Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Yves Klein
Age: 34 †
Born: 1928
Born: January 1
Died: 1962
Died: June 6
Artist
Conceptual Artist
Drawer
Judoka
Painter
Performance Artist
Photographer
Sculptor
Nice
France
Career
Dared
Careers
Origin
Started
Colour
Nice
Entirely
Call
Remembered
Consisted
Ends
Towards
Milan
Work
Sky
Exhibition
Blue
Exhibitions

More quotes by Yves Klein

Image
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
Image
To feel the soul without explaining it, without vocabulary, and to represent this sensation.
Yves Klein
Image
For me, each nuance of a color is in some way an individual, a being who is from the same race as the base color, but who definitely possesses a distinct character and personal soul.
Yves Klein
Image
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
Image
I have written my name on the far side of the sky.
Yves Klein
Image
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
Image
I want to take as the canvas for my next picture the entire surface of France.
Yves Klein
Image
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
Image
Blue has no dimensions, it is beyond dimensions.
Yves Klein
Image
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
Image
At first there is nothing, then there is a profound nothingness, after that a blue profundity.
Yves Klein
Image
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
Image
Color is sensibility in material form, matter in its primordial state.
Yves Klein
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
My paintings are only the ashes of my art
Yves Klein