Yves Klein (1928 – 1962)
French artist and is considered an important figure in post-war European art.
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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. (1960)
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.
I am against the line and all its consequences: contours, forms, composition. All paintings of whatever sort, figuratives or abstract, seem to me like prison windows in which the lines, precisely are the bars.
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'. (1957)
Bill for 20 grams of Pure Gold, for one painted area of sensibilized immaterial. (about 1958, text on a bill for selling 'air')
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.
To paint space, I owe it to myself to go there, to that very space... without illusions or tricks, nor with a plane or a parachute or a rocket ship: the painter of space must go there with his own means, with an independent individual force, in a word, he must be capable of levitation. (1960)
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. 1956)
Space is waiting for our love, as I am longing for you; go with me, travelling through space.. (line in a poem of Klein himself)
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 (Tanguely created art-machines made from old metal engine parts) to take to return to the ephemerality of material life.(1958)
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.
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