Yves Klein

Yves Klein (28 April 1928 - 6 June 1962) was a French artist and is considered an important figure in post-war European art.

Sourced

• I am against the line and all its consequences: contours, forms, composition. All paintings of whatever sort, figuratives or abstract, seem to me like prison windows in which the lines, precisely are the bars.
  • Gilbert Perlein and Bruno Cora, Yves Klein: Long live the Immaterial, Delano Greenidge Edition, New York, 2001.

• • The essential of painting is that something, that 'ethereal glue', that intermediary product which the artist secretes with all his creative being and which he has to place, to encrust, to impregnate into the pictorial stuff of the painting.
  • Yves Klein, catalogue of exhibition in the Jewish Museum, New York 1967, p. 18

• 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.
  • his lecture at the Sorbonne, 1959

• The world is blue.
  • Abstract Art, Anna Moszynska, Thames and Hudson 1990, p. 182

• Space is waiting for our love, as I am longing for you; go with me, travelling through space.. (line in a poem of Klein himself)
  • De Tweede Helft, Ad de Visser, SUN, Nijmegen 1998, p. 107

• Bill for 20 grams of Pure Gold, for one painted area of sensibilized immaterial. (about 1958, text on a bill for selling 'air')
  • De Tweede Helft, Ad de Visser, SUN, Nijmegen 1998, p. 106

Unsourced

• Sponges are the portraits of the readers of my monochromes who,after having travelled in the blue of my paintings,came back totally impregnated in sensibility like the sponges.