La terre bleue

"From April to June, Klein was in the United States, and there he learned of the exploit of the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin. The newspapers in April 1961 printed a statement by the first man in space: "I saw the sky very dark and the earth blue, of a deep and intense blue"...Already in 1957 [Yves] had had the idea of colouring a terrestrial globe (of the standard schoolroom kind) blue...The globe showed the earth's mountains in slight relief. No sooner said than done" (P. Restany, op. cit, p. 227).