Paul Klee

Creative Confession brings together three short critical texts written by Paul Klee, one of the most distinctive artists of the early twentieth century. Reflective and often lyrical, the essays exemplify Klee's artistic thinking and his relationship with the creative process. Entitled "Graphic Art" (published as Creative Confession, 1920), "Ways of Nature Study" (1923) and "Exact Experiments in the Realm of Art" (1928), the texts arch into each other...

An emblematic figure of the early 20th century, Paul Klee participated in the expansive Avant-Garde movements in Germany and Switzerland. From the vibrant Blaue Reiter movement to Surrealism at the end of the 1930s and throughout his teaching years at the Bauhaus, he attempted to capture the organic and harmonic nature of painting by alluding to other artistic mediums such as poetry, literature, and, above all, music. While he collaborated with artists...

This book illustrates how Paul Klee's critical and ironic take on life was evident in every stage of his career. It argues that Klee's style emerged from a philosophical school that originated with early German Romanticism and consisted of perpetual shifts between satire and affirmation of the absolute, finite and infinite, and real and ideal.