Elsa Smithgall

Fabienne Eggelhöfer

Katy Siegel

Elke Seibert

Kai-Inga Dost

Critics have traditionally confined Paul Klee's contribution to American art as one of "spirit," and limited to the works of the New York School and other Abstract Expressionist painters. In fact, Klee's influence on American art is more expansive, as illustrated in this study of ten artists who, through their use of automatic drawing, color field painting, symbols, and pictographs, reveal how Klee's theories and artistic methods contributed to the history of post-war American art. The ten artists explored include familiar names, such as Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Mark Tobey, Gene Davis, and Kenneth Noland, as well as lesser-known artists William Baziotes, Norman Lewis, Theodore Stamos, and Bradley Walker Tomlin. The richly-illustrated book features essays exploring Klee's legacy among various schools of American art and a chronology illustrates where and how American artists learned about Klee. It also includes a profile of each artist and their connections to Klee, followed by exquisite reproductions of their works.

after Paul Klee

Ten Americans

Michael Baumgartner

Paul Klee

Christine Hopfengart

Paul Klee (1879-1940) is one of the most important representatives of modern art. His oeuvre is as universal as it is individual, standing tall among all of the currents and "isms" of his day. His overwhelming body of paintings, drawings, and other visual works; his letters, journal entries, and, last but not least, his teaching notes form the background for this pointed depiction of the life and work of the meditative artist and visual thinker. This richly illustrated volume traces Klee's eventful biography, ranging from his artistic beginnings with caricature-like drawings and nudes, his encounter with the avant-garde and the famous watercolors from his journey to Tunisia, the abstract color compositions from the Bauhaus era, to the mysterious, inventive images of his last years in Bern.

Life and Work

"Paul Klee (1879-1940) is one of the most influential painters of European modernism. With an oeuvre comprising nearly ten thousand works, numerous solo and group exhibitions of his work have been mounted well beyond his lifetime. To this very day, the intense interest in his work has not waned. And yet there has never been an exhibition that has extensively examined Klee's relationship to abstraction. The show at the Fondation Beyeler--along with the accompanying catalogue, which is "underscored" by insightful texts from well-known authors--is closing this gap. Four groups of themes--nature, architecture, painting, and graphic characters--make up the golden thread through Klee's body of work whose formal repertoire repeatedly oscillates between the semi-representational and the absolute abstract, and which are examined here in separate chapters. Thus one not only gains in-depth insight into Klee's involvement with abstraction--new references to his contemporaries, as well as to artists of later generations, are unveiled."--From the publisher.

Marianne Keller Tschirren

Marianne Keller

Comprehensive in scope and elegant in design, "Paul Klee: Bauhaus Master "is a landmark publication resulting from several years of work in collaboration with the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern, and based on a recent critical publication on Klee's "pedagogical legacy." The book contextualizes a selection of 137 works--including paintings, watercolors and drawings, made between 1899 and 1940--with nearly 100 handwritten notes selected from classes Klee gave at the Bauhaus, alongside an extensive array of archival objects and documents ranging from archival photographs to the artist's herbaria through to his reading, sketchbooks and publications. Demonstrating the unity of Klee's art and pedagogy--the unity of his hand and mind--"Bauhaus Master" presents an artist thinking with and through his materials and image-making practices, endlessly testing both. Paul Klee (1879-1940) was born in Switzerland and studied at Munich's Academy of Fine Arts. Klee participated in several exhibitions between 1911 and 1913, but the breakthrough in his career was a 1914 trip to Tunis with August Macke and Louis Moillet, after which he painted his first abstract work. From 1919 he was represented by influential dealer Hans Goltz. Klee taught at the Bauhaus from 1921 to 1931; when the ascent of Nazism forced the closure of the Bauhaus, Klee emigrated to Switzerland. Although still working, he was in ill health until his death in 1940.

Bauhaus Master

Régine Bonnefoit

Martina Dobbe

Based on Paul Klee's pictorial thinking, the Zentrum Paul Klee is organising an exhibition on the meaning of script, sign and line in the artistic process. Writing transfers not only content but is also form. Its structure, horizontally or vertically placed lines, as well as its letters, correspond to certain norms. At the same time writing is determined by the individual, spontaneous gesture of the author. It consequently unites concept and spontaneity and is therefore interesting with regard to the artistic process. For the exhibition other important artists of the 20th century besides Klee have been selected who in their different ways take up the aspects of script, symbol and line and therefore also examine the tension between concept and spontaneity. The exhibition examines the significance of handwriting and writing as well as "scriptive" signs in artistic practice. Departing from Paul Klee's interest in handwriting and calligraphy, it will examine the nature of writing more closely. Writing adheres to specific rules in order to be decipherable, but is simultaneously also the expression of an individual sensibility. As handwriting unites both concept and gesture, it will serve here as a model for the artistic process. The artists selected for the exhibition not only employ writing as pictorial element, but also locate their artistic practice between the two poles of spontaneity and the conceptual. In statements about their work they have repeatedly emphasized the importance of process and movement. The spectrum spanning the gestural through to the conceptual, ranges from the gestural "scription" of Henri Michaux, Mark Tobey, and Cy Twombly, to Paul Klee, Brice Marden, and Olav Christopher Jenssen, to the conceptual painting of Jonathan Lasker and word paintings by Christopher Wool.--Museum website.

Fabienne Eggelhöfer

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