# - Klein, Yves (1928-1962).

being part of an autobiographical draft, in which Klein reflects on the origins of his "Blue Period" ("l’époque bleue"), explaining that it was born out of his conviction that painting was something over and above the merely visual, unlike for other artists, giving an overall assessment of his early career, and describing his first exhibition of monochrome paintings in 1955-1956 at the Galerie Colette Allendy in Paris, recalling that although the blue paintings all seemed to be alike in tone and format, they were in fact so different from each other that his customers were able to distinguish between them with fine discernment and to assess them at quite different price levels.



...C’est depuis cette époque je puis dire que pour moi la peinture n’est plus en fonction de l’œil comme elle l’a toujours été pour tous les artistes (…) La vraie valeur, la vraie vie, la vraie nature de la peinture se trouve au-delà de mon œil, de la seule chose qui peut « croire » voir et composer – on voit une composition au lieu de vivre et d’être avec l’œuvre. C’est ainsi qu’est née l’époque bleue...



8 pages, written on various sheets of paper, mainly 4to (c.210 x 210mm. and c.210 x 295mm.), on the versos of typewritten pages and on leaves from a printed catalogue ("Tervuren, 1-III-1959" etc.), [c.1959], some browning

Yves Klein's ambition to express the infinite in art began with a view of the cloudless sky at Nice; he saw this a symbol of absolute freedom and existential space, and resolved to express it through pure colour.  Klein found that his monochrome paintings of 1955-1956, when hung together, were seen comparatively and hence polychromatically and thereafter limited himself to one colour: a deep ultramarine which, in 1960, he patented as International Klein Blue (IKB).