Author | Paul Klee |
---|---|
Original title | Schriften zur Form und Gestaltungslehre |
Language | German |
Subject | Klee's Bauhaus school lectures |
Genre | Modern art |
Published | 1956 & 1964 |
Publisher | Benno Schwab |
Publication place | Germany |
Website | Zentrum Paul Klee online edition |
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. [1] [2] [3] 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." [4] [5]
The final work was edited by Swiss artist Jürg Spiller and Marcel Franciscono criticized Spiller's collection of Klee's notes as "extensive but drastically rearranged", and added that the lectures "are interspersed with later notes and in part rearranged. Despite Spiller's notation of their sources in Klee's manuscripts, it is not always possible to determine from his arrangement where a lecture leaves off and an interpolation begins." [4]
In an earlier 1925 shorter book, Pädagogisches Skizzenbuch ('Pedagogical Sketchbook'), Klee published a condensation of his lectures at the Weimar Bauhaus. [4]
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The original title is Schriften zur Form und Gestaltungslehre ('Writings on form and design theory'), and the two volumes are titled Band I: Das bildnerische Denken ('Volume I: the creative thinking') and Band 2: Unendliche Naturgeschichte ('Volume 2: Infinite Natural History'); they were edited by Jürg Spiller and first published in Switzerland (Basel) and Germany (Stuttgart) by publishing house Benno Schwab, in 1956 and 1964 respectively.
The subtitles of the two volumes were rendered, for the English translation, 'The thinking eye' and 'The Nature of Nature'. The Italian translation is called Teoria della forma e della figurazione, and the two volumes are subtitled Il pensiero immaginabile and Storia naturale infinita. The French edition is called Contributions à la théorie de la forme picturale.
In 2016, the Zentrum Paul Klee museum in Bern, Switzerland, published digital versions of Klee's notebooks on their website. [6]
The Staatliches Bauhaus, commonly known as the Bauhaus, was a German art school operational from 1919 to 1933 that combined crafts and the fine arts. The school became famous for its approach to design, which attempted to unify individual artistic vision with the principles of mass production and emphasis on function. Along with the doctrine of functionalism, the Bauhaus initiated the conceptual understanding of architecture and design.
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.
Degenerate art was a term adopted in the 1920s by the Nazi Party in Germany to describe modern art. During the dictatorship of Adolf Hitler, German modernist art, including many works of internationally renowned artists, was removed from state-owned museums and banned in Nazi Germany on the grounds that such art was an "insult to German feeling", un-German, Freemasonic, Jewish, or Communist in nature. Those identified as degenerate artists were subjected to sanctions that included being dismissed from teaching positions, being forbidden to exhibit or to sell their art, and in some cases being forbidden to produce art.
Abstract art uses visual language of shape, form, color and line to create a composition which may exist with a degree of independence from visual references in the world. Abstract art, non-figurative art, non-objective art, and non-representational art are all closely related terms. They have similar, but perhaps not identical, meanings.
Johannes Itten was a Swiss expressionist painter, designer, teacher, writer and theorist associated with the Bauhaus school. Together with German-American painter Lyonel Feininger and German sculptor Gerhard Marcks, under the direction of German architect Walter Gropius, Itten was part of the core of the Weimar Bauhaus.
Max Bill was a Swiss architect, artist, painter, typeface designer, industrial designer and graphic designer.
Kaspar Zehnder is a Swiss conductor and flutist. He studied classical languages at the Lyceum in Bern and music at the University of the Arts Bern. His music teachers included Heidi Indermühle (flute), Ewald Körner (conducting), Agathe Rytz-Jaggi (piano) and Peter Streiff and Arthur Furer. He further took conducting master classes with Ralf Weikert, Werner-Andreas Albert and Horst Stein. He also studied chamber music and was a member of the Mozart European Academy, where his main mentor was Aurèle Nicolet.
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.
The idea of founding a theory of painting after the model of music theory was suggested by Goethe in 1807 and gained much regard among the avant-garde artists of the 1920s, the Weimar culture period, like Paul Klee.
Twittering Machine is a 1922 watercolor with gouache, pen-and-ink, and oil transfer on paper by Swiss-German painter Paul Klee. Like other artworks by Klee, it blends biology and machinery, depicting a loosely sketched group of birds on a wire or branch connected to a hand-crank. Interpretations of the work vary widely: it has been perceived as a nightmarish lure for the viewer or a depiction of the helplessness of the artist, but also as a triumph of nature over mechanical pursuits. It has been seen as a visual representation of the mechanics of sound.
Galka Scheyer was a German-American painter, art dealer, art collector, and teacher. She was the founder of the "Blue Four," an artists' group that consisted of Lyonel Feininger, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Alexej von Jawlensky.
Death and Fire, known in German as Tod und Feuer, is an expressionist painting by Paul Klee, from 1940. It is on display at Zentrum Paul Klee, in Bern.
David Fried is an American interdisciplinary, contemporary artist.
Camel (in Rhythmic Landscape with Trees) (German: Kamel (in rhythmischer baumlandschaft)) is a painting by Swiss artist Paul Klee, made in 1920, in the collection of the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf, Germany.
Nina Zimmer is a German art historian who is director of the Zentrum Paul Klee and the Museum of Fine Arts Bern.
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.
Ad Parnassum is a pointillist painting by Swiss-born artist Paul Klee. The painting is currently in the Kunstmuseum Bern.
Lily Klee was a German piano teacher, wife of painter Paul Klee, and mother to theatrical director Felix Klee.
Maria Marc, née Bertha Pauline Marie Franck, was a German artist. She is also known as the wife of the painter Franz Marc.