (about 1958; quoted text on a bill for selling ‘air’, (translation: Fons Heijnsbroek)
* Yves Klein, source of his artist quotes on art, his Blue, painting, & the Void: ”De Tweede Helft”, Ad de Visser, SUN, Nijmegen 1998, p. 106 (French painter and sculptor, famous for his monochrome paintings and anthropometries, Zero-artist; biography facts and art links at the bottom)
Yves Klein: not sourced quotes by the artist, painter of monochrome ‘Blue’
– Sponges are the portraits of the readers of my monochromes who, after having travelled in the blue of my paintings, came back totally impregnated in sensibility like the sponges. (artist quote on sponge forms, Yves Klein)
– Recently (1958/59, fh) my work with color has led me, in spite of myself, to search little by little, with some assistance (from the observer, from the translator), for the realization of matter, and I have decided to end the battle. My paintings are now invisible and I would like to show them in a clear and positive manner. (artist quote on his recent invisible art, 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. (from his lecture at the Sorbonne, 1959,fh) (artist quote on his famus Blue, Yves Klein)
biography facts on Yves Klein, the French artist, famous for his monochromes & ‘Blue’
Yves Klein was a French artist and is considered as an important renewing artist in post-war European art; mainly for Zero. Klein made a lot of monochrome paintings, mostly in his famous blue, and in gold colour. Later he also used fire, nature itself and air, as the raw materials for creating his art. His last ambition was to make spatial art without any boundaries: a Void.
Klein was a very precise and consequent artist in reflecting his own creations and his personal development; also in clarifying his new position in contemporary art of his time. On the other hand, his expansive and strong imagination took large areas of human life as no artist has done before. However, his imagination always resulted in practical creations which people could experience. That is one reason why he had such a strong influence on the German and Dutch Zero-artists and later on Joseph Beuys
on Klein’s idea of the Void and dematerialization in creating / experiencing art:
His idea of Void is a nirvana-like state that is a void of worldly influences; a kind of neutral zone where one is inspired to pay attention to one’s own sensibilities (like in meditation).
Klein presented his work in all kind of forms that were recognized as art – paintings, a book, a musical composition, fire-sculpture – but then would take away the expected content of that form (paintings without pictures, a book without words, a musical composition without in fact composition) leaving only a shell of emptiness, as it were. In this way he tried to create for the audience his “Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility”. Instead of representing objects in a subjective, artistic way, Klein wanted his subjects to be represented by their imprint: the image of their absence. Klein’s work strongly refers to a art historical context (Malevich) as well as to philosophy; with his artworks he aimed to combine these; moreover he tried to make his audience experience a state where an idea could simultaneously be “felt” as well as “understood”.
Links for more information and biography facts of the French artist-painter Yves Klein
* for the complete text with all kind of photos as illustration of the biography facts
* famous artist painter Yves Klein, his biography and paintings on Wikipedia
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* biography facts about the artist painter Yves Klein, Yves Klein Archive
