Paul Klee: Selected by Genius, 1917-1933 (Art Flexi)
from Prestel Publishing
Now available in a flexi format, this dazzling monograph features some of Klee's favorite works, created during his most productive artistic period.
As an avant-garde artist of the twentieth century, painter Paul Klee's work defies classification. What is indisputable, however, is its originality and brilliance. Taken from the artist's most prolific years,1917-1933, this book presents works that Klee never intended to sell. More than 100 color plates reveal Klee's chromatic genius and wide stylistic range. Along with an in-depth biography, the book features three essays, which examine Klee's versatility, place him in context with his contemporaries, and discuss his process for cataloging his works. The result is a unique and far-reaching exploration of one of the twentieth century's most important and admired artists, at the most fecund stage of his career.
Paul Klee: Hand Puppets (Emanating)
by Christine Hopfengart
from Hatje Cantz Publishers
Between 1916 and 1925 Paul Klee (1879-1940) made some 50 hand puppets for his son, Felix, of which 30 are still in existence. For the heads, he used materials from his own household: beef bones and electrical outlets, bristle brushes, leftover bits of fur and nutshells. Soon he began to sew costumes. These characters and small works, do not pretend to be great art, but at the same time, they are superbly imaginative, sweetly reminiscent of Klee's relationships with his family, and beautifully illustrative of the artistic and social developments of the time. Readers will see the chronological proximity of Dada and Kurt Schwitters's collages in Klee's Matchbox Ghost; the German National caricatures one of the era's more ominous political types. An introductory essay tracks the work's links to other avant-garde puppetry and to Klee's sculptural works, and notes his connections to the theater. For their part, Klee's son Felix and his grandson Alexander tell the story of how the figures were created.
Paul Klee: Painting Music (Pegasus)
Now available in flexi-cover, this illuminating work examines the fascinating relationship between music and painting in Paul KleeÂ’s art.
A talented violinist as well as a painter, Klee drew much of the inspiration for his abstract art from musical rhythms and structures. Like a composer, he developed and harmonized pictorial themes, weaving a complex series of signs and symbols into his painting. The book focuses on KleeÂ’s decade-long tenure at the Bauhaus, where the artistÂ’s theories and practice first merged, and where he developed his Color Spectrum, Square, and Polyphone painting series. Illustrated throughout with full-color reproductions of KleeÂ’s paintings and etchings, as well as entries from his diaries, this unique study sheds light on an important aspect of KleeÂ’s work while providing insights into his development as an abstract artist.
The Diaries of Paul Klee, 1898-1918
by Paul Klee
from University of California Press
Paul Klee was endowed with a rice and many-sided personality that was continually spilling over into forms of expression other than his painting and that made him one of the most extraordinary phenomena of modern European art. These abilities have left their record in the four intimate Diaries in which he faithfully recorded the events of his inner and outer life from his ninteenth to his fortieth year. Here, together with recollections of his childhood in Bern, his relations with his family and such friends as Kandinsky, Marc, Macke, and many others, his observations on nature and people, his trips to Italy and Tunisia, and his military service, the read will find Klee's crucial experience with literature and music, as well as many of his essential ideas about his own artistic technique and the creative process.
Paul Klee, 1879-1940 (Basic Art)
by Susanna Partsch
from Taschen
Paul Klee: Art and Music
Drawings of Paul Klee (Master Draughtsman Series)
from Borden Pub Co
The Making of Paul Klee's Career, 1914-1920
by Otto Karl Werckmeister
from University Of Chicago Press
Drawing on rich documentary evidence—records of Klee's sales, reviews of his exhibitions, the artist's published writings about his art, unpublished correspondence, as well as contemporary criticism—Werckmeister follows Klee's transformation from an idiosyncratic abstract individualist to a metaphysical storyteller to mystical sage. Werckmeister argues that this latter image was promoted by a number of influential art critics and dealers acting in cooperation with the artist himself. This posture prompted Klee's success first in the war-weary modernist art world of 1916-18 and then in the pseudo-revolutionary art world of 1919-20.
This work is a critical challenge to the myth of Klee's art and to the hagiography of his artistic personality. Werckmeister's historical account is sure to be a controversial yet significant contribution to Klee studies—one that will change the nature of Klee scholarship for some time to come.
Paul Klee: Zentrum Paul Klee
by Ursina Barandun
from Hatje Cantz Publishers
The Zentrum Paul Klee, which opened its doors during the summer of 2005, is not an art museum in the traditional sense--just as its raison d''tre, Paul Klee, was by no means a traditional artist. Klee, who was also a musician, teacher, and poet, ranks comfortably as one of the 20th-century's most significant and beloved artists. His artworks, which partook marvelously in the spirit of the naef and the childlike, were the visual wonder of an intellect that also produced fascinating theoretical and educational treatises. The center, housed in a marvelously undulating building designed by renowned architect Renzo Piano, is set to become the leading resource worldwide for mediations on the life and work of Paul Klee, as well as the reception of his art. The diversity of Klee's artistic activities will be thoroughly represented here, with nearly 40 percent of the artist's entire oeuvre accounted for, totalling some four thousand paintings, watercolors, and drawings, as well as plentiful archives and biographical material. The collection has been compiled from a number of contributing sources, including generous donations and loans from the founding Klee and Mller families, the former Paul Klee foundation, and numerous private holdings.
Paul Klee
+++
