Paul Klee
Paul Klee
Paul Kleewas a Swiss-German artist. His highly individual style was influenced by movements in art that included Expressionism, Cubism, and Surrealism. Klee was a natural draftsman who experimented with and eventually deeply explored color theory, writing about it extensively; his lectures Writings on Form and Design Theory, published in English as the Paul Klee Notebooks, are held to be as important for modern art as Leonardo da Vinci's A Treatise on Painting for the Renaissance. He and his colleague, Russian...
NationalitySwiss
ProfessionPainter
Date of Birth18 December 1879
CityMunchenbuchsee, Switzerland
CountrySwitzerland
One day I will lie nowhere with an angel at my side.
There is plenty of room left for exact experiment in art, and the gate has been opened for some time. What had been accomplished in music by the end of the eighteenth century has only begun in the fine arts. Mathematics and physics have given us a clue in the form of rules to be strictly observed or departed from, as the case may be. Here salutary discipline is come to grips first of all with the function of forms, and not with form as the final result … in this way we learn how to look beyond the surface and get to the root of things.
Reduction! One wants to say more than nature and one makes the impossible mistake of wanting to say it with more means than she, instead of fewer.
Nature can afford to be prodigal in everything, the artist must be frugal down to the last detail.Nature is garrulous to the point of confusion, let the artist be truly taciturn.
An active line on a walk, moving freely, without goal. A walk for a walk's sake.
All is well with me. The rain doesn't reach me, my room is well heated, what more can one ask for? There's no shortage of work, either...
Spatial art does not begin with a poetic mood or idea, but with construction of one or more figures, with the harmonizing of several colors and tones, or with the devaluation of spatial relationships and so on.
Each energy calls for its complementary energy to achieve self-contained stability based on the play of energies.
What my art probably lacks is a kind of passionate humanity... There is no sensuous relationship, not even the noblest, between myself and the many.
One does not lash hat lies at a distance. The foibles that we ridicule must at least be a little bit our own. Only then will the work be a part of our own flesh. The garden must be weeded.
Everything vanishes round me and good works rise from me of their own accord.
It is precisely the way which is productive - this is the essential thing; becoming is more important than being...
My hand is entirely the implement of a distant sphere. It is not my head that functions but something else, something higher, something somewhere remote. I must have great friends there, dark as well as bright. They are all very kind to me.
The beholder's eye, which moves like an animal grazing, follows paths prepared for it in the picture.