The Art of Paul Klee

Catalog description

The Swiss artist Paul Klee (1879-1940) is known for his small drawings, intricate motifs, and fantastical themes. His drawn and painted marks are personal hieroglyphs defying easy description. Drawing and painting in an age of epochal transformations (world war, economic collapse, the rise of Fascism), he persisted in an art of the small. Aligned with childhood, mental illness, and marginality in general, Klee's work still raises questions about the importance of unimportant art?a kind that pursues the private valor of an enchanted obscurity. Drawing on brilliant recent scholarship about Klee by Annie Bourneuf, as well as critical readings on childhood and modernism, mental illness and modernism, and the high melancholy theory of Walter Benjamin (whose Theses on the Philosophy of History derives from Klee's Angelus Novus, which Benjamin owned), the seminar will explore the value of the small and obscure not only in Klee's art and times but in our own.