Using a practice started by Marcel Duchamp, this use of readymade objects to represent nothing but themselves has been referred to as an early example of Postmodernism,[4] using a series of carefully executed strategies to undermine its own authority, and as a precursor to conceptual art.

[3] "The booklet asserts its character straightaway in the preface: a wordless text of unbroken horizontal lines with the same two paragraph indentations on each page.... a homogenous continuum with no real beginning, middle, or end, and no content - at least insofar as there are no descriptions, analyses, or personalized utterances.

The colour plates are similarly presented as anonymous entities, each a flat spatial field of an uninflected hue: turquoise, brown, purple, green, pink, gray, yellow, ultramarine, mint, orange, or red.

Initially influenced by his readings of Max Heindel's The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception or Mystic Christianity, which taught that 'space equals spirit and life, that matter is inert form, [and] that sponges and water symbolize the saturation of matter with spirit,[8] he later rejected these teachings for a more rigorous study of the philosophy behind Judo, which involved long periods of meditation with his friends Arman and Claude Pascal.

His second private exhibition of monochromes took place whilst Klein was in Tokyo, late 1953, around the same time as he earned a diploma from the Kōdōkan Institute, as a fourth degree Dan, achieving the highest level possible for a European.

[8] 'The philosophy of Zen, which is essentially prevalent in Kōdōkan judo, being primarily concerned with an increased sensitivity for the present and an extended concept of space and time, [meant] a new form of spirituality for Klein, and [had] a direct effect upon his artistic activities.'

[9] He responded by publishing a book, Les Fondements du Judo, (see [1]), studying six Katas formulated by Kanō Jigorō in the 19th century, in an attempt to establish a reputation in France by circumventing the federation.

Curiously, some of the plates are still mechanically signed ‘Yves’, part of a series of deliberate strategies to undermine the works’ integrity, leading some critics, such as Pierre Restany, to call Klein an early post-modernist.

[13] “ The fact that there were two different monochrome artists featured in two nearly identical booklets augmented the manifestations of doubling, duplication and duplicity that lay at the core of the project.” Sidra Stich[12] Klein was in contact at this time with key advocates of Lettrism, a group of French avant garde artists who were challenging the assumed authority of texts by creating ‘an experiential language that was to be the basis of (the) new culture.’[14] By 1952, he had seen various works by key members of the group, including Isidore Isou, and by Dufrêne, Gil J. Wolman & Guy Debord,[15] and had become a close friend of Dufrêne in particular.

He wanted to induce independent sensations, feelings and reactions in viewers without giving them a depicted object or an abstract sign as a starting-point, just by means of the state and effect of the colour.