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Paul Klee Quotes
1879–1940 Germany
Paul Klee (December 18 1879 – June 29 1940) was a Swiss painter of German nationality. He was influenced by many different art styles in his work, including expressionism, cubism and surrealism; he was art-teacher at the Bauhaus with Kandinsky; they exchanged their ideas on art very intensively.
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It is possible that a picture will move far away from Nature and yet find its way back to reality. The faculty of memory, experience at a distance produces pictorial associations.
Statement of mid-1920'; as quoted in Abstract Art (1990)
My mirror probes down to the heart. I write words on the forehead and around the corners of the mouth. My human faces are truer than the real ones.
The work grows "stone upon stone" (additive) or
Pedagogical Sketch Book (1925)
In art, too, there is room enough for exact research.. .What was accomplished in music before the end of the eighteenth century has hardly been begun in the pictorial field.
..I thought I had come into the clear in art when for the first time I was able to apply an abstract style to nature.
Color has taken possession of me; no longer do I have to chase after it, I know that it has hold of me forever.. .Color and I are one. I am a painter.
Diary-notes from Tunisia (1914)
Everything vanishes around me, and works are born as if out of the void. Ripe, graphic fruits fall off. My hand has become the obedient instrument of a remote will.
First of all, the art of living; then as my ideal profession, poetry and philosophy, and as my real profession, plastic arts; in the last resort, for lack of income, illustrations.
At the moment, an unpleasant feeling presses on my stomach, as though the new year of the unified, national Germany has assisted in the advent of an all too torch-parade-like sparkling wine bacchanal.
What does the artist create? Forms and spaces! How does he create them? In certain chosen proportions.. .O satire, you plague of intellectuals.
As time passes I become more and more afraid of my growing love of music. I don’t understand myself. I play solo sonatas by Bach: next to them, what is Böcklin? It makes me smile.
The father of the arrow is the thought: how do I expand my reach? Over this river? This lake? That mountain ?
Pedagogical Sketch Book (1925)
Alfred Kubin, my benefactor, has arrived! He acted so enthusiastic that he carried me away. We actually sat entranced in front of my drawings! Really quite entranced! Profoundly entranced!
The conviction that painting is the right profession grows stronger and stronger in me. Writing is the only other thing I still feel attracted to. Perhaps when I am mature I shall go back to it.
The changeover was complete; in the summer of 1907 I devoted myself entirely to the appearance of nature and upon these studies built my black-and-white landscapes on glass, 1907/1908.
In earlier versions of 'Woman and Beast' the woman suffered too much. Later I gave her that not altogether disgusted expression. Dissertations could be written about the significance of the 'ugliness' of my figures.
And now an altogether revolutionary discovery: to adapt oneself to the contents of the paintbox is more important than [to] nature and its study. I must some day be able to improvise freely on the chromatic keyboard of the rows of watercolor cup.
The main thing now is not to paint precociously but to be, or at least become, an individual. The art of mastering life is the prerequisite for all further forms of expression, whether they are paintings, sculptures, tragedies, or musical compositions.
Music, for me, is a love bewitched.
The beautiful, which is perhaps inseparable from art, is not after all tied to the subject, but to the pictorial representation. In this way and in no other does art overcome the ugly without avoiding it.
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