Yves Klein Quotes

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

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.

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

Color is enslaved by line, that becomes writing.

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?

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.

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

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

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

My paintings are only the ashes of my art

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.

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.

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.

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

Color is sensitivity in material form, substance in its purest form.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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!

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.

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.

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