PÄDAGOGISCHES SKIZZENBUCH
Paul Klee
Hans Wingler [introduction], László Moholy-Nagy [design]
Paul Klee, Hans Wingler [introduction], László Moholy-Nagy [design]: PÄDAGOGISCHES SKIZZENBUCH. Mainz and Berlin: Florian Kupferberg, 1965. First edition [Neue Bauhausbücher series] Text in German. Slim quarto. Green cloth decorated in white. Printed dust jacket. Black endpapers. 56 pp. Elaborate graphic design throughout, retaining the original text layout by László Moholy-Nagy. Dust jacket with tiny chip to spine crown, otherwise a fine copy in a fine dust jacket.
7.25 x 9.25 hardcover book with 56 pages of illustrated text. This edition is a reissue of 1925's Pädagogisches Skizzenbuch (the 2nd of the 14 Bauhaus Books edited by Walter Gropius and Moholy-Nagy). The interior typography by László Moholy-Nagy serves as a valuable reminder of the graphic design pioneered at the Bauhaus by Moholy-Nagy and Herbert Bayer.
- Vorwort: Hans Wingler
- Pädagogisches Skizzenbuch: Paul Klee
- Der Unterricht Von Paul Klee In Weimar Und Dessau: Helene Schmidt-Nonne
Walter Gropius and László Moholy-Nagy served as Editorial Directors for the 14 titles in the Bauhausbücher [Bauhaus Book] series published in Dessau from 1925 to 1929. The series served as an extension of the Bauhaus teaching tradition with volumes by Walter Gropius, Paul Klee, Adolf Meyer, Oskar Schlemmer, László Moholy-Nagy or as as anthologies of work produced by a select group of contemporaries such as Piet Mondrian, Theo van Doesburg, J. J. P. Oud, Kasimir Malewitsch and Albert Gleizes.
Prior to the 20th century, when artists were called upon to illustrate texts or provide posters for advertising, their function was to provide visual images that bore no formal relationship to the message. In other words, the illustration was simply a diversion.
More than any other group, the expositional, programmatic set of Bauhaus Bücher engineers one of the most consistently remarkable episodes in the history of the art of the book. A series of 14 volumes (1925–1930) edited by Walter Gropius and László Moholy-Nagy, the books rigorously demonstrate format as a systematic support of content and are discussed in Jan Tschichold’s classic and influential Die Neue Typograhie of 1928. In the Bauhaus Books the precepts and sense of content are palpably clear in the logic and decisions of design and format. Content is not so much conveyed by as in the carefully considered means and methods of presentation. Nowhere is the book more completely accomplished as a mental instrument; form and content virtually assume the operation of a mathematical proposition, arriving at a language in which everything formal belongs to syntax and not to vocabulary.
The Bauhaus Bücher series serve as testaments to the graphic design pioneered at the Bauhaus by Moholy-Nagy and Herbert Bayer. The layout of the pages designed by Moholy-Nagy—bold sans-serif captions floating in white space; compositions composed of arrows, dots and heavy ruled lines—is much more like a movie storyboard or a musical score.
“. . . typography is an instrument of communication. It has to be clear communication in the most penetrating form. Clarity must be particularly emphasized since this is the essence of our writing as compared with pictorial communication of ages ago. Our intellectual approach to the world is individually precise in contrast to the former individually and later collectively amorphous. Foremost, therefore: absolute clarity in all typographical works. Legibility—communication, that is, must never suffer from a priori assumed aesthetics. The letter types must never be squeezed into a pre-determined form.” — László Moholy-Nagy, 1923
"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."
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."