Klee Quotes

One eye sees, the other feels.

A single day is enough to make us a little larger or, another time, a little smaller.

A line is a dot that went for a walk.

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

A Klee painting named 'Angelus Novus' shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

Art does not reproduce the visible; it makes visible.

I am trying like Klee, to create something that will have a life of its own, that can put me in real danger, a danger which I willingly take on myself.

Color has got me. I no longer need to chase after it. It has got me for ever. I know it. That is the meaning of this happy hour.

One day I will lie nowhere with an angel at my side.

Art does not reproduce what is visible, it makes things visible.

Colour and I are one.

Becoming is superior to being.

It is the artistic mission to penetrate as far as may be toward that secret ground where primal law feeds growth.

After all, it's rather difficult to achieve the exact minimum, and it involves risks.

You talked about Nietzsche and his tertiary syphilis. Mozart and his uremia. Paul Klee and the scleroderma that shrank his joints and muscles to death. Frida Kahlo and the spina bifida that covered her legs with bleeding sores. Lord Byron and his clubfoot. The Brontë sisters and their tuberculosis. Mark Rothko and his suicide. Flannery O'Connor and her lupus. Inspiration needs disease, injury, madness.

You said how Michelangelo was a manic-depressive who portrayed himself as a flayed martyr in his painting. Henri Matisse gave up being a lawyer because of appendicitis. Robert Schumann only began composing after his right hand became paralyzed and ended his career as a concert pianist. (...) You talked about Nietzsche and his tertiary syphilis. Mozart and his uremia. Paul Klee and the scleroderma that shrank his joints and muscles to death. Frida Kahlo and the spina bifida that covered her legs with bleeding sores. Lord Byron and his clubfoot. The Bronte sisters and their tuberculosis. Mark Rothko and his suicide. Flannery O’Connor and her lupus. Inspiration needs disease, injury, madness. “According to Thomas Mann,” Peter said, “‘Great artists are great invalids.

Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible.

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

Art does not reproduce the visible rather, it makes visible.

mistikus pernah berkata begini pada seluruh patung yang tak bisa diraba: ‘di kehidupan sebenarnya, sesuatu yang kau torehkan ini hanyalah fana!’ tapi makhluk imajiner apa yang merangkak dan memiliki tempat-tempat luas seakan sabana Afrika telah muntah garingnya demi menangkup ia yang tak berjenis apa-apa. ia yang dinomori sebagai sang satu. yang penuh totem warna-warni di sekujur dagingnya. menebarkan piuh dingin yang amis dan luka terjerat kekosongan tanda sebelum bukit pasir menghisap tubuhnya atau warna pasir yang menggerus tubuhnya?

Indians do not hinder the progress of their dead by embalming or tight coffining. When the spirit has gone they give the body back to the earth. the earth welcomes the body-coaxes new life and beauty from it, hurries over what men shudder at. Lovely tender herbage bursts from the graves, swiftly, exulting over corruption.

I cannot be grasped in the here and now. For my dwelling place is as much among the dead as the yet unborn. Slightly closer to the heart of creation than usual. But not nearly close enough.

ditembakkan dari pelir barracuda yang lolos api, tubuhnya penuh runcing seperti penggaris 16 centi ke atas terus ke atas melewati loronglorong rusak yang pengap akan tetesan air amis. terbuka menganga, lurus terus maju tanpa mundur memasuki sorga yang hilang di Bermuda kecil warna-warni logo bungabungaan yang diracuni bensin dan mungkin sundutan rokok tengik. owalah...rambutrambut keriting siapa ini disepahkan mulut lebar ikan lonte di danau sebelah utara?

Art does not render what is visible, but renders visible.

The future is you revisiting places you've once been, with a fresh set of eyes. It's the closest thing we can ever get to time traveling.

Staring at a blank piece of paper, I can't think of anything original. I feel utterly uninspired and unreceptive. It's the familiar malaise of 'artist's block' and in such circumstances there is only one thing to do: just start drawing. The artist Paul Klee refers to this simple act as 'taking a line for a walk', an apt description of my own basic practice: allowing the tip of a pencil to wander through the landscape of a sketchbook, motivated by a vague impulse but hoping to find something much more interesting along the way. Strokes, hooks, squiggles and loops can resolve into hills, faces, animals, machines -even abstract feelings- the meanings of which are often secondary to the simple act of making (something young children know intuitively). Images are not preconceived and then drawn, they are conceived as they are drawn. Indeed, drawing is its own form of thinking, in the same way birdsong is 'thought about' within a bird's throat.

I imagined face and genitals to be the corresponding poles of the female sex, when girls wept I thought of pudenda weeping in unison.

Kunst gibt nicht das Sichtbare wieder, sondern Kunst macht sichtbar.

Klee would start a picture with a point and then “take a line for a walk.

I’ve discovered my deepest source of inspiration, which is art: the art of the primitives like Henri Rousseau, Gauguin, Paul Klee, and De Chirico.

His moment of revelation duly arrived; however, for Klee it did not come through music, but through travel. In 1914 he went to Tunis to paint, an experience that changed him and his art.

Paul Klee, who may be regarded as the poet among modern painters, says: “It is the artist’s mission to penetrate as far as may be toward that secret ground where primal law feeds growth.

After a noticeable silence, he'd recently published a book of technically baffling poems, with line breaks so arbitrary and frequent as to be useless, arrhythmic. On the page they look like some of Charles Bukowski's skinny, chatty, muttering-stuttering antiverses. Impossibly, Mark's words make music, the faraway strains of an irresistible jazz. It's plain to any reader, within a few lines—well, go read the poems and see, Marcus Ahearn traffics with the ineffable. He makes the mind of the speaker present, in that here-and-now where the reader actually reads—that place. Such a rare thing. Samuel Beckett. Jean Follain, Ionesco—the composer Billy Strayhorn. Mark calls his process "psychic improvisation" and referred me to the painter Paul Klee; the term was Klee's. "You just get out a pen and a notebook and let your mind go long," he told me.

The artist does not ascribe to the natural form of appearance the same convincing significance as the realists who are his critics. He does not feel so intimately bound to that reality, because he cannot see in the formal products of nature the essence of the creative process. He is more concerned with formative powers than with formal products.

My self… is a dramatic ensemble. Here a prophetic ancestor makes his appearance. Here a brutal hero shouts. Here an alcoholic bon vivant argues with a learned professor. Here a lyric muse, chronically love-struck, raises her eyes to heaven. Here papa steps forward, uttering pedantic protests. Here the indulgent uncle intercedes. Here the aunt babbles gossip. Here the maid giggles lasciviously. And I look upon it all with amazement, the sharpened pen in my hand. A pregnant mother wants to join the fun. ‘Pshtt!’ I cry, ‘You don’t belong here. You are divisible.’ And she fades out.

I was also, slowly, to learn that there were painters whom you grew out of (like the Pre-Raphaelites); painters you grew into (Chardin); painters towards whom you had a lifelong, sighing indifference (Greuze); painters you suddenly became aware of after years of unnoticing (Liotard, Hammershoi, Cassatt, Vallotton); painters assuredly great but to whom your response was always a bit negligent (Rubens); and painters who would, whatever age you were, remain persistently, indomitably great (Piero, Rembrandt, Degas). And then – perhaps the slowest advance of all – I permitted myself to believe, or rather see, that not all Modernism was entirely wonderful. That some parts of it were better than others; that maybe Picasso could be vainglorious, Miró and Klee could be twee, Léger could be repetitive, and so on. I eventually came to realise that Modernism had strengths and weaknesses and a built-in obsolescence, just like all other art movements. Which, as it happens, made it more rather than less interesting.

But, as Sir Herbert Read remarks in his Concise History of Modern Art, metaphysical anxiety is no longer only Germanic and northern; it now characterizes the whole of the modern world. Read quotes Klee, who wrote in his Diary at the beginning of 1915: “The more horrifying this world becomes (as it is in these days) the more art becomes abstract; while a world at peace produces realistic art.” To Franz Marc, abstraction offered a refuge from the evil and ugliness in this world. “Very early in life I felt that man was ugly. The animals seemed to be more lovely and pure, yet even among them I discovered so much that was revolting and hideous that my painting became more and more schematic and abstract.

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

You adapt yourself, Paul Klee said, to the contents of the paintbox. Adapting yourself to the contents of the paintbox, he said, is more important than nature and its study. The painter, in other words, does not fit the paints to the world. He most certainly does not fit the world to himself. He fits himself to the paint. The self is the servant who bears the paintbox and its inherited contents.

The composition responds to the spirituality that lay at the heart of the Blue Rider group. Real life is represented in the top half, only to fuse with the ethereal world that Klee has laid out on the bottom half of the picture: internal and external worlds expressed and combined through color. Klee, like Kandinsky, believed art wasn’t there to “reproduce the visible; rather, it makes [life] visible.

Artists who shared (Paul) Klee's fundamental beliefs, such as (Piet) Mondrian, were searching for universal truths, often derived from nature and having "all-mighty power." For some, a traditional notion of God was part of this; for others, it was of no consequence. What mattered was not the precise character of the object of worship, but the shared belief in its superiority to the cult of self. (104)

(Charles) Laughton was one of the most pugnaciously morose men I had ever met. His huge talent seemed to endorse his implacable resentment. His Caliban self-portraiture must have been further agnozied by being incarcerated, like so many of his unhappy generation, in that closet which dared not speak its name. Even his large collection of Klees and Kokoshchkas was displayed as trophies of martyrdom rather than joyful plunder.

Down deep we all hug something. The great forest hugs its silence. The sea and the air hug the spilled cries of sea-birds. The forest hugs only silence; its birds and even its beasts are mute. It must have hurt the Indians dreadfully to have the things they had always believed trampled on and torn from their hugging.

C’è un quadro di Klee che s’intitola Angelus Novus. Vi si trova un angelo che sembra in atto di allontanarsi da qualcosa su cui fissa lo sguardo. Ha gli occhi spalancati, la bocca aperta, le ali distese. L'angelo della storia deve avere questo aspetto. Ha il viso rivolto al passato. Dove ci appare una catena di eventi, egli vede una sola catastrofe, che accumula senza tregua rovine su rovine e le rovescia ai suoi piedi. Egli vorrebbe ben trattenersi, destare i morti e ricomporre l’infranto. Ma una tempesta spira dal paradiso, che si è impigliata nelle sue ali, ed è così forte che egli non può più chiuderle. Questa tempesta lo spinge irresistibilmente nel futuro, a cui volge le spalle, mentre il cumulo delle rovine sale davanti a lui al cielo. Ciò che chiamiamo il progresso, è questa tempesta.

Mimicry within mimicry, imperfectly understood idea within imperfectly understood idea: the second-year girl student in the printing department, not understanding the typographical exercise she had been set, and playing with type like a child with a typewriter, avoiding, in the name of design, anything like symmetry, clarity, or logic; the third-year girl student showing a talentless drawing and saying, in an unacknowledged paraphrase of Klee, that she had described the 'the adventures of a line'; and that fourth-year man playing with tools for the peasants. There are times when the intellectual confusion of India seems complete and it seems impossible to get back to clarifying first principles. Which must have been one of the aims of an institute of design: to make people look afresh at the everyday.

—Fijate un poco en Mondrian —decía Etienne—. Frente a él se acaban los signos mágicos de un Klee. Klee jugaba con el azar, los beneficios de la cultura. La sensibilidad pura puede quedar satisfecha con Mondrian, mientras que para Klee hace falta un fárrago de otras cosas. Un refinado para refinados. Un chino, realmente. En cambio Mondrian pinta absoluto. Te ponés delante, bien desnudo, y entonces una de dos: ves o no ves. El placer, las cosquillas, las alusiones, los terrores o las delicias están completamente de más.

—Quiere decir que en el fondo una pintura como la de Klee te reclama un diploma ès lettres, o por lo menos ès poésie, en tanto que Mondrian se conforma con que uno se mondrianice y se acabó. —No es eso —dijo Etienne. —Claro que es eso —dijo Oliveira—. Según vos una tela de Mondrian se basta a sí misma. Ergo, necesita de tu inocencia más que de tu experiencia. Hablo de inocencia edénica, no de estupidez. Fijate que hasta tu metáfora sobre estar desnudo delante del cuadro huele a preadamismo. Paradójicamente Klee es mucho más modesto porque exige la múltiple complicidad del espectador, no se basta a sí mismo. En el fondo Klee es historia y Mondrian atemporalidad. Y vos te morís por lo absoluto. ¿Te explico? —

If there is a modern age, it is, of course, the age of the cosmic. Paul Klee declared himself anti-Faustian. "As for animals and all other creatures, I do not like them with a terrestrial cordiality; earthly things interest me less than cosmic things." The assemblage no longer confronts the forces of chaos, it no longer uses the forces of the earth or the people to deepen itself but instead opens onto th forces of the Cosmos. All this seems extremely general, and somewhat Hegelian, testifying to an Absolute Spirit.

Too bad Klee couldn’t automatically find bugs in its own code!

Mastery in a technology in fact is difficult to achieve because a technology grammar, unlike a linguistic one, changes rapidly. Technology grammars are primitive and dimly perceived at first; they deepen as the base knowledge that comprises them grows; and they evolve as new combinations that work well are discovered and as the daily use of working designs reveals difficulties. There is never closure to them. As a result, even adepts can never fully keep up with all the principles of combination in their domain. One result of this heavy investment in a domain is that a designer rarely puts a technology together from considerations of all domains available. The artist adapts himself, Paul Klee said, to the contents of his paintbox. "The painter...does not fit the paints to the world. He fits himself to the paint." As in art, so in technology. Designers construct from the domains they know.

In the end, it took three attempts by four Ph.D. students over the course of five years before Dawson’s initial Klee-UC idea turned into a published paper. Of those four students, only one “survived”—I quit the Klee project, and two others quit the Ph.D. program altogether. From an individual student’s perspective, the odds of success were low.

It’s impossible for Klee to “surgically extract” the code of each device driver and analyze its 1,000 lines in isolation.

The artist Paul Klee described drawing a picture as taking a line for a walk. I have borrowed his words to explain my approach to writing; when I write a novel it is like I am taking a thought for a walk.

A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are

America and possibly the most powerful private citizen, awaited the arrival of his godson, the Attorney General of the United States, Christian Klee. Oliphant's charm equaled his brilliance; his power

Dirilen Tarih Meleği üzerine.... «Angelus Novus dalıp seyrettiği bir şeyden uzaklaşmak üzereymiş gibi duran bir meleği anlatır. Gözleri dik dik bakıyor, ağzı aralık, kanatları iki yana açılmış. Tarih Meleği bu şekilde betimlenir. Yüzü geçmişe dönüktür, Bizim olaylar zinciri olarak gördüğümüzü, o üst üste binmiş yıkıntılardan oluşan tek bir felaket olarak görür ve onu ayaklarının önüne fırlatır. Melek, kalıp ölüleri uyandırmak ister ve kırılıp dökülenleri bütün hâline getirmeyi. Ancak cennetten gelen bir rüzgâr esmektedir; kanatları bu rüzgâra öyle kapılmıştır ki artık onları kapatamaz. Önündeki yıkıntı gökyüzüne doğru büyürken fırtına onu sırtını döndüğü geleceğe karşl koyamadlğı bir şekilde savurur. Bu fırtına bizim gelişme dediğimiz şeydir.” Walter Benjamin, Paul Klee'nin çizimine bakıp yazmış bunları. Bu çizimden sızan önermelerden ilham alan Benjamin “tarihsel gelişim”e tapınanların, ihtiram edenlerin, saray şairlerin, dalkavukların ve yolcuların inancını, daha büyük bir mutluluğun planları, hayalleri ve umutlarının çekip yürüttüğü bu hareket hâlindeki tarih temsilini alaşağı ediyor. Benjamin aydınlık bir geleceğin bizi ileriye doğru çekmediği, ancak geçmişin karanlık korkularıyla itilip kovalandığımız ve koşmaya zorlandığımız konusunda ısrar ediyor. Benjamin'in en özgün keşfi “gelişim”i her zaman ve hâlâ ...-e doğru bir hareketten ziyade -den kaçış olduğunu söylemesi.

Fin juillet, en arrivant au Jeu de Paume, Rose aperçut une grande colonne de fumée s’élevant au-dessus de la terrasse des Tuileries. Des soldats nourrissaient un feu gigantesque, les flammes jaillissant à chaque objet qu’on y jetait. Épouvantée, Rose reconnut les tableaux modernes du Louvre, lacérés et arrachés de leurs cadres. Picasso, Paul Klee, Max Ernst, Fernand Léger flambaient sous le soleil d’été. Invendables, inutiles, détestables aux yeux du Reich, ces toiles subissaient le même sort que les œuvres brûlées dans la cour de la caserne des pompiers de Berlin, le 20 mars 1939. « Impossible de rien sauver », inscrivit elle d’un trait tremblant.

If Klee led Plath further into the rococo labyrinth she meant to escape, Giorgio de Chirico led her out. Plath’s most successful art poem from this period was “The Disquieting Muses,” inspired by an abstract, surrealist painting of that title by de Chirico—“three terrible, faceless dressmakers’ dummies in classical gowns,

There are really only two types of men in this world when it comes to bad trouble,' Andy said cupping a match between his hands and lighting a cigarette. 'Suppose there was a house full of rare paintings and sculptures and fine old antiques, Red? And suppose the guy who owned the house heard that there was a monster of a hurricane headed right at it. One of those two kinds of men just hopes for the best. The hurricane will change course, he says to himself. No right-thinking hurricane would ever dare wipe out all the Rembrandts, my two Degas horses, my Jackson Pollocks and my Paul Klees. Furthermore, God wouldn't allow it. And worst comes to worst, they're insured. Thats's one sort of man. The other sort just assumes that the hurricane is going to tear right though the middle of his house. If the weather bureau says the hurricane just changed course, this guy assumes it'll change back in order to put his house on ground zero again. This second type of guy knows there's no harm in hoping for the best as long as you're prepared for the worst.

Klee channeled his mood through the process of using areas of color that he then outlined or added figures to embellish. Some of his paintings are simply color and shade studies, juxtaposing light and tone to produce a thing of lyrical beauty. He said, “Color is the irrational element in painting and chief vehicle of expression.” He wanted to present his works as “disciplined simplicity” in order to portray seeing the world through child-like eyes. When his work was criticized as little more than the scribbles of a child, he claimed to be delighted.

came before were fated to live and die so that it might triumph. Dan smiled through bandages and tears because he remembered a Calvin and Hobbes strip about that very idea. The author had a different vision: he owned a painting by an artist named Paul Klee called Angelus Novus, in which an angel seems to hurtle backward, wings spread, eyes fixed, mouth agape, and his description of the Klee painting was something Dan had never been able to get out of his head, his memorization hopelessly accidental: “This is how one pictures the angel of history,” the author wrote. “His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to

Την άνοιξη του 1901 έβαλα το εξής πρόγραμμα: Υπεράνω όλων η τέχνη της ζωής. Κατόπιν, ως ιδανικό επάγγελμα: η ποιητική τέχνη και η φιλοσοφία -ως πραγματικό επάγγελμα: οι πλαστικές τέχνες -και τέλος, ελλείψει πόρων ή εισοδημάτων: η τέχνη της εικονογράφησης. - Paul Klee, “Τα ημερολόγια 1898-1918” (τ. Α)

L’art ne reproduit pas le visible, il rend visible.

A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

It is important that we do not provide adult-made models, coloring books or sheets, or prepared "color-in" papers. Never show a child how to draw or paint something—like a flower or a house; the child will often simply repeat and repeat what you have shown. Famous artists like Paul Klee and Pablo Picasso worked for many years to achieve the originality, spontaneity, and childlike qualities that our children all possess naturally. The best we can do for our children is to prepare a beautiful environment, provide the best materials, and get out of the way.

Vancouver city was more beautiful to look at across the water than to be in.

The old man sawed as if aeons of time were before him, and as if all the years behind him had been leisurely and all the years in front of him would be equally so. Life had sweetened the old man. He was luscious with time like the end berries of the strawberry season.