• Yves : Propositions monochromes

Exhibition, 21 Feb 1956 - 7 Mar 1956

Yves : Propositions monochromes

Galerie Colette Allendy, Paris, France

"After passing through several periods, my pursuits have led me to the creation of uniformly monochrome paintings.
Using multiple techniques, after appropriate preparation of the foundation, each of my canvases is thus covered by one or more layers of a unique and uniform color. No drawing and no variation of hue appear: there is only strictly UNIFORM color. In such manner, the dominant force asserts itself upon the entire painting.
I thus seek to individualize color, for I have reached the conclusion that each color expresses a living world and I express these worlds in my painting."
Text for the exhibition “Yves Peintures” at the Club des Solitaires, Éditions Lacoste, Paris, 15 october 1955
"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. (...)
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."
Yves Klein, excerpt from « The Monochrome Adventure: the monochrome epic », 1960 ca., Overcoming the problematics of Art -The writings of Yves Klein, Spring Publications, 2007, p. 38