Paul Klee: Trending quotes (page 3)

“Reality and dream simultaneously, and myself makes a third in the party, completely at home here. This will be fine.”

Paul Klee

Diary-note, 7 April 1914; as quoted by June Taboroff, on 'AramcoWorld', May, June 1991 http://archive.aramcoworld.com/issue/199103/travels.in.tunisia.htm
1911 - 1914, Diary-notes from Tunisia' (1914)

Dreams , Home , Reality

“What does the artist create? Forms and spaces! How does he create them? In certain chosen proportions... O satire, you plague of intellectuals.”

Paul Klee

Quote (1905), # 599, in The Diaries of Paul Klee, translation: Pierre B. Schneider, R. Y. Zachary and Max Knight; publisher, University of California Press, 1964
1903 - 1910

“The harbor and city.... were behind us [Klee's first glimpse of Tunis], slightly hidden. First, we passed down a long canal. On shore, very close, our first Arabs. The sun has a dark power. The colorful clarity on shore full of promise. Macke too feels it. We both know that we shall work well here.”

Paul Klee

Diary-note, 7 April 1914; as quoted by June Taboroff, on 'AramcoWorld', May, June 1991 http://archive.aramcoworld.com/issue/199103/travels.in.tunisia.htm
1911 - 1914, Diary-notes from Tunisia' (1914)

Color , Feeling , Sun

“The longer a line, the more of the time element it contains. Distance is time whereas a surface is apprehended more in terms of the moment.”

Paul Klee

Exact Experiments in the Realm of Art (1927)
1921 - 1930

Time

“To emphasize only the beautiful seems to me to be like a mathematical system that only concerns itself with positive numbers.”

Paul Klee

Diary entry (March 1906), # 759, in The Diaries of Paul Klee, 1898-1918; University of California Press, 1968
1903 - 1910

Beauty , Mathematics

“I can dimly recollect Kandinsky and Weisgerber, who were fellow students of mine... Kandinsky was quiet and mixed the colours on his palette with the greatest diligence and, so it seemed to me, with a kind of studiousness, peering very closely at what he was doing.”

Paul Klee

Klee in a autobiographical text for Wilhelm Hausenstein, 1919; as quoted in Klee & Kandinsky, 2015 exhibition text – exposition, Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau Munich, from 21 October 2015 to 24 January 2016: on https://www.zpk.org/en/exhibitions/review_0/2015/klee-kandinsky-969.html
1916 - 1920

“We document, explain, justify, construct, organize: these are good things, but we do not succeed in coming to the whole... But we may as well calm down: construction is not absolute. Our virtue is this: by cultivating the exact we have laid the foundations for a science of art, including the unknown X.”

Paul Klee

Statement of 1917; as quoted in Teaching at the Bauhaus (2000) by Rainer Wick and Gabriele Diana Grawe, p. 231
1916 - 1920

Art , Science

“Music, for me, is a love bewitched. / Fame as a painter? / Writer, modern poet? Bad joke. / So I have no calling, and loaf.”

Paul Klee

Quote (1899), # 67, in The Diaries of Paul Klee, translation: Pierre B. Schneider, R. Y. Zachary and Max Knight; publisher, University of California Press, 1964
1895 - 1902

Love , Music

“..(Then come the lovers of art / and contemplate the bleeding work from outside. / Then come the photographers. / "New art," it says in the newspaper the following day. / The learned journals / give it a name that ends in "ism").”

Paul Klee

Quote (1905), # 690, in The Diaries of Paul Klee, translation: Pierre B. Schneider, R. Y. Zachary and Max Knight; publisher, University of California Press, 1964
1903 - 1910

Art , Lovers , Learning

“I am God / So much of the divine / is heaped in me / that I cannot die.
My head burns to the point of bursting.
One of the worlds / hidden in it / wants to be born. / But now I must suffer / to bring it forth.”

Paul Klee

Quote (1901), # 155, in The Diaries of Paul Klee, translation: Pierre B. Schneider, R. Y. Zachary and Max Knight; publisher, University of California Press, 1964
1895 - 1902

God , World , Suffering

“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.”

Paul Klee

Diary entry (December 1905), # 733, in The Diaries of Paul Klee, 1898-1918; University of California Press, 1968
1903 - 1910

Beauty , Art , Way

“I project on the surface; that is, the essence of the subject must always become visible, even if this is impossible in nature, which is not adapted to this relief style. The absence of foreshortening also plays a crucial part in the process... For I have discovered a very small, undisputed, personal possession: a particular sort of three-dimensional representation on the flat surface... I am my style.”

Paul Klee

Quote (July 1902), # 425, in The Diaries of Paul Klee, translation: Pierre B. Schneider, R. Y. Zachary and Max Knight; publisher, University of California Press, 1964
1895 - 1902

Nature , Parting , Personality

“Color is primarily Quality. Secondly, it is also Weight, for it has not only color value but also brilliance. Thirdly, it is Measure, for besides Quality and Weight, it has its limits, its area, and its extent, all of which may be measured.Tone value is primarily Weight, but in its extent and its boundaries, it is also Measure.Line, however, is solely Measure.”

Paul Klee

Quote from Klee's lecture 'On Modern Art', Kunstverein, Jena (26 January 1924), trans. Paul Findlay in Paul Klee: On Modern Art (London, 1948)
1921 - 1930

Color

“Tunis. My head is full of the impressions of last night's walk. Art-Nature-Self. Went to work at once and painted in watercolour in the Arab quarter. Began the synthesis of urban architecture and pictorial architecture. Not yet pure, but quite attractive, somewhat too much of the mood, the enthusiasm of traveling in it-the Self, in a word. Things will no doubt get more objective later, once the intoxication has worn off a bit.”

Paul Klee

Diary-note, 7 April 1914; # 926-f; as cited by Francesco Mazzaferro, in 'The Diaries of Paul Klee Part Four', : Klee as an Expressionist and Constructivist Painter http://letteraturaartistica.blogspot.nl/2015/05/paul-klee-ev27.html
The evening of their arrival, Dr. Jaggi took the 3 artists Klee, August Macke and Louis Moilliet on 'a nocturnal walk through the Arab city' Tunis. Klee wrote this note next day.
1911 - 1914, Diary-notes from Tunisia' (1914)

Art , Travel , Mood , Nature

“Thoughts about the art of portraiture. Some will not recognize the truthfulness of my mirror. Let them remember that I am not here to reflect the surface (this can be done by the photographic plate), but must penetrate inside. 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.”

Paul Klee

Diary entry (1901), # 136, in The Diaries of Paul Klee, 1898-1918; University of California Press, 1964
1895 - 1902

Truth , Art , Heart

“My etchings have.... the mistake of being processed as images and to have at the same time the meaning of epigrams. It is the union of pure painting with pure graphics... From now onwards my task will be the division of art and graphics, and the full development of both fields. The pure art has already turned to impressionism and the graphics is going to do it.”

Paul Klee

Quote in a letter to his wife, 12 June, 1906; as cited in Paul Klee. Das Frühwerk 1883-1922, p. 50.
1903 - 1910

Art , Time , Painting

“Am I God? / I have accumulated so many great things in me! / My head aches to the point of bursting. / It has to hold an overview of power. / May you want (are you worthy of it?) / that it be born to you.”

Paul Klee

Quote (1905), # 690, in The Diaries of Paul Klee, translation: Pierre B. Schneider, R. Y. Zachary and Max Knight; publisher, University of California Press, 1964
1903 - 1910

God

“Twenty-one years old! I never doubted my vital force. But how is it to fare with my chosen art? The recognition that at bottom I am a poet, after all, should be no hindrance in the plastic arts! And should I really have to be a poet, Lord knows what else I should desire. Certainly, a sea swells within me, for I feel. It is a hopeless state, to feel in such a way that the storm rages on all sides at once and that nowhere is a lord who commands the chaos.”

Paul Klee

Quote (1900), # 121, in The Diaries of Paul Klee, translation: Pierre B. Schneider, R. Y. Zachary and Max Knight; publisher, University of California Press, 1964
1895 - 1902

Art , Way , Feeling , Rage

“His [ Vincent van Gogh's] line is new and yet very old, and happily not a purely European affair. It is more a question of reform than of revolution.”

Paul Klee

Quote (1911), Diary # 899; as cited by Francesco Mazzaferro, in 'The Diaries of Paul Klee Part Four', : Klee as an Expressionist and Constructivist Painter http://letteraturaartistica.blogspot.nl/2015/05/paul-klee-ev27.html
speaking in positive terms of Van Gogh and his way of using the line in painting
1911 - 1914

Question

“.. I served Beauty by drawing her enemies.”

Paul Klee

Quote of Paul Klee, from 'Diaries I', 1901; as quoted in 'Klee & Kandinsky', 2015 exhibition text, Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau Munich, 2015-2016 https://www.zpk.org/en/exhibitions/review_0/2015/klee-kandinsky-969.html
on his caricatures and his satirical drawings Klee made then
1895 - 1902

Beauty , Drawing