PAUL KLEE
Alfred H. Barr, Jr.
Alfred H. Barr, Jr.: PAUL KLEE. New York: Museum of Modern Art, March 1930. First Edition [1,000 copies]. Slim quarto. Printed stapled wrappers. 32 pp. 10 black and white plates. 63 works listed. Wrappers lightly dust spotted with light wear overall. Text and illustrations fresh and clean. Catalog of Klee’s first comprehensive exhibition in the United States. A very good or better copy.
8.5 x 11 softcover book with 32 pages and 10 gorgeous black and white plates. Published on the occasion of the exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art from March 13 to April 2, 1930. Alfred H. Barr contributed a four-page introduction for this catalog of Klee’s first comprehensive exhibition in the United States.
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."