ÜBER DIE MODERNE KUNST
Paul Klee
Paul Klee: ÜBER DIE MODERNE KUNST. Bern: Verlag Benteli Bern-Bumpliz, 1945. First edition. Text in German. Square quarto. White paper covered boards embossed in purple. Printed dust jacket. Publishers chipboard mailing box with printed label. 53 pp. 24 black and white drawings. Helen & Gene Federico ownership signature to front free endpaper. Jacket with three of short closed tears to lower front edge, otherwise a fine, fresh copy housed in Publisher’s mailing carton. Rare in this condition.
8.75 x 8.5 hardcover book with 53 pages and 24 black and white drawings. Book based on a Bauhaus lecture by Klee from 1924.
"A dot goes for a walk . . . freely and without a goal."
In the fall of 1920 Paul Klee received a telegram from Walter Gropius inviting him to teach at the Bauhaus. Klee's decision to join the avant-garde school in Weimar was to have profound implications for his art. By the first of the new year Klee was installed at the school, working in a studio spacious enough to house his twelve easels.
During the years Klee taught at the Bauhaus he developed the theoretical foundations of his art. In his role as pedagogue he faced new challenges. "When I came to be a teacher," he later wrote, "I had to account explicitly for what I had been used to doing unconsciously." As one critic observed, Klee's "theory of art is the outgrowth of the practice, not the other way around."
Klee, whose official title was Forrnmeister or master of forms, used the cube as a prop while lecturing on the nature of space. "What he wanted to give his students," one observer wrote, "were basic clarities and points of departure." Klee's detached manner earned him the nickname "the Buddha of the Bauhaus."
Felix Klee, the painter's son, was only fourteen when he started studying at the Bauhaus. He knew his father's lectures were not for nonbelievers. "He had only a small circle of enthusiastic followers," Felix Klee wrote, ". . . those who could understand him. Not everyone could." Paul Klee put it best when he said, "I am not graspable in this world."