Paul Klee et la nature de L’Art, Une dévotion aux petites choses (Book)

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Paul Klee et la nature de L’Art, Une dévotion aux petites choses (Book) , Softcover, good condition inside and traces on cover. French. Under the supervision of Margaret Pfenninger. Hazan. 216 pages. 200 illustrations. Museums of Strasbourg

Paul Klee and the nature of Art, A devotion to small things.
How did Paul Klee’s perception of nature constitute an unlimited source of creation for both the painter and the educator? This question, which fed his teaching at the Bauhaus between 1921 and 1931, is confronted with the particular context of scientific curiosity at the start of the 20th century. Innumerable are then, scientific models, photographs, magazines, specimens or drawings which seek, just like Klee’s art, to make visible the imperceptible in the most elementary natural world. This is a Germanic tradition that goes back to Goethe with which Klee is in resonance.

This work bases this approach on the basis of a double research. The first situates Klee’s position on nature in the broader context of the birth of abstraction. The second confronts the artist’s intentions with the modern paradigm of a tilting of the scientific world: at the moment when Klee forms his artistic theory, new possibilities of examination of matter and the revolution of quantum physics are imposed.

Then tackled, along with a study of his theoretical and educational texts, thirteen fundamental concepts related to Klee’s idea of ​​nature and which run through his different writings: tree, becoming, dialogue, essence, structuring energies , genesis, seed, intuition, microcosm / macrocosm, movement, oppositions, organisms and rhythms. Taking the path as a model, these thirteen notions – with comparison of Klee’s educational files – punctuate the corpus of works presented in chronological order. An illustrated, annotated, extremely detailed chronology based on numerous sources traces Klee’s ten years of presence in the turbulent history of the Bauhaus and presents his two years spent at the Academy of Fine Arts in Düsseldorf.