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 noted some- thing significant: the public, in the presence of the picture rails on which were hung several canvases of different colors, reas- sembled them as components of polychrome decoration. Im- prisoned 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 DELACROIX spoke 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 initia- tion. I realized that the paintings are only the ashes of my art. The authentic quality of the canvas, its very Being, once creat- ed, 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."
Yves Klein, excerpt from "Overcoming the problematic of art", 1959
"To the question I am often asked, why I choose blue, I will reply by citing again that marvelous passage concerning blue from Bachelard’s book Air and Dreams: 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 ... 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 in- determinate 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 there is nothing, then there is a deep nothing, then there is a blue depth.
It is from this that I drew the sentence for Anvers. For Claudel, “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 the navigator sees the stars disappear all at once.”
Blue has no dimensions, it is beyond dimensions, whereas the other colors are not. They are psychological spaces; red, for example, presupposing a hearth releasing heat. All colors bring forth specific associative ideas, tangible or psychological, while blue suggests, at most, the sea and sky, and they, after all, are in actual nature what is most abstract."
Yves Klein, excerpt from "The Evolution of Art Towards the Immaterial", Lecture at the Sorbonne, 3 June 1959
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