At Antwerp, barely two months ago. Invited to exhibit with a group of artists comprising Bury, Tinguely, Roth, Breer, Mack, Munari, Spoerri, Piene, and Soto, I travelled to Antwerp and, on the occasion of the opening, instead of installing a painting or whatever tangible and visible object in the space that had been reserved for me in the Hessenhuis exhibition hall, I loudly pronounced to the public these words borrowed from Gaston Bachelard: “First there is nothing, then there is a deep nothing, then there is a blue depth”.

The Belgian organiser of this exhibition then asked me where my work might be. I replied: “There, there where I am speaking at this moment.” “And what is the price of this work?” “A kilo of gold, a kilo ingot of pure gold will suffice me”. Why these fanciful conditions instead of a normal price simply represented by a sum of money? Because, for pictorial sensibility in raw material state, in a space that I had specialized and stabilized by pronouncing these few words upon my arrival, which made the blood of this spatial sensibility flow, one cannot ask for money. “The blood of sensibility is blue,” says Shelley and that is exactly what I think. The price of blue blood cannot in any instance be measured in money. It must be measured in gold.

…the pictorial space that I have already managed to stabilize before and around my monochrome paintings of earlier years will now be well established in the gallery space. My active presence in the given space will create the climate and the radiant pictorial ambiance that usually reigns in the studio of any artist gifted with real power. A sensible density that is abstract yet real will exist and will live by and for itself in places that are empty in appearance only.

 

(Excerpts from Yves Klein’s conference “L’évolution de l’art vers l’immatériel”, Paris, La Sorbonne, June 3, 1959, as published in: Yves Klein, Vers l’immatériel, Editions Dilecta, Paris 2006, pagg. 118 and 126. Translation Charles Penwarden)

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