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 contrasted with white sponge reliefs. While the latter might be nice, it would lack the force and grandeur that a strictly monochrome grouping would produce.

Based upon sensory and tactile resources, I have pursued for several years now an adventure and pictorial experiment with pure color, i.e. color presented as a proposition of itself to the readers [lecteurs].

These monochrome propositions, so named by Pierre RESTANY because their material presentation makes them true supports of color (before I simply called them paintings), have preserved the objective aspect of traditional painting.

They are panels of wood or hardboard in varying formats (format and chromatic value being in general unconnected) whose surface has been covered with a very fine and tightly-stretched canvas. It is this canvas that is destined to receive the color, after meticulous preparation. A color whose tone, once fixed after diverse pigments are mixed together, is uniform. I speak of a kind of alchemy practiced by today’s painters, created in the tension of each moment of the pictorial matter, suggestive of a bath in a space more vast than infinity. On the occasion of my second 

Paris exhibition, at the Colette ALLENDY Gallery en 1956, I presented a selection of these propositions in various colors and formats. What I sought to inspire in the public was that minute of truth, of which Pierre RESTANY spoke in his introduction to my exhibition, allowing for a blank slate devoid of all exterior contamination and attaining a degree of contemplation that turns color into full and pure sensibility.

Unfortunately, it became apparent from the responses to that occasion, and especially during a debate organized at the Colette ALLENDY Gallery, that many of the spectators were prisoners of a conditioned way of seeing and remained sensitive to the relationships between the different propositions (relationships of colors, of intensities, of dimensions and architectural integration), reconstituting the elements of a decorative polychromy. It is this that led me to push my attempt further still, this time in Italy at the Apollinaire Gallery in Milan, in an exhibition dedicated to what I dared to call my Blue Period. (In fact, I had already dedicated myself for more than a year to the search for the most perfect expression of Blue).

This exposition was comprised of ten paintings in dark ultramarine blue, all of them rigorously similar in tone, intensity, proportions, and dimensions. The rather passionate controversy that arose from this manifestation proved to me the value of the phenomenon and the real profundity of the upheaval that comes in its wake to those unwilling to submit passively to the sclerosis of accepted ideas and set rules.

Allow me to add to this some reflections on the color blue:

The blue of the sky, if we were to examined its many image values would require a long study in which we would see all the types of material imagination being determined according to the basic elements of water, fire, earth, and air. In other words, we could divide poets into four classifications by their response to the single theme of celestial blue:
Those who see in an immobile sky a flowing liquid that comes to life with the smallest cloud.
Those who experience the blue sky as though it were an enormous flame – “searing” blue, as the Comtesse de Noailles describes it.
Those who contemplate the sky as if it were a solidified blue, a painted vault – “compact and hard azure,” as the Comtesse de Noailles again says.
Finally those who can truly participate in the aerial nature of celestial blue … The word blue designates but it does not render.
… First, a document taken from Mallarmé in which the poet, living in the “dear ennui” of the “Lethean ponds” suffers from “the irony” of the azure. He perceives an azure that is too offensive and that wants

To stop with untiring hand
The great blue holes that naughty birds make.

...It is through this activity of the image that the human psyche receives future causality through a kind of immediate finality

Moreover, if we are truly willing to live, with Eluard, by imagination and for imagination, these hours of pure vision in front of the tender and delicate blue of a sky from which all objects have been banished, we will be able to understand that the aerial kind of imagination offers a domain in which the values of the dream and of the representation are interchangeable on the most basic level. Other matters harden objects. Also, in the realm of blue air more than elsewhere, we feel that the world may be permeated by the most indeterminate reverie. This is when reverie really has depth. The blue sky opens up in depth beneath the dream. Then dreams are not limited to one-dimensional images. Paradoxically, the aerial dream soon has only a depth dimension. The other two dimensions, in which picturesque, colored reverie plays its games, lose all their oneiric interest. The world is then truly on the other side of the unsilvered mirror. There is an imaginary beyond, a pure beyond, one without a within. First is nothing, then there is a deep nothing, then there is a blue depth.

… A. Claudel, for example, seeks an immediate and passionate adherence. He will seize a blue sky in its raw material. For him, before this enormous mass where nothing stirs, this mass that is the blue sky or rather a sky overflowing with azure, the first question will be “What is blue?” The Claudelian hymn will answer: “Blue is obscurity become visible.” To feel this image, I will take the liberty of changing the past participle, for, in the realm of the imagination, there are no past participles. I will say, then, “Blue is obscurity becoming visible.” This is precisely why Claudel can write: “Azure, between day and night, shows a balance, as is proved by the subtle moment when, in the Eastern sky, a navigator sees the stars disappear all at once.”


Blue has no dimensions. It is beyond dimensions, while the other colors have some. These are the psychological spaces. Red, for example, presupposes a hearth giving off heat. All colors bring forth associations of concrete, material, and tangible ideas, while blue evokes all the more the sea and the sky, which are what is most abstract in tangible and visible nature.

This all too brief presentation of my ideas on blue will perhaps not suffice to convince you of the fact that the other colors harden objects contrary to what one may normally think. In the case of the decoration of the lobby of this theater, a color other than blue or the non-color of white will crystallize the sponge relief. The natural form of the sponge, which I shall use as the foundation in my construction of the relief, will be rendered unnecessarily antipathetic and aggressive by the white, while the blue, on the contrary, will create a suggestion of the elementary state of the brutal budding of matter impregnated with spirit and sensibility that the color of the sky and the sea alone can produce.

The spectators, in passing time between acts in the presence of the blue and the white in the lobby of this magnificent building, will reconstitute the elements of a decorative polychromatic which will diminish the allure and general élan of the architecture; while, on the one hand, the architecture will be enhanced with a suggestion of unseen of grandeur in the presence of a great unity of blue and, on the other hand, my works will produce a shock at once violent and gentle, which is, I do believe, the vainglorious spirit, sure of itself and the future in the good sense that made you decide, one day, in Gelsenkirchen, upon the construction of such a cultural edifice at the pinnacle of progress and the avant-garde in the world!

My painting strives to be a representation of freedom in the first material state. Madame, Gentlemen, this is why I ask you today to agree with me to realize these works for you, in the spirit of my ideal conception of painting and in collaboration with the architect Werner Ruhnau.


Yves Klein
read by Werner Ruhnau, November 1958

(Archives Anita et Werner Ruhnau)