Outside of the faculty of the Bauhaus, Klee tended to avoid belonging to any group aesthetic or movement. Expressionists, Dadaists, Constructivists, pioneers of abstraction, Surrealists and the emerging Abstract Expressionists of the New York School all either claimed Klee as one of their own or acknowledged the importance of his example. It is also for this reason that Klee’s work was to prove such a major influence upon a whole range of different and often diametrically opposed art movements, back in a time when art had movements. Klee was an artist who could apply his vision to almost any pictorial style and his art is virtually unique in the history of early Twentieth Century modernism in that he is probably the only leading avant-garde figure to have allowed his work to roam freely between the organic and the geometric, the constructive and the intuitive, the figurative and the abstract and, as in a work such as Reste eiener Burg for example, between the purely linear and the completely chromatic. In contrast, the five very diverse paintings in this sale are each prominent examples from some of the most lyrically inventive and more poetic periods in the artist’s career, made during periods when Klee was freer to pursue what he once described as his own “poetic-personal idea of landscape.”Įach work, executed in a range of differing styles and media over an always carefully prepared ground, is a testament to the extraordinary versatility of the artist and to the depth of variation that runs throughout his oeuvre. Klee’s Bauhaus years (1920-31) were ones in which his art often reacted to and occasionally ironized the increasingly Constructivist principles advocated by the school. Executed either between 19 or between 19, the five outstanding works from David Solinger’s collection are ones that effectively bracket the twelve years that Klee spent teaching at the Bauhaus. Solinger Collection demonstrate, the unique pictorial vocabulary that this most literary of artists devised was one that often actively attempted to fuse the worlds of the visible and the legible into a revelatory new pictographic language. “I am, after all, a poet” Klee once noted in this regard and, as many of his works in The David M. Ultimately, the “ur-reality” that such a process revealed was one that, in the hands of an artist of Klee’s extraordinarily fecund imagination and genius, had the ability to resonate with such power that it instilled in the viewer a profoundly poetic and often deeply moving sense of universal truth and ancient wisdom.Īugust Macke and Paul Klee in front of a mosque in Tunisia, 1914. what we see more or less with our senses, but visible the things we watch in secret” (Paul Klee, from a lecture given in Jena in 1924, cited in Hans Jaffe, Paul Klee, London, 1971, p. For Klee, who often described drawing as “taking a line for a walk,” the creation of a work of art was the result of a meditative and near-mystical practice in which “our beating heart pushes down, down to the primitive depths what is produced by this movement could.be called a dream, or idea, or fantasy certain curious things become a reality, the reality of art, which widens life more than seems possible…. Both Klee and Jung, (who was himself an artist), saw the process of creation as a psychological journey. This “deeper” reality is a mysterious and primordial realm, often rendered by Klee as a magical landscape full of ambiguous symbols, pictorial metaphors and archetypes reminiscent in some respects of the domain of the “collective unconscious” imagined and championed by his contemporary, and fellow Swiss-German, the psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung. Art, “does not repeat the visible,” Klee famously insisted, but instead it “makes visible” a deeper, hidden reality known, unconsciously perhaps, only to the heart and soul of man. For, therein is nature reborn” (Paul Klee, One Modern Art, London, 1954, p. The “creation of a work of art” Paul Klee said, “must… be accompanied by distortion of the natural form. Paul Klee, quoted in Will Grohman, Paul Klee, London, 1954, p.
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