THE PRINTS OF PAUL KLEE
James Thrall Soby
[KLEE, PAUL] James Thrall Soby: THE PRINTS OF PAUL KLEE. New York: Curt Valentin, 1945. First edition [1,000 copies]. Black cloth portfolio with paper labels to front and spine. 40 loose prints [complete], Booklet xv [vii] pp + 5 black and white illustrations, housed in original black cloth portfolio. The 40 etchings and lithographs were printed by the Meriden Gravure Company and The Golden Eagle Press. The eight color plates were reproduced in stencil by Esther Gentle. Booklet in uncoated paper wrappers with small black design to front panel [no title on stitched binding]. Wrappers slightly marked and dusted. Plate no. 1 Jungfrau im Baum uniformly darkened to the fore edge margin. Close inspection reveals a couple of tiny dust spots randomly in the margins of a couple of plates. Portfolio flaps lightly foxed, but a very good copy with complete set of nearly fine plates.
Black cloth Portfolio housing [40] 9 x 12-inch [22.86 x 30.48 cm] plates printed by the Meriden Gravure Company with eight color plates reproduced in stencil by Esther Gentle, and a 24-page booklet that contains 5 additional full-page black and white reproductions of 3 pan and ink and 2 lithographs, a list of plates in the portfolio, and a Catalog of Prints, etchings and lithographs, prepared by the artist's widow and printed here as a basis for further research.
The Prints of Paul Klee was first published in the summer of 1945 by art dealer Curt Valentin. The book features plates of facsimile impressions of 40 lithographs and etchings from 1903 – 1931 by Paul Klee and is accompanied by a brochure with an introduction by James Thrall Soby, former head of the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art.
This first edition of Paul Klee Klee’s etchings and lithographs shows his changing style, from academic traditionalist to abstractionist. “I want to create something very humble,” he wrote in 1902. “I will think of a very tiny formative motif; my pencil will be able to hold it without any technique.”
“Klee’s work was as much analytical as it was spontaneous. His rigor as an artist never got in the way of his humor, or his excitement at the inexplicable nature of things, both in the world itself and in the world confined by the edges of his painted vision… Klee’s art developed not by shucking off earlier modes or compartmentalizing different elements, so much as by reintegrating and reformulating what he had already achieved in a different register. And as much as he strove to understand the visible world rationally, he never lost that playfulness and openness to the unbidden that makes his work so lively, generous and unexpected” (The Guardian). Freitag 6109.
Paul Klee (1879-1940) was an extraordinary painter, draughtsman, graphic artist, teacher and theoretician who had a decisive influence on the development of art in the twentieth century. His graphic work in particular clearly shows how he broke with tradition and became one of the major innovators of modern art.
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." [xlist_2018]