Yves Klein
Yves Klein
Yves Kleinwas a French artist considered an important figure in post-war European art. He is the leading member of the French artistic movement of Nouveau réalisme founded in 1960 by art critic Pierre Restany. Klein was a pioneer in the development of performance art, and is seen as an inspiration to, and as a forerunner of, Minimal art, as well as Pop art...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionPainter
Date of Birth28 April 1928
CountryFrance
believe color world
The dominant invades the entire picture, as it were. In this way I seek to individualize the color, because I have come to believe that there is a living world of each color and I express these worlds.
writing color lines
Color is enslaved by line, that becomes writing.
christian believe thinking
The immaterial told me that I was indeed an occidental, a right-thinking Christian who believes in the 'Resurrection of the flesh'. A whole phenomenology then appeared, but a phenomenology without ideas, or rather without any of the systems of official conventions. What appeared was distinct from form and became Immediacy. 'The mark of the immediate' - that was what I needed.
character color race
For me, each nuance of a color is in some way an individual, a being who is from the same race as the base color, but who definitely possesses a distinct character and personal soul.
spiritual exercise space
Judo has helped me to understand that pictorial space is above all the product of spiritual exercises. Judo is, in fact, the discovery by the human body of a spiritual space.
nice blue sky
It was then that I remembered the colour blue, the blue of the sky in nice that was at the origin of my career as monochromist. I started work towards the end of 1956 and in 1957 I had an exhibition in Milan which consisted entirely of what I dared to call my 'Epoque bleue'.
communication vocabulary soul
To feel the soul without explaining it, without vocabulary, and to represent this sensation.
creative preparation ashes
My monochrome pictures are not my definite works, but the preparation for my works. They are the leftovers from the creative processes, the ashes. My pictures, after all, are only the title-deeds to my property which I have to produce when I am asked to prove that I am a proprietor.
blue dimensions
Blue has no dimensions, it is beyond dimensions.
art ashes painting
My paintings are only the ashes of my art
essence form manifestation
Every phenomenon manifests itself of its own accord. This manifestation is always distinct from form, and is the essence of the immediate, the trace of the immediate.
beautiful beach nice
As I lay stretched upon the beach of Nice, I began to feel hatred for birds which flew back and forth across my blue sky, cloudless sky, because they tried to bore holes in my greatest and most beautiful work.
blue sea sky
Blue suggests the sea and sky, and they, after all, are in actual, visible nature what is most abstract.
blue movement depth
I did not like the nothing, and it is thus that I met the empty, the deep empty, the depth of the blue.