Article, 1959

Writings excerpt : blue

Yves Klein

"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
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" I had no affection for oil paint. The colors seemed dead to me. What pleased me above all were pure pigments in powder form, such as I often saw at the wholesale paint suppliers. They had a brilliance and an extraordinary, autonomous life of their own. This was truly color in itself. The living and tangible matter of color.

What saddened me was to see that this incandescent powder, once mixed with glue or whatever medium intended as a fixative, lost all its value, became tarnished, its tone darkened. One might obtain the effects of impasto, but after it dried, it was no longer the same; the effective magic of color had vanished.

Each grain of powder appeared to have been individually killed by the glue or whatever fixative used to binding them together, as well as to the support.

Irresistibly attracted by this new monochrome manner, I decided to undertake the technical research required to find a medium capable of affixing pure pigment without altering it. The color value would then be represented in a pictorial manner. The possibility of leaving the grains of pigment entirely free, such as they are in powder form, mixed perhaps yet still independent in their semblance, seemed sufficiently auspicious to me. Art is total freedom; it is life; when there is imprisonment in whatever manner, liberty is restrained and life is diminished in relation to the degree of imprisonment."

Yves Klein, excerpt from « The Monochrome Adventure: the monochrome epic », 1960 ca.

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"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. (...)

Each of these blue propositions, all similar in appearance, were perceived by the public as clearly distinct from each other. The nonprofessionals passed from one to the next, as was fitting, penetrating in an instant state of contemplation the worlds of blue.
But each painting’s blue world, although of the same blue and treated in the same way, revealed itself to be of entirely different essence and atmosphere; none resembled the other anymore than pictorial moments and poetic moments resemble each other. Though all are alike in nature, superior and subtle (detection of the immaterial).

The most sensational observation was that of the buyers. Each selected from among the eleven displayed paintings the one that pleased them the most and paid its price. The prices, of course, were all different. This fact demonstrated that, on the one hand, the pictorial quality of each painting was perceptible by something other than the material and physical appearance and, on the other, that those who made their choice recognized that state of things to which I refer as Pictorial Sensibility.

To those who keep telling me after all this was done that I could go no further: I am going to continue in this spirit, having thus detected the existence of the pictorial sensibility. I repeat it here once again, my master DELACROIX had, well before me, announced it under the name of the INDEFINABLE, but has been imperative to me that I rediscover it myself in order to make the Blue Period into an initiation for both for the public and for myself.

Yves Klein, excerpt from « The Monochrome Adventure: the monochrome epic », 1960 ca.