| Cat and Bird | |
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| Artist | Paul Klee |
| Year | 1928 |
| Type | Oil and ink on plaster-primed gauze mounted on plywood |
| Dimensions | 38.1 cm× 53.2 cm(15.0 in× 20.9 in) |
| Location | Museum of Modern Art, New York |
Cat and Bird is a painting by Swiss German painter Paul Klee, created in 1928. It was made when Klee was a teacher at the Bauhaus Dessau. The painting depicts the wide face of a stylized cat with a small bird perched on its forehead. It is held in the Museum of Modern Art, in New York. [1]
Klee made many paintings and drawings depicting cats, the most well-known being the current. The little bird on the forehead of the cat is actually meant to be inside the cat's head; it can be assumed that he is dreaming of a potential prey. In the painting, the bird only plays a minor role; the undisputed main character is the cat, whose face overwhelmingly dominates the format. Domestic cats often like to sit in tight spaces. His facial expression is characterized by a frightening alertness, shown in the open eyes with the typical vertical pupils of the cats, but also by his calmness. Klee's coloring is muted in this painting, from pink to light brown, as well as bluish, green and violet areas, a warm color scheme that corresponds to the nature of warmth-loving domestic cats. Only the tip of the nose appears in bright red, in the shape of a heart. As a well-known symbol, this heart is supposed to express a kind of “loving desire”. Klee liked cats and also kept them at home and in his studio. Above the bird is a kind of dark celestial body at the top of the picture, a motif that appears frequently in his paintings. The painter viewed the world as the model of a cosmic planetarium designed to show spiritual truths. [2] [3]
The painter wanted to let simple lines, shapes and colors work for themselves in his paintings. He called this "the pure cultivation of means". The visible should recede and focus instead on thought, imagination and the "hunger of the mind". He wanted to “make hidden visions visible”. For the two beings in this painting, he used simple strokes and lines in the drawing, reminiscent of children's drawings, which he saw as "sources of creativity". So simple pointed oval shapes for the eyes, triangles for the nose, ears and cat's mouth are characteristic of this painting. The bird shows a similar wavy reduced line in the drawing to the eye area of the cat and is reminiscent of Klee's depictions of the graphic meaning of the active, medial and passive lines in their curved form. [4] [5] [6] [7]
The cat is represented as a kind of "magical eye animal", since the bird is literally imprinted on him, as an eternal wish. Both animals belong to the painters creatures of his knowledge, imagination for forms and his suggestive simplified sign language, which he experienced and developed after a trip to Tunis, in 1914, and later as a Bauhaus teacher. [8] [9] [10] [11]
The American art historian William Rubin interprets Cat and Bird from the perspective of Gestalt psychology and mentions the small formats of Klee's paintings. Things can only happen in the head with small formats, and here it is the cat that thinks of the bird and who no longer wants him to "get out of his head". With this painting, Klee speculates perhaps on the unconscious knowledge of the viewer, who otherwise would not understand that the bird is not outside the cat, but only in his obsessed mind. Rubin believes that this painting is rather unique in Klee's work in terms of execution and subject. [12]
Klee donated the painting to Alfred Flechtheim's gallery in Berlin in 1929, and it was loaned to the Museum of Modern Art, in New York, in 1930. In 1934 it was sold to Franz Herbert Hirschland. After his death, it passed through inheritance to Susan Ann Hirschland and Joan Ellen Hirschland Meijer. In 1975 it came as an offer to the Museum of Modern Art, in New York, where it has been since then. [13]
Max Ernst was a German painter, sculptor, printmaker, graphic artist, and poet. A prolific artist, Ernst was a primary pioneer of the Dada movement and Surrealism in Europe. He had no formal artistic training, but his experimental attitude toward the making of art resulted in his invention of frottage—a technique that uses pencil rubbings of textured objects and relief surfaces to create images—and grattage, an analogous technique in which paint is scraped across canvas to reveal the imprints of the objects placed beneath. Ernst is noted for his unconventional drawing methods as well as for creating novels and pamphlets using the method of collages. He served as a soldier for four years during World War I, and this experience left him shocked, traumatised and critical of the modern world. During World War II he was designated an "undesirable foreigner" while living in France.
Paul Klee was a Swiss-born 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 was for the Renaissance. He and his colleague, Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, both taught at the Bauhaus school of art, design and architecture in Germany. His works reflect his dry humor and his sometimes childlike perspective, his personal moods and beliefs, and his musicality.
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Pedagogical Sketchbook is a book by Paul Klee. It is based on his extensive lectures on visual form at Bauhaus Staatliche Art School where he was a teacher in between 1921-1931. Originally handwritten – as a pile of working notes he used in his lectures – it was eventually edited by Walter Gropius, designed by László Moholy-Nagy and published in as a Bauhaus student manual under the original title: Pädagogisches Skizzenbuch. It was translated into English by Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, who also wrote an introduction for it.
Paul Klee Notebooks is a two-volume work by the Swiss-born artist Paul Klee that collects his lectures at the Bauhaus schools in 1920s Germany and his other main essays on modern art. These works are considered so important for understanding modern art that they are compared to the importance that Leonardo's A Treatise on Painting had for Renaissance. Herbert Read called the collection "the most complete presentation of the principles of design ever made by a modern artist – it constitutes the Principia Aesthetica of a new era of art, in which Klee occupies a position comparable to Newton's in the realm of physics."
Georg Muche was a German painter, printmaker, architect, author, and teacher.
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William Stanley Rubin was an American art scholar, a distinguished curator, critic, collector, art historian and teacher of modern art.
The Neues Sehen, also known as New Vision or Neue Optik, was a movement, not specifically restricted to photography, which was developed in the 1920s. The movement was directly related to the principles of the Bauhaus. Neues Sehen considered photography to be an autonomous artistic practice with its own laws of composition and lighting, through which the lens of the camera becomes a second eye for looking at the world. This way of seeing was based on the use of unexpected framings, the search for contrast in form and light, the use of high and low camera angles, etc. The movement was contemporary with New Objectivity with which it shared a defence of photography as a specific medium of artistic expression, although Neues Sehen favoured experimentation and the use of technical means in photographic expression.
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Limits of Reason is a 1927 painting by Paul Klee (1879-1940). It is in the permanent collection of the Pinakothek der Moderne—Pinakothek of modern art—in central Munich's Kunstareal.
Carola Giedion-Welcker was a German-Swiss art historian.
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Media related to Cat and Bird by Paul Klee at Wikimedia Commons
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