Friday’s Famous Artist is … Paul Klee

 

  “A line is a dot that went for a walk.” Paul Klee

  

Paul Klee    1879 – 1940 was born in Munchenbuchsee, Switzerland.  Credited with inspiration in the impressionist and cubism movement, here again we see an artist moved by symbols and the primitive essence.  Finding words and color could move together to form a thought or sentence, Klee was inspired to paint symbols as a code in his work.  Each piece representing an entire experience. 

He is credited with writing the book “The Thinking Eye” which details an obsession with spiritual concepts and exactness.  The  book is considered the most detailed manual on the science of design ever written.  This book is as valuable as Da Vinci’s journal and notes on A Treatise on Painting.

Paul Klee was a man who un spun the wheel and detached from the need to create limp realistic, stilted images.  He was more impressed with the impression of time upon a person’s consciousness and deformed objects and related them back to the place they “belonged.”

His works take great leaps of change throughout his career, none staying exactly in any one direction, but there is a pattern to the evolution of his work in his artist’s eye.   It is color and pattern, color sometimes more important and at other times pattern or symbols more important in the progression of his work.  Shapes are expressive and speak, then pattern is expressive and speaks.  In yet another work, a face or a figure are expressive and speak all returning to …. and then a release from that structure. 

Playful, humorous, emphatic, brilliant and majestic are all words to be found in his pieces.  He is at once, demanding an attention to our human past, present and future.  Time stops in one work and begins again in another.  Moments are captured and released to return again.  All of his work speaks the language of the human spirit. 

“Beauty is as relative as light and dark.  Thus, there exists no beautiful woman, none as all, because you are never certain that a still far more beautiful woman will not appear and completely shame the supposed beauty of the first.”  Paul Klee