Yves Klein: Blue

“Blue has no dimensions, it is beyond dimensions, whereas the other colours are not. They are pre-psychological expanses, red, for example, presupposing a site radiating heat... 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

Quote from Yves Klein's lecture at the Sorbonne in 1959; published in Studio International, Vol. 186 (1973), p. 43; also quoted in: David Batchelor (2008) Colour. p. 122
before 1960

Idea , Nature , Sea

“The world is blue.”

Yves Klein

Abstract Art, Anna Moszynska, Thames and Hudson 1990, p. 182
from posthumous publications

World

“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.”

Yves Klein

In 1956; p. 30
before 1960, "Yves Klein, 1928 – 1962, Selected Writings"

“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

In 1957; p. 31
before 1960, "Yves Klein, 1928 – 1962, Selected Writings"

“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

In 1958; p. 41
before 1960, "Yves Klein, 1928 – 1962, Selected Writings"

“The immaterial Blue colour shown at Iris Clert’s in April [1958, together with Jean Tinguely ] 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

In 1958; p. 47
before 1960, "Yves Klein, 1928 – 1962, Selected Writings"

Life , World , Reality , Speed

“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’.”

Yves Klein

In 1958; p. 43
before 1960, "Yves Klein, 1928 – 1962, Selected Writings"

“This period of blue monochrome was the product of my pursuit of the indefinable in painting which that master, Eugène Delacroix [Romantic French painter] was able to indicate even in his day.”

Yves Klein

In 1957; p. 33
before 1960, "Yves Klein, 1928 – 1962, Selected Writings"

Painting

“Today anyone who paints space must actually go into space to paint [the Russian cosmonaut Gagarin said on 12 April 1961 from his space capsule: 'The earthy is a beautiful blue colour'], 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.”

Yves Klein

In 1961; p. 67
1960 -1964, "Yves Klein, 1928 – 1962, Selected Writings"

Beauty , Painting

“Through all these researches into an art that would lead to immaterialisation, Werner Ruhnau [German architect] and I came together in the architecture of the air. He was hindered by the last obstacle that even a w:Mies van der Rohe [also a German architect, famous for his reflecting glass skyscrapers in the U. S. ] 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.”

Yves Klein

In 1958; p. 45
before 1960, "Yves Klein, 1928 – 1962, Selected Writings"

Art