"Formerly we used to represent things visible 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, thus expressing the belief that the visible world is...
[more]"Formerly we used to represent things visible 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, thus expressing the belief that the visible world is merely an isolated case in relation to the universe and that there are other, more latent realities...."
So wrote Swiss painter Paul Klee, one of the twentieth century's ultimate Romantics, in 1920. An all-around genius (Klee probably could have enjoyed, had he chosen, a stellar career as a musician or scholar), he was fascinated by the mystic, the metaphysical, the transcendental. He was blessed with an innate sense of balance between form and content. The sheer breadth of Klee's influences -- both those who influenced him and those he influenced -- speaks to his absorbent intellectual facility. He admired Cézanne , established a standard of quality for the Bluer Reiter and the Bauhaus movements, swooned over Mozart and Bach, and read widely in Goethe.
But the last example is perhaps the most relevant, for Klee was, above all else in his astonishingly diverse oeuvre, a poetic painter who refused to separate art from writing. Many of his paintings teem with consciously primitive symbols (inspired in part by trips to Tunisia and Egypt), as well as signs, letters, punctuation, codes, and hieroglyphs. "An artist must be so much -- poet, natural scientist, philosopher," Klee wrote. Few would have the gall to write these words in earnest, far fewer the vision to live up to them.
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