One of the goals of Modernism was the presentation of the essence of art, or pure form. Encouraged by theorists, modern artists found pure form in ornament which, though promising, was sullied by connotations of materiality, domesticity, and femininity. Jenny Anger demonstrates that the decorative significantly informed Paul Klee's art. She compares his work to that of another major modernist, Henri Matisse, to confirm the critical role of the decorative in Modernism. Anger also explores the relevance of the decorative for contemporary and, especially, women artists.
Primitivism versus modernity: the expressionist dilemma - Politics of primitivism - Brucke bathers: back to nature - Max Pechstein's visionary ideas - Emil Nolded.
The book offers a new, original look at the great European modernist Paul Klee and the interplay of word and image in the work he produced after WWI, when the European avant-garde was at its most adamant. Bourneuf asks: why was it that Klee immersed himself in crossings of image and text at the same time that so much avant-garde art focused fiercely on the visual? She proposes that Klee created forms that hover between the pictorial and the written to provoke the viewer to look slowly and contemplatively, a mode of viewing the artist saw as both analogous to reading and threatened by new technological media such as film, mass printing, telephones, and radio. Bourneuf demonstrates how Klee s concern for the literary aspects of visual art is both the motive for and the means of his ironic play with modernist art theories and practices."
Contextual analogies reveal that Klee matched wits with Christian Morgenstern, rose to the provocations of Kurt Schwitters, and gave new form to the Surrealists' "exquisite corpses." By the end of his life Klee discovered his own poetic voice in alphabet drawings that read as anagrams and pictorial poems that challenge conventional distinctions between verbal and visual forms of expression." "Paul Klee, Poet/Painter is a case study in the reciprocity of poetry and painting in early modernist practice. It introduces readers to a little-known facet of Klee's creative activity and re-evaluates his contributions to a modernist aesthetic."--BOOK JACKET.
Paul Klee experienced his 1914 trip to Tunisia as a major breakthrough for his art: ÒColor and I are one,Ó he famously wrote. ÒI am a painter.Ó Kandinsky and Klee in Tunisia sets the scene for KleeÕs breakthrough with a close study of the parallel voyage undertaken in 1904Ð5 by Wassily Kandinsky and Gabriele MŸnter, who would later become Klee's friends. This artist couple, then at an early stage in their celebrated careers, produced a rich body of painting and photography known only to specialists. Paul KleeÕs 1914 trip with August Macke and Louis Moilliet, in contrast, is a vaunted convergence of cubism and the exotic. Roger Benjamin refigures these two seminal voyages in terms of colonial culture and politics, the fabric of ancient Tunisian cities, visual ethnography, and the tourist photograph. The book looks closely at the cities of Tunis, Sousse, Hammamet, and Kairouan to flesh out a profound confrontation between European high modernism and the wealth of Islamic lifeways and architecture. Kandinsky and Klee in Tunisia offers a new understanding of how the European avant-garde was formed in dialogue with cultural difference.
The year before he died, in what was one of the most difficult yet prolific periods of his life, Paul Klee created some of his most surprising and innovative works. In 1939, the year before his death from a long illness and against a backdrop of sociopolitical turmoil and the outbreak of World War II, Klee worked with a vigor and inventiveness that rivaled even the most productive periods of his youth. This book illuminates the artist’s response to his personal difficulties and the era’s broader realities through imagery that is tirelessly inventive—by turns political, solemn, playful, humorous, and poetic. The works featured testify to Klee’s restless drive to experiment with form and material. His use of adhesive, grease, oil, chalk, and watercolor, among other media, resulted in surfaces that are not only visually striking, but also highly tactile and original. Not unlike a diary, the drawings are often meditative reflections on the pains and pleasures of life—their titles, among them Monsters in readiness and Struggles with himself, signal Klee’s frame of mind. Renowned art historian Dawn Ades looks at this group of paintings and drawings in the context of their time and as indicative of a pivotal moment in art history. Moved by this late period of Klee’s oeuvre, American artist Richard Tuttle responds to specific works in the form of dialogical poems. This stunning publication highlights the novelty and ingenuity of Klee’s late works, which deeply affected the generation of artists—including Anni Albers, Jean Dubuffet, Mark Tobey, and Zao Wou-Ki—that emerged after World War II and continues to captivate artists and viewers alike today
Paul Klee (1879–1940) ist einer der bedeutendsten Vertreter der modernen Kunst. Er schuf ein ebenso universales wie individuelles Werk, das zwischen allen Strömungen und Ismen seiner Zeit steht. Sein gewaltiges malerisches, zeichnerisches und bildnerisches Œuvre, seine Briefe und Tagebuchaufzeichnungen und nicht zuletzt seine pädagogischen Notizen bilden den Hintergrund für diese pointierte Darstellung zu Leben und Werk des meditativen Künstlers und visuellen Denkers. Der reich bebilderte Band zeichnet Klees bewegte Biografie nach und spannt den Bogen von Klees künstlerischen Anfängen mit karikaturistischen Zeichnungen und Akten über seine Begegnung mit der Avantgarde und die berühmten Aquarelle der Tunisreise oder die abstrakten Farbkompositionen der Bauhaus-Zeit bis zu den geheimnisvollen Bildfindungen seiner letzten Jahre in Bern.
"The German painter Paul Klee (1879-1940) has become one of today's most popular artists. Ninety works by Klee--including drawings, watercolors, and oils, either serious, comical, capricious, or dramatic--have recently been given to the Metropolitan Museum of Art by one of the postwar era's leading art dealers and collectors, Heinz Berggruen, and are now published together in this volume for the first time. The works in the distinguished Berggruen Klee Collection, now a permanent part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's holdings, span the career of the artist from his student days in Bern in the 1890s to his death in Muralto-Locarno in 1940. All aspects of Klee both as a draftsman and as a painter are illustrated in these ninety works. Paul Klee is not only one of today's most popular artists, but he is also one of the most written about. In an illuminating addition to the vast literature on Klee, Sabine Rewald opens this study with a candid interview with the artist's only son, Felix, which took place in Bern in February 1986. Accompanied by documentary and informal photographs of the Klee family, it gives pointed and witty insights into the artist's private life. It also offers a behind-the-scenes view of the Bauhaus, where Paul Klee taught and where Felix Klee was a student. Most of the ninety works in the Berggruen Klee Collection are reproduced in full-page colorplates, and each one is accompanied by an extensive entry. These entries incorporate biographical information and quotations from Klee's letters, the latter as yet unpublished in English. The book includes an extensive chronology and a bibliography." -- Provided by publisher
