Curriculum Materials: Amazing Animals in
Art
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Image 5 Paul Klee Essays: Questions: |
Background
Traditionally European artists attempted to imitate nature using laws of PERSPECTIVE perfected during the Renaissance. Amid accelerated social changes and innovations of the early 20th century, however, many artists rejected the notion that art must imitate nature. They often regarded a painting as a flat surface covered with colors, lines, and shapes that need not represent anything from the visible world. Artists increasingly looked to sources outside the Western Renaissance tradition, such as the art of Asia, Africa, and Oceania. This attitude led to intense experimentation, to an emphasis on the artist's personal vision and imagination, and to a broad spectrum of artistic styles and approaches ranging from naturalism to abstraction.
Paul Klee, like many artists in the early 20th century, wanted to reveal a world that had never been seen before. He wrote:
Art does not reproduce the visible; rather it makes visible. Formerly we used to represent things on earth, things we either liked to look at or would have liked to see. Today we reveal the reality that is behind visible things.1
To understand that reality, Klee avidly studied nature. He observed that nature is never static, but goes through continuous cycles of growth and change-becoming, growing, ripening, and fading. Klee believed that the artist's creative process is similar to creation in nature and that the formal elements, such as the point, the line, the PLANE, and SPACE, and the relationships among them, go through a similar process of growth and change.
Klee's closeness to nature influenced both his subject matter and his working methods. Throughout his career, he explored the relationship between nature and cosmic forces, searching for symbols and signs to express his ideas. He did not draw a clear distinction between art and writing, and many of his paintings are a form of writing, incorporating signs, arrows, floating letters, and codes for objects. Klee was also inspired by folk art and children's drawings, which appealed to him because of their directness, innocence, and spontaneity. An accomplished violinist, Klee thought of painting as similar to music in its expressiveness and its ability to touch the spirit of its viewers through color, form, and line. His work often depicts elements associated with sound and the principles of musical composition.
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1 Paul Klee, "Creative Credo," published in Herschel B. Chipp, Theories of Modern Art
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 182-86.