THE NOVICES OF SAIS [Sixty Drawings by Paul Klee]
Novalis [F.L.v. Hardenberg], Paul Klee
Novalis [F.L.v. Hardenberg]: THE NOVICES OF SAIS [Sixty Drawings by Paul Klee]. New York: Curt Valentin, 1949. First edition thus. Oblong quarto. Paper covered boards titled in black. Printed dust jacket. 127 pp. 60 black and white illustrations by Paul Klee. Frontispice by Andre Masson. Textblock edges lightly spotted. Jacket spine lightly sun darkened and a couple of tiny closed tears. An exceptionally well preserved copy: nearly fine in a nearly fine dust jacket.
8.75 x 5.625 hardcover book with 127 pages and 60 previously unpublished illustrations by Paul Klee, a frontispice by Andre Masson, and a preface by Stephen Spender. Translation by Ralph Manheim. Published by Curt Valentin and printed by Golden Eagle Press in the Spring of 1949.
According to Spender, the Klee drawings are not meant as illustrations but as parallels between the imaginative worlds of Novalis and Klee.
On one hand, Curt Valentin was widely respected as one of the most astute dealers in modern art, Valentin organized influential exhibitions and attracted major artists to his Gallery. His enthusiasm for sculpture is obvious from the artists and exhibitions he selected. Valentin also published several distinguished, limited edition books in which the writings of poets and novelists were "illustrated" by a contemporary artist.
On the other hand, Curt Valentin, who was Jewish, fled Nazi Germany in 1937 and moved to New York, where—with authorization from the Third Reich, according to a November 14, 1936, letter from the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts—he opened a gallery, first on West 46th Street and two years later, as his fortunes improved, on West 57th Street, to sell what the Nazis considered “degenerate art.”
Valentin funneled the proceeds of the art sales back to Germany, which needed foreign currency to support its war economy. He was one in a group of Jewish art dealers in Germany and Austria who were allowed safe passage to New York in order to sell confiscated artworks and send the foreign currency they garnered back to the Third Reich. According to Stephanie Barron, senior curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and organizer of the landmark 1991–92 exhibition “‘Degenerate Art’: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany,” records kept by the propaganda ministry in Berlin prove that many works were sold to Valentin so that he could resell them abroad.
"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."