Overcoming the problematics of art
By Yves Klein
Artist and painter
Fourth degree black belt in judo
Graduate of Kôdôkan in Tokyo, Japan
It is inadequate to write or to say: I have overcome the problematics of art. It is necessary to have done so. I have done so.
For me, painting today is no longer a function of the eye; it is the function of the one thing we may not possess within ourselves: our LIFE.
Here is how it came about:
In 1946 I was painting or drawing either under the influence of my father, a figurative painter of horses in landscapes or of beach landscapes, or under the influence of my mother, an abstract painter of compositions of form and color. At the same time, COLOR, the sensibly pure space, beckoned to me irregularly but with stubborn persistence. This sense of the complete freedom of sensibly pure space exerted upon me such a power of attraction that I painted monochrome surfaces to see, with my own eyes to SEE, what was visible in the absolute. I would not consider at the time these attempts as having pictorial potential, until the day, around one year later, when I said to myself: Why not. The WHY NOT in the life of a man is what decides everything, it is destiny. It is the sign that conveys to the inexperienced artist that the archetype of a new state of things is ready, that it has ripened, that it can be brought forth into the world.
However, I showed nothing to the world immediately. I waited. I STABILIZED it. I am opposed to the line and to all that result from it: outlines, forms, and compositions. All paintings, of
whatever kind, abstract or representational, have on me the effect of the bars on a prison window. Freedom lies in the far away dominion of color! The reader of a painting of lines, forms, and composition remains a prisoner of his five senses.
Then I immersed myself in the monochrome space, in everything, in the boundless pictorial sensibility. I did not immerse myself in my own personality, not at all. I felt myself, volumetrically impregnating myself, beyond all proportions and dimensions, in EVERYTHING. I encountered or, rather, was caught up in the presence of many inhabitants of space, but none that were human in nature; none had arrived ahead of me.
There, space gave me the right to be owner or rather co-owner with others, but those had nothing to do with humans. And space graciously consented to manifest its presence in my paintings in order to establish them as titles of ownership, as my documents, my proofs, the diplomas of my conquests. I am not only the owner of Blue, as one would assume today, no, I am also the owner of COLOR, for it is the terminology of space for legal titles. Certainly, my immeasurable property is not only color, it is, in short. My paintings exist only as the visible titles of my ownership.
If, very unexpectedly, someone else had already been there, in this world of total space, at the time of my arrival, I would not have felt that inexpressible sensation of absolute freedom, of which my predecessors could only dream, enclosed forever in poetic pictorialism: hence I have received the rights by which I have subsequently been worn out.
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 because it
is neither born nor will it die, after existence. However, in the world of our possibilities of conscious perception, it is silence – audible presence.
In 1955 I exhibited in Paris twenty monochrome paintings of different colors. On that occasion I immediately noted something significant: the public, in the presence of the picture rails on which were hung several canvases of different colors, reassembled them as components of polychrome decoration. Imprisoned by their learned ways of seeing, this public, however select, could not comprehend the presence of color in any one painting. This is what provoked my initiation into the Blue period.
Through Blue, the great COLOR, I am closing in, more and more, on the indefinable of which DELACROIXspoke in his journal as being the one true MERIT OF PAINTING.
Presented in Paris in 1957 at the [Iris] Clert Gallery and at the Colette Allendy Gallery, the Blue period was my initiation. I realized that the paintings are only the ashes of my art. The authentic quality of the canvas, its very Being, once created, is beyond what is visible, in the pictorial sensibility of the First Matter.
It is then that I decided to present, at Iris Clert, the Immaterial Blue.