Yves Klein: Quotes about painting

Yves Klein was French artist. Explore interesting quotes on painting.
Yves Klein: 66 quotes9 likes

“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.”

Yves Klein

Gilbert Perlein and Bruno Cora, Yves Klein: Long live the Immaterial, Delano Greenidge Edition, New York, 2001. p. 74
from posthumous publications

“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?”

Yves Klein

Source: before 1960, "Yves Klein, 1928 – 1962, Selected Writings", p. 15

“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, he called this "Anthropometry"]. 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 executed, with extreme precision, in a few minutes. Just as with a judo throw.”

Yves Klein

In 1960; pp. 55-57
1960 -1964, "Yves Klein, 1928 – 1962, Selected Writings"

“At present, I am particularly excited by 'bad taste'. I have the deep feeling that there exists in the very essence of bad taste a power capable of creating those things situated far beyond what is traditionally termed 'The Work of Art'. I wish to play with human feeling, with its 'morbidity' in a cold and ferocious manner. Only very recently I have become a sort of gravedigger of art (oddly enough, I am using the very terms of my enemies). Some of my latest works have been coffins and tombs. During the same time I succeeded in painting with fire, using particularly powerful and searing gas flames, some of them measuring three to four meters high. I use these to bathe the surface of the painting in such a way that it registered the spontaneous trace of fire.”

Yves Klein

Quote from Klein's 'Chelsea Hotel Manifesto', 1961; from the Yves Klein Archives - archived from the original on 15 January 2013; as cited on Wikipedia: Yves Klein
After the opening of his unsuccesful exhibition at Leo Castelli's Gallery, New York 1961, Klein stayed with Rotraut Uecker (fr) at the Chelsea Hotel for the duration of the exhibition. While there, he wrote the 'Chelsea Hotel Manifesto', a proclamation of the 'multiplicity of new possibilities'
1960 -1964

“A bill for 20 grams of Pure Gold, for one painted area of sensibilized immaterial. [about 1958, text on a bill for selling 'air']”

Yves Klein

De Tweede Helft, Ad de Visser, SUN, Nijmegen 1998, p. 106
from posthumous publications

“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"

“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.”

Yves Klein

Yves Klein, catalogue of exhibition in the Jewish Museum, New York 1967, p. 18
from posthumous publications

“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"

“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

In 1961; p. 67
Klein's quote on making paintings with a flame-thrower
1960 -1964, "Yves Klein, 1928 – 1962, Selected Writings"