"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 victory.
(...)
The ordinary judoka does not practise in spirit but in physical and emotional terms. The true judoka practises in spirit and pure sensitivity and then, as life is constant victory, he wins, he always wins."
Yves Klein, excerpt from "Reflections on Judo, Kiai and Constant Victory", 1958 ca.

"The mind of a sportsman is abstract!
It's always with a condescending smile that people learn that I'm interested in Judo, and generally in circles that pride themselves on being intellectual, they simply burst out laughing when I declare that I've come to Japan especially to study Judo.
In France, I come across as a bit simple and still quite naive in the eyes of the circle of strict artists who are friends of my parents, and here it's not much brighter, for the Japanese Judo is at most an excellent recreation, a diversion, a schoolboy's game.
And yet Judo is vast and great, far greater perhaps than all those psychological worlds constructed by modern intellectualism".
Yves Klein, note, 1958 ca.

"I was always taught in Judo that I had to achieve technical perfection so that I couldn't care less about it; that I had to be constantly able to show it to all my opponents, so that even though they knew everything, I could still win."
Yves Klein, excerpt from « Truth become reality », 1960



"Origins of his pictorial career (...)
He began practising judo, which would later lead him to understand that pictorial space is above all the fruit of a spiritual asceticism: judo, in fact, is the human body's discovery of a spiritual space.
(...)
He was very impressed by other marks: those traced by the perspiration and dust of the great judo fights on a new, and therefore all-white, judo mat.
(...)
Creation of the first monotonous symphony. Digressive evolution towards a musical possibility of the Kiai myth extended into judo.
First glimpse of the real possibility of freeing oneself from the forces of gravity, both emotional and physical. Dreams of levitation because of judo."
Yves Klein, Biographical notes, 1960 ca.