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.
Interpretation
Yves Klein criticizes traditional artistic boundaries and believes they confine creativity.
In this quote, Yves Klein expresses his disdain for conventional artistic elements such as lines and forms, which he perceives as limitations on true artistic expression. He likens traditional paintings to 'prison windows,' highlighting that these elements restrict the creative flow and confine the artist's vision, suggesting a desire for a more liberated form of artistic expression beyond linear constraints.
In practice
This quote can be used in an art class to provoke discussion about the limitations of traditional art forms.
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.
Color is sensibility in material form, matter in its primordial state.
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.
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.
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.
Art for art's sake makes no more sense than gin for gin's sake.
My drawings inspire, and are not to be defined. They place us, as does music, in the ambiguous realm of the undetermined.
And he sang to them, now in the Elven tongue, now in the speech of the West, until their hearts, wounded with sweet words, overflowed, and their joy was like swords, and they passed in thought out to regions where pain and delight flow together and tears are the very wine of blessedness.
Art is what you can get away with.
The music of Africa is big sound: it's the sound of a community
A good poet's made as well as born.
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