Klee, Paul

We admire human creation second - The Beatles and Bob Dylan, heroes from the sixties whose music and lyrics changed a whole generation. In the twenties Pablo Picasso and Paul Klee were among the artists who changed our conception of art. 

Klee, Bern. Reprinted by permission of Zentrum Paul Klee and Artist Rights Society, Inc. 

A case illustrating the metaphorical approach to Alchemy is the Swiss-born master of fantasy, Paul Klee (1879-1940). Klee was early championed by the French Surrealists, and was one of the few modern painters mentioned by name in the First Manifesto of 1924. For Breton, Klee was particularly to be recommended as a pioneer of automatism, an artistic practice which we should now recognize to have arisen nearly a century earlier directly out of populist Spiritualist experiments. Klee s own writings, however, make plain the fact of a much more profound, quasi-philosophical impulse, one heavily redolent of traditional hermetic dialectics expressed by the perennial formula of the caniunctio oppositomm. Klee s transcendental and blatantly mystical aspirations were best manifested in his Schopferische Konfession (1920). As Klee claimed. 

Current address Paul-Klee-Strasse 11, D—6710 Frankenthal, Federal Republic of Germany... 

Elsewhere, then, material was asserting itself, foregrounding its textural properties, its unintended aspects. The ideas that animated the experiments with coatings and paints stemmed not just from the modernist art practices that were now banned. Willi Baumeister spoke of an automatism of the material that could be regulated fully by consciousness, just as Paul Klee similarly spoke of the life of material. In this, they echoed Romantic natural philosophy and early German chemistry, which likewise had ordained an equality between artist and substance, convinced that substance too possessed a will. 

Take Paul Klee, for example. You can like Klee s paintings without any preparation, and I liked Klee. Then I read the book that Paul Klee had written on his paintings, and I got a different perspective of his works. When you know what it means when an arrow in one of his paintings is thin or thick and so on, the painting takes on a different meaning. So, again, it s love at first approach and love when you know better. 

This provides greater scope for connectivity with individuals and for more embodied experiences. Visual art also requires such connectivity and embodied engagement from individuals in order to produce. The artist Paul Klee (1961) describes the period just before art is made as a nowhere existent something or a somewhere existent nothing (p. 4), which, once established by the artist, leaps into a new order. In Cezanne s account of making art, he depicts an assemblage of himself and the world to be painted and from which there needs to be some onergence ... 

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