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Editorial

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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...
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Editorial, 1957, Yves Klein

Yves Klein, "Some Excerpts from My Journal of 1957"

Friday, 23 August 1957 –Chamonix My monochrome propositions are landscapes of freedom; I am an impressionist and a disciple of Delacroix. Monday, 26 August When Claude presented to me his most recent manuscript to read, I told him: The day will come when you will present something to me that is true poetry; I believe that already by taking the manuscript in my hands I will feel it. Something will have changed everywhere! Saturday, 31 August – Venice What above all inspired me in my most...
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Editorial, 1958, Yves Klein

Yves Klein, "My Position in the Battle Between Line and Color", article from the ZERO group magazine

Paris, 16 April 1958 For my part, the art of painting consists in liberating the first state of matter. Ordinary painting, painting as it is commonly understood, is a prison window, whose lines, contours, forms, and composition are all determined by bars. For me the lines concretize our mortality, our emotional life, our reason, and even our spirituality. They are our psychological boundaries, our historic past, our skeletal framework; they are our weaknesses and our desires, our faculties, and...
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Editorial, 1958, Yves Klein

Yves Klein, Speech to the Gelsenkirchen Theater Commission, read by Werner Ruhnau, November 1958

Ladies and Gentlemen,As I prepare to realize the commission that I am so honored to have received from you for the lobby of the new theater of Gelsenkirchen, I wish to express to you some of my ideas and conceptions about painting, in order to explain to you, who have entrusted my art with your confidence, some of the reasons why I believe that the entire group of works that I am setting out to create should be in blue, uniformly in blue everywhere, and not consist of lateral panels in blue...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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Editorial, 1960, Yves Klein

Yves Klein, "On the Monochrome", excerpt from the Monochrome Adventure: the monochrome epic

Never using the line, one has been able to create in painting a fourth, fifth, or whatever other dimension – only color can attempt to succeed in this exploit. The monochrome is the only physical way of painting – permitting us to attain the spiritual absolute. If we imagine that cinema always existed, that one only knew moving pictures, then the creator of a fixed image would today have been considered a genius! Young painters such as Alberto BURRI, TAPIÈS, MACK, DAWING, JONESCO, PIENE,...
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Editorial, 1960, Yves Klein

"A Man in Space !", extrait de Dimanche 27 novembre 1960 "Le journal d'un seul jour"

A Man in Space !The painter of space leaps into the void! The monochrome man who is also champion of judo, black belt 4th dan, practices regularly dynamic levitation! (with or without a net, at the risk of his life). He claims to be able to join up with his preferred work in space soon: an aerostatic sculpture, composed of one thousand and one blue balloons, which will take off from his exhibition in 1957 into the sky of Saint-Germain-des-Prés never again to return! To liberate sculpture from...
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