PAUL KLEE
Alfred H. Barr, Jr., James Johnson Sweeney, Julia and Lyonel Feininger
Alfred H. Barr, Jr., James Johnson Sweeney, Julia and Lyonel Feininger [articles]: PAUL KLEE. New York: Museum of Modern Art, January 1941. First Edition. Slim quarto. Uncoated printed wrappers. Tan endpapers. Unpaginated. 23 black and white reproductions and two text illustrations. Trace of wear overall. A nearly fine copy.
7.5 x 10 book with 23 black and white reproductions and two text illustrations. Published on the occasion of the exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art in 1941, then travelled to Northampton, Massachusetts, Smith College Museum of Art; Chicago, The Arts Club of Chicago; Portland, Oregon, Art Museum; San Francisco, Museum of Art; Los Angeles, Stendahl Art Galleries; St. Louis, City Art Museum; and Wellesly, Massachusetts, Wellesley College. Introduction by Alfred H. Barr, Jr. and two short essays by James Sweeney and Julia and Lyonel Feininger, plus Catalog, Chronology and Bibliography plus 20 pages of B&W reproductions.
From the Guggenheim's web site: "Klee taught at the Bauhaus in Weimar from 1921 to 1926 and in Dessau from 1926 to 1931. During his tenure, he was in close contact with other Bauhaus masters such as Kandinsky and Lyonel Feininger. In 1924 the Blaue Vier (the Blue Four), consisting of Lyonel Feininger, Jawlensky, Kandinsky, and Klee, was founded. Among his notable exhibitions of this period were his first in the United States at the Societe Anonyme, New York, in 1924; his first major show in Paris the following year at the Galerie Vavin-Raspail; and an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1930. Klee went to Dusseldorf to teach at the Akademie in 1931, shortly before the Nazis closed the Bauhaus. Forced by the Nazis to leave his position in Dusseldorf in 1933, Klee settled in Bern the following year. Seventeen of his works were included in the Nazi exhibition of "degenerate art," Entartete Kunst, in 1937. Major Klee exhibitions took place in Bern and Basel in 1935 and in Zurich in 1940. Klee died on June 29, 1940, in Muralto-Locarno, Switzerland."
In Pedagogical Sketch Book, the second of the Bauhaus manuals edited by Gropius and designed by Moholy-Nagy, Klee developed a primer for his students. Based on his extensive 1921 lecture notes on visual form, Klee divided his artistic sketchbook, first published in 1925, into sections on the line and dimensions and symbols of movement such as the spinning top, the pendulum and the arrow. The artist's world, it has been pointed out, was not static; it was in the process of becoming. In Klee's vernacular, an active line moves freely. It is "a walk for a walk's sake, without aim." Klee's textbook and his friend Wassily Kandinsky's Point and Line to Plane, published in 1926, became Bauhaus classics.
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."