Paul Klee: Quotes about art

Paul Klee was German Swiss painter. Explore interesting quotes on art.

Paul Klee: 208 quotes12 likes

“Art does not reproduce what we see. It makes us see.”

Section I

(de) Kunst gibt nicht das Sichtbare wieder, sondern macht sichtbar.
1916 - 1920, Creative Credo (1920)
Variant: Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible.

“Franz Marc.... is more human, he loves more warmly, is more demonstrative.... I only try to relate myself to God, and if I am in harmony with God, I don't fancy that my brothers are not also in harmony with me; but that is their business... My fire is more like that of the dead or the unborn... Art is like Creation: it holds good on the last days as on the first.
What my art probably lacks, is a kind of passionate humanity. I don't love animals and every sort of creature with an earthly warmth... I tend rather to dissolve into the whole of creation and am then on a footing of brotherliness to my neighbour, to all things earthly. I possess. The earth-idea gives way to the world-idea. My love is distant and religious.”

Paul Klee

Quote (1916), # 1008, in The Diaries of Paul Klee, translation: Pierre B. Schneider, R. Y. Zachary and Max Knight; publisher, University of California Press, 1964
1916 - 1920

“The naked body is an altogether suitable object. In art classes I have gradually learned something of it from every angle. But now I will no more project some plan of it: I will proceed so that all its essentials, even those hidden by optical perspective, will appear upon the paper. And thus a little uncontested personal property has already been discovered, a style has been created.”

Paul Klee

Quote (June 1902), as cited in Artists on Art, from the 14th – 20th centuries, ed. Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves; Pantheon Books, 1972, London, p. 443
1895 - 1902

“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.”

Paul Klee

quote of Paul Klee from the text Exact experiments in the realm of art, 1928; 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 1921 - 1930

“.. 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.”

Paul Klee

Paul Klee, in an autobiographical text for Wilhelm Hausenstein, 1919; 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 1916 - 1920

“The more horrible this world (as today, for instance), the more abstract our art, whereas a happy world brings forth an art of the here and now.”

Paul Klee

Diary entry (1915), # 951 , in The Diaries of Paul Klee, translation: Pierre B. Schneider, R. Y. Zachary and Max Knight; publisher, University of California Press, 1964 1916 - 1920 Variant: The more horrifying this world becomes (as it is these days) the more art becomes abstract; while a world at peace produces realistic art. Variant: The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract; while a world at peace produces realistic art. (this variant was quoted in the speech "Between Two Ages: The Meaning Of Our Times" by Wm. Van Dusen Wishard) http://www.commonwealthnorth.org/transcripts/wishard.html

“What had already been done for music by the end of the eighteenth century has at last been begun for the pictorial arts. Mathematics and physics furnished the means in the form of rules to be followed and to be broken. In the beginning it is wholesome to be concerned with the functions and to disregard the finished form. Studies in algebra, in geometry, in mechanics characterize teaching directed towards the essential and the functional, in contrast to apparent. One learns to look behind the façade, to grasp the root of things. One learns to recognize the undercurrents, the antecedents of the visible. One learns to dig down, to uncover, to find the cause, to analyze.”

Paul Klee

1921 - 1930
Source: 'Bauhaus prospectus 1929'; as quoted in Artists on Art, from the 14th – 20th centuries, ed. by Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves; Pantheon Books, 1972, London, p. 444

“We [at the Bauhaus, in Dessau - where Klee was art teacher with Kandinsky ] construct and construct, and yet intuition still has its uses. Without it we can do a lot, but not everything... When intuition is joined to exact research it speeds the progress of exact research..”

Paul Klee

1921 - 1930
Source: 'Bauhaus prospectus 1929'; as quoted in Artists on Art, from the 14th – 20th centuries, ed. by Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves; Pantheon Books, 1972, London, p. 444

“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

“..(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

“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

“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)

“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

“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

“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

“[commenting French Cubist art].. Trees are violated, humans become incapable of life; there is a coercion that leads to the un-recognazibility of the object, to a picture-puzzle. For here what counts is not a profane law, but a law of art.”

Paul Klee

Quote (April 1912); as cited in Kandinsky and Klee in Tunisia, Roger Benjamin & Cristina Ashjian; Univ of California Press, 2015, p. 106
In April 1912 Paul Klee spent 16 days with his wife Lily in Paris. They visited the exhibtion of the 'Salon des Independants' of 1912, where works were shown of Delaunay, Seurat and many Cubist works
1911 - 1914

“I have now reached the point where I can look over the great art of antiquity and its Renaissance. But, for myself, I cannot find any artistic connection with our own times. And to want to create something outside of one's own age strikes me as suspect. Great perplexity. This is why I am again all on the side of satire. Am I to be completely absorbed by it once more? For the time being it is my only creed. Perhaps I shall never become positive? In any case, I will defend myself like a wild beast.”

Paul Klee

Quote (1901), # 294, in The Diaries of Paul Klee, translation: Pierre B. Schneider, R. Y. Zachary and Max Knight; publisher, University of California Press, 1964
1895 - 1902

“These are primitive beginnings in art, such as one usually finds in ethnographic collections or at home in one's nursery. Do not laugh, reader! Children also have artistic ability, and there is wisdom in their having it! The more helpless they are, the more instructive are the examples they furnish us; and they must be preserved from corruption at an early age. Parallel phenomena are provided by the works of the mentally diseased; neither childish behaviour nor madness are insulting words here, as they commonly are. All this is to be taken very seriously, more seriously than all the public galleries, when it comes to reforming today's art.”

Paul Klee

Diary entry (January 1912), # 905, quoting his "Munich Art Letter" in the journal Die Alpen
1911 - 1914

“Art should be like a holiday: something to give a man the opportunity to see things differently and to change his point of view.”

Paul Klee

As quoted in the film Der Bauhaus, produced by TV-Rechte in Germany (1975)
Attributed from posthumous publications

“Since not even sufficient time for my main business remains to me. Production is taking a larger magnitude at a faster tempo, and can no longer wholly keep up with these children. They [very probably: his new art] issue forth.”

Paul Klee

Paul Klee to his son Felix Paul Klee, 29.12.1939; 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 1931 -1940