Yves Klein Quotes

On this page you can find the TOP of Yves Klein's best quotes! We hope you will find some sayings from Artist Yves Klein's in our collection, which will inspire you to new achievements! There are currently 32 quotes on this page collected since April 28, 1928! Share our collection of quotes with your friends on social media so that they can find something to inspire them!
All quotes by Yves Klein: Art Painting more...
  • I did not like the nothing, and it is thus that I met the empty, the deep empty, the depth of the blue.

    Blue   Depth   Movement  
  • 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.

    Bars   Lines   Painting  
    Yves Klein (2000). “Yves Klein: Long Live the Immaterial”, Delano Greenridge Editions
  • Blue has no dimensions, it is beyond dimensions.

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

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

    Yves Klein (2006). “Towards the immaterial”, Editions Dilecta
  • Color is sensibility in material form, matter in its primordial state.

    Color   Matter   States  
  • 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, 1928 - 1962, Selected Writings" by Yves Klein, in 1961; p. 67, 1974.
  • 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!

    Eye   Space   Existential  
    "Yves Klein, 1928 - 1962, Selected Writings". Book by Yves Klein, ed. J & J. p.15, 1974.
  • Color is sensitivity in material form, substance in its purest form.

    Color   Substance   Form  
  • I was trying to show colour, but I realized at the private view that the public were prisoners of a preconceived point of view and that, confronted with all these surfaces of different colours, they responded far more to the inter-relationship of the different propositions, they reconstituted the elements of a decorative polychromy.

    "Yves Klein, 1928-1962". Book by Yves Klein, p. 30, 1974.
  • 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.

    Art   Eye   Order  
  • 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.

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

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

  • I made the flames lick the surface of the painting in such a way that is recorded the spontaneous traces of the fire. But what is it that provokes in me this pursuit of the impression of fire? Why must I search for its traces?

    Fire   Flames   Burning  
    "Yves Klein, 1928 - 1962, Selected Writings" by Yves Klein, in 1961; p. 67, 1974.
  • Color is enslaved by line, that becomes writing.

    Writing   Color   Lines  
    Sidra Stich, Yves Klein, Hayward Gallery, Museum Ludwig, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen (Germany) (1994). “Yves Klein”
  • 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, 1928 - 1962, Selected Writings". ed. J & J, the Tate Gallery, London 1974, p.53, 1960.
  • 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, 1928 - 1962, Selected Writings". Book by Yves Klein, ed. J & J. p. 19, 1974.
  • To feel the soul without explaining it, without vocabulary, and to represent this sensation.

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

  • I arrived on earth in 1928. Born into a milieu of painters, I acquired my taste for painting with my mother's milk.

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

    "Yves Klein, 1928 - 1962, Selected Writings". Book by Yves Klein, ed. J & J. pp. 55-57, 1974.
  • My paintings are only the ashes of my art

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

    Blue   Sea   Sky  
    Yves Klein, Gimpel Fils (1973). “Yves Klein”
  • I want to take as the canvas for my next picture the entire surface of France.

    Want   Next   France  
    "Yves Klein, 1928 - 1962, Selected Writings". Book by Yves Klein, ed. J & J. p.43, 1974.
  • 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.

    Beautiful   Beach   Nice  
    Yves Klein (2000). “Yves Klein: Long Live the Immaterial”, Delano Greenridge Editions
  • The essential of painting is that 'something', that 'ethereal glue,' that 'intermediary product' which the artist exudes with all his creative being and which he has the power to place, to encrust, to impregnate into the pictorial matter of the painting.

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

    Blue   Profound   Firsts  
  • 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'.

    Nice   Blue   Sky  
    "Yves Klein, 1928 - 1962, Selected Writings". ed. J & J, the Tate Gallery, London 1974, p. 31, 1957.
  • The immaterial blue colour shown at Iris Clert's in April had in short made me inhuman, had excluded me from the world of tangible reality; I was an extreme element of society who lived in space and who had no means of coming back to earth. Jean Tinguely saw me in space and signaled to me in speed to show me the last machine to take to return to the ephemerality of material life.

    Mean   Reality   Blue  
    "Yves Klein, 1928 - 1962". Book by Yves Klein, p. 47, 1974.
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  • We hope you have found the saying you were looking for in our collection! At the moment, we have collected 32 quotes from the Artist Yves Klein, starting from April 28, 1928! We periodically replenish our collection so that visitors of our website can always find inspirational quotes by authors from all over the world! Come back to us again!
    Yves Klein quotes about: Art Painting