Paul Klee Articles by Alfred H. Barr, Jr., James Johnson, Sweeney, Julia and Lyonel Feininger Author Museum of Modern Art (New York, N.Y.) Date 1941 Publisher The Museum of Modern Art Exhibition URL www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/2816 The Museum of Modern Art's exhibition history— from our founding in 1929 to the present—is available online. It includes exhibition catalogues, primary documents, installation views, and an index of participating artists. MoMA © 2017 The Museum of Modern Art MoMA 135 c.2 ARCHIVE i* 4 : ' . ' ' ' :' ' '' ' * ''' " '»" * ir{ BL.! M tf ARTICLES BY / ALFREDH. BARR, JR., JAMES JOHNSON SWEENEY JULIA AND LYONEL FEININGER THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, NEW YORK O/IAA I 3? TRUSTEES OF THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART Stephen C. Clark, Chairman of the Board; Wallace K. MacLeish, William S. Paley, Mrs. John Parkinson, Jr., Harrison, 1st Vice-Chairman ; Samuel A. Lewisohn, 2nd Mrs. Charles S. Payson, Mrs. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., Vice-Chairman; John Hay Whitney, President; Alfred Beardsley Ruml, Carleton Sprague Smith, Edward H. Barr, Jr., Vice-President and Director; John E. M. M. Warburg. Abhott, Executive Vice-President; Mrs. John S. Shep- pard, Treasurer; Mrs. Robert Woods Bliss, Mrs. W. Murray Crane, Marshall Field, Edsel B. Ford, Philip L. HONORARY TRUSTEES: Frederic Clay Bartlett, Goodwin, A. Conger Goodyear, Mrs. Simon Guggen Frank Crowninshield, Duncan Phillips, Mrs. Rainey heim, Mrs. David M. Levy, Henry R. Luce, Archibald Rogers, Paul J. Sachs. Seven thousand copies of this book have been printed for the Trustees of the Museum of Modern Art by the Plantin Press, New York, in January, 1941. Copyright 1941, The Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53 Street, New York City. ACKNOWLEDGMENT This traveling exhibition bas been selected in part from the Klee memorial exhibition held jointly at the Buchholz Gallery and the Willard Gallery in New York in October 1940. The Mu seum is indebted to Mr. Curt Valentin for his help in assembling the exhibition and for the use of the cuts which appear on pages 8 and 12. The Museum also extends special thanks to Mr. J. B. Neumann and to Mr. Karl Nierendorf whose collections have been heavily drawn upon for important additions to the exhibition. Mr. Neumann assisted the Museum in its Paul Klee Exhibition in 1930. In addition, the Museum wishes to thank the following who have generously lent to the exhi bition: Walter P. Chrysler, Jr., New York; Lyonel Feininger, New York; Philip Goodwin, New York; Miss Jane Greenough, Coeur d'Alene, Paul Klee 1926 Idaho; Sidney Janis, New York; George L. K. Morris, New York; Karl Nathan, New York; John S. Newberry, Grosse Pointe; Perry Rath- bone, St. Louis; Bernard J. Reis, New York; \ Miss Helen Resor, New York; Allan Roos, New York; Mme. Galka Scheyer, Hollywood; CONTENTS Herman Shulman, New York; Dr. W. R. Valentiner, Detroit; Mrs. Benjamin Watson, Acknowledgment 3 New York; Buchholz Gallery, New York; J. B. Introduction by Alfred H. Barr, Jr.* 4 Neumann, New York; Nierendorf Gallery, New Paul Klee by James Johnson Sweeney** 6 York; Miss Marian Willard, Albright Art Gal Recollections of Paul Klee lery, Buffalo; Germanic Museum, Harvard by Julia and Lyonel Feininger** 7 University; Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford. Catalog 9 This book has been prepared by the Department Chronology 11 of Circulating Exhibitions to accompany the Bibliography 12 memorial travelling exhibition which is to be Plates 13 shown in: The line cut on the cover is adapted from Klee's Letter Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Ghost, No. 61 in the present exhibition. Mass.; The Arts Club of Chicago, Chicago, 111.; The Portland Art Museum, Portland, Oregon; *Reprinted with revisions from the catalog of the Museum of Modern Art's Klee exhibition held in 1930. The San Francisco Museum of Art, San Fran **Reprinted from the catalog of the Paul Klee exhi cisco, Calif.; The City Art Museum of St. bition held at the Buchholz Gallery and the Willard Gallery in October, 1940 by courtesy of Curt V alentin. Louis, St/ Louis, Mo. g q expressive (as opposed to the descriptive) pos INTRODUCTION sibilities of color and to the charm of the Alfred H. Barr, Jr. apparently artless and naive. In Munich he became acquainted with three His father a Bavarian, liis mother Southern other young painters, Kandinsky, a Russian French, Paul Klee was born, with geographical who had also studied under Stuck, Franz Marc, appropriateness, in Switzerland near the town and August Macke, the last two, both of them of Berne, in the year 1879. His childhood was men of great promise, lost to German art during passed in an atmosphere of music for his father the First World War. The four formed the was a professional musician and conductor of nucleus of the famous group Der Blaue Reiter the orchestra in which his son at an early age which raised the banner of revolt in staid played the violin. His mother, too, came of a academic Munich, won a considerable success musical family so that for a time he expected to in Berlin and made the word Expressionism become a musician. However, after much de known throughout the world. Marc painted bate, he was sent in 1898 to Munich to study compositions of animals, using brilliant, pure drawing, at first at the Knitt school, and then color, a line of great style and a Cubistic tech with Franz Stuck at the Academy. Stuck was nique. Kandinsky's abstract Improvisations an academic painter of bizarre and macabre were among the first to disregard entirely all subjects, at times coarsely banal, hut with con vestiges of representation. But Klee, while he siderable imaginative power. In 1901 Klee made experimented with abstract design, continued the orthodox journey to Italy, but quite un- his researches in the realm of fantasy. orthodoxly he preferred early Christian art to In 1912 Klee visited Paris, where he stayed that of the quattrocento, Baroque to High for over a year. Guillaume Apollinaire, Picasso, Renaissance painting, and the Naples aquarium Delaunay, became his friends. A journey to to the classical antiquities of the Naples Mu Tunis (Kairuan) in 1914 seems to have been seum. equally important in the discovery of himself. For the next few years Klee lived with his Shortly after the War, the town of Weimar parents, producing very slowly a remarkable asked the architect Walter Gropius to reor series of etchings, among them Perseus (No. lb) ganize the art school. The Bauhaus, as the new which he exhibited in Switzerland and Munich. school was called, was primarily a technical Though he visited Paris he did not at first school devoted to the study of materials and become aware of the post -Impressionist and design in architecture, furniture, typography, Fauve revolutions. He found himself more con and other modern industrial arts. As a "spiritual cerned with drawing and caricature than with counterpoint" to these technological and utili painting. Goya's fantastic Caprichos interested tarian activities Gropius invited three painters him as did the other-worldly engravings of to live at the Bauhaus and give instruction in Blake and Fuseli. Of more recent draughtsmen drawing and painting. They were the Russian he found Kubin's weird humor, the bizarre Kandinsky, the American Feininger, and the pathos of James Ensor, and Redon's visionary Swiss Klee, three of the most gifted as well as lithographs most to his taste. He read the tales most adventurous artists at work in Germany. of Hoffmann and of Poe, the prose and poetry of Klee remained as professor at the Bauhaus from Baudelaire. His admirations both in graphic art 1920 to 1928. In 1926 the Bauhaus moved to and literature were clearly fantastic. Dessau and in the same year Feininger, Jav- He moved to Munich in 1906. In the next lensky, Kandinsky, and Klee, formed the Blue four years he came to know through exhibitions Four which exhibited throughout Germany and van Gogh, then Cezanne, and finally Matisse, America. Klee also sent paintings to the Societe who opened the eyes of the young artist to the Anonyme exhibitions in New York and Brooklyn. 4 Klee was "claimed" by the Surrealist group Their appeal is primarily to the sentiment, in Paris but refused to become in any formal to the subjective imagination. They have been sense a member of the movement. His work is, compared, for this reason, to the drawings of however, perhaps the finest realization of the young children at an age when they draw spon Surrealist ideal of an art which appears to be taneously from intuitive impulses rather than purely of the imagination, untrammelled by rea from observation. They have been compared to son or the outer world of empirical experience. the fantastic and often truly marvelous draw About 1929 Klee left the Bauhaus and accept ings of the insane who live in a world of the ed a professorship in the Diisseldorf Academy mind far removed from circumstantial reality. where he taught for three years. In the spring Klee's work sometimes suggests the painting of 1933 came the Nazi revolution which forced and ornament of primitive peoples such as: all art in Germany to conform to the timid and palaeolithic bone carvings, Eskimo drawings vulgar prejudices of Adolf Hitler. Klee left Ger and Bushman paintings, the pictographs of the many in disgust and returned to Berne. In American Indian. Drawings made subcon Switzerland he died seven years later, honored sciously or absentmindedly or while under hyp throughout the world wherever the human nosis occasionally suggest Klee's devices. In spirit still retained its freedom. fact, Klee has himself at times made "auto matic" drawings with some success.
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