Yves Klein

Anthropometries

Editorial, 1960, Yves Klein

"I have been painting (...) from models", excerpts from writings

"I have been painting already for several years most often from models and even with the effective collaboration of models. Indeed, for a long time I have wondered why figurative painters or even sometimes abstract painters such as Fautrier, for example, feel the need to paint nudes. To simply seek out a living human form to draw and to copy after nature was not good enough a reason for me; I felt that there must be something else. The nude model brings sensuality into the atmosphere. Careful:...

Fire Paintings

Editorial, 1959, Yves Klein

"Fire is beautiful in itself, regardless", excerpts from writings

"Fire for me is the future without forgetting the past. It is the memory of nature. (...) It is gentleness: [Fire] is gentleness and torture. It is cookery and it is apocalypse. It is a pleasure for the good child sitting prudently by the hearth; yet it punishes any disobedience when the child wishes to play too close to its flames. It is well-being and it is respect. It is a tutelary and a terrible divinity, both good and bad. It can contradict itself; thus it is one of the principles of...

IKB

Editorial, 1959, Yves Klein

"What pleased me above all were pure pigments in powder form", excerpts from writings

"How do I get there, while still drawing from the pictorial norms that I have constructed? For painting, I have long searched for a fixative medium to expressly fix each grain of pigment that make up the radiant and dazzling mass found in the bins of the merchants of color. It is quite dismaying to see this same pigment, when milled in oil, for example, lose all its brilliance, all its essential vitality. It seems as if mummified; nevertheless, one cannot leave it on the ground, held by the...

Editorial, 1959, Yves Klein

"Blue has no dimensions", excerpts from writings

"Just an adolescent in 1946, I went to sign my name on the underside of the sky during a fantastic realistico-imaginary journey. That day, as I lay on the beach at Nice, I began to hate the birds which occasionally flew in my pure, unclouded blue sky, because they tried to bore holes in my greatest and more beautiful work." Yves Klein, excerpt from the Chelsea Hotel Manifesto, 1961 "In 1955 I exhibited in Paris twenty monochrome paintings of different colors. On that occasion I immediately...

Judo

Editorial, 1957, Yves Klein

"Judo (...) is the human body's discovery of a spiritual space", excerpts from writings

"When I paint (...) I feel like a Judo champion before the fight".Yves Klein, The Evening Standard, 25 juin 1957"I've often been asked if judo played a role in my pictorial conception. Until now, I've always replied that it didn't. In fact, that's not true. In fact, that's not true: judo has given me a lot, I started almost at the same time as my painting. Both have lived with me as I live with my physical body!Here's what I know about judo:Firstly, a major principle: "have the spirit of...

Monogolds

Editorial, 1959, Yves Klein

"And then, the gold!", excerpts from writings

"First, hardly two months ago, at Anvers, I was invited to exhibit with a group of artists made up of [Pol] Bury, [Jean] Tinguely, [Dieter] Rot, [Robert] Breer, [Heinz] Mack, [Bruno] Munari, [Daniel] Spoerri, [Otto] Piene, and [Rafael] Soto. I traveled to Anvers and instead of installing a painting or whatever tangible and visible object in the space reserved for me in the Hessenhuis exhibit hall, I loudly pronounced to the public these words borrowed from Gaston Bachelard during the opening...

Monotone-silence Symphony

Editorial, 1959, Yves Klein

"Silence … This is really my symphony", excerpts from writings

"During this period of concentration, I created, around 1947–1948, a monotone symphony whose theme expresses what I wished my life to be. This symphony of forty minutes duration (although that is of no importance, as one will see) consisted of one unique continuous sound, drawn out and deprived of its beginning and of its end, creating a feeling of vertigo and of aspiration outside of time. Thus even in its presence, this symphony does not exist. It exists outside of the phenomenology of time...

Sponge Sculptures

Editorial, 1957, Yves Klein

"...make portraits of the readers of my monochromes...impregnated with sensibility, just as the sponges", excerpts from writings

Excerpts from writings