Yves Klein Quotes

Quotes about:

• Blue has no dimensions, it is beyond dimensions, whereas the other colours are not....All colours arouse specific associative ideas, psychologically material or tangible, while blue suggests at most the sea and sky, and they, after all, are in actual, visible nature what is most abstract.

  Yves Klein

  Art, Blue, Color

  109 Copy quote

• At first there is nothing, then there is a profound nothingness, after that a blue profundity.

  Yves Klein

  Blue, Profound, Firsts

  60 Copy quote

• The imagination is the vehicle of sensibility. Transported by the imagination, we attain life, life itself, which is absolute art.

  Yves Klein

  Art, Imagination, Vehicle

  Yves Klein (2006). “Towards the immaterial”, Editions Dilecta

  61 Copy quote

• I did not like the nothing, and it is thus that I met the empty, the deep empty, the depth of the blue.

  Yves Klein

  Blue, Depth, Movement

  60 Copy quote

• Color is sensitivity in material form, substance in its purest form.

  Yves Klein

  Color, Substance, Form

  7 Copy quote

• To feel the soul without explaining it, without vocabulary, and to represent this sensation.

  Yves Klein

  Communication, Vocabulary, Soul

  Sidra Stich, Yves Klein, Hayward Gallery, Museum Ludwig, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen (Germany) (1994). “Yves Klein”

  46 Copy quote

• Blue suggests the sea and sky, and they, after all, are in actual, visible nature what is most abstract.

  Yves Klein

  Blue, Sea, Sky

  Yves Klein, Gimpel Fils (1973). “Yves Klein”

  47 Copy quote

• I have written my name on the far side of the sky.

  Yves Klein

  Sky, Names, Sides

  42 Copy quote

• My paintings are only the ashes of my art

  Yves Klein

  Art, Ashes, Painting

  24 Copy quote

• Pure, existential space was regularly winking at me, each time in a more impressive manner, and this sensation of total freedom attracted me so powerfully that I painted some monochrome surfaces just to 'see,' to 'see' with my own eyes what existential sensibility granted me: absolute freedom!

  Yves Klein

  Eye, Space, Existential

  "Yves Klein, 1928 - 1962, Selected Writings". Book by Yves Klein, ed. J & J. p.15, 1974.

  32 Copy quote

• I had left the visible, physical blue at the door, outside, in the street. The real blue was inside, the blue of the profundity of space, the blue of my kingdom, of our kingdom!.. ..the immaterialisation of blue, the coloured space that can not be seen but which we impregnate ourselves with.

  Yves Klein

  Real, Blue, Doors

  "Yves Klein, 1928 - 1962, Selected Writings". Book by Yves Klein (p. 41),

  16 Copy quote

• Blue has no dimensions, it is beyond dimensions.

  Yves Klein

  Blue, Dimensions, Color Blue

  112 Copy quote

• Color is sensibility in material form, matter in its primordial state.

  Yves Klein

  Color, Matter, States

  26 Copy quote

• I am against the line and all its consequences: contours, forms, composition. All paintings of whatever sort, figurative or abstract, seem to me like prison windows in which the lines, precisely are the bars.

  Yves Klein

  Bars, Lines, Painting

  Yves Klein (2000). “Yves Klein: Long Live the Immaterial”, Delano Greenridge Editions

  7 Copy quote

• 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.

  Yves Klein

  Beautiful, Beach, Nice

  Yves Klein (2000). “Yves Klein: Long Live the Immaterial”, Delano Greenridge Editions

  30 Copy quote

• Color is enslaved by line, that becomes writing.

  Yves Klein

  Writing, Color, Lines

  Sidra Stich, Yves Klein, Hayward Gallery, Museum Ludwig, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen (Germany) (1994). “Yves Klein”

  21 Copy quote

• 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.

  Yves Klein

  Character, Color, Race

  24 Copy quote

• I remain detached and distant, but it is under my eyes and my orders that the work of art must create itself. Then, when the creation starts, I stand there, present at the ceremony, immaculate, calm, relaxed... ready to welcome the work of art that is coming into existence in the tangible world.

  Yves Klein

  Art, Eye, Order

  9 Copy quote

• 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.

  Yves Klein

  Essence, Form, Manifestation

  "Yves Klein, 1928 - 1962, Selected Writings" by Yves Klein, in 1961; p. 67, 1974.

  19 Copy quote

• Hours of preparation for something that is excecuted, with extreme precision, in a few minutes. Just as with a judo throw.

  Yves Klein

  Preparation, Hours, Minutes

  "Yves Klein, 1928 - 1962, Selected Writings". Book by Yves Klein, ed. J & J. pp. 55-57, 1974.

  50 Copy quote

• 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.

  Yves Klein

  Spiritual, Exercise, Discovery

  19 Copy quote

• I had proof that I had five senses, that I knew how to get myself to function! And then I lost my childhood.

  Yves Klein

  Childhood, Five Senses, Proof

  "Yves Klein, 1928 - 1962, Selected Writings". Book by Yves Klein, ed. J & J. p. 19, 1974.

  4 Copy quote

• 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'.

  Yves Klein

  Nice, Blue, Sky

  "Yves Klein, 1928 - 1962, Selected Writings". ed. J & J, the Tate Gallery, London 1974, p. 31, 1957.

  19 Copy quote

• 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.

  Yves Klein

  Creative, Preparation, Titles

  17 Copy quote

• 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.

  Yves Klein

  Christian, Believe, Thinking

  "Yves Klein, 1928 - 1962, Selected Writings". ed. J & J, the Tate Gallery, London 1974, p.53, 1960.

  19 Copy quote

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