Paul Klee: The Visible and the Legible
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Paul Klee: The Visible and the Legible Details
The fact that Paul Klee (1879–1940) consistently intertwined the visual and the verbal in his art has long fascinated commentators from Walter Benjamin to Michel Foucault. However, the questions it prompts have never been satisfactorily answered—until now. In Paul Klee, Annie Bourneuf offers the first full account of the interplay between the visible and the legible in Klee’s works from the 1910s and 1920s.Bourneuf argues that Klee joined these elements to invite a manner of viewing that would unfold in time, a process analogous to reading. From his elaborate titles to the small scale he favored to his metaphoric play with materials, Klee created forms that hover between the pictorial and the written. Through his unique approach, he subverted forms of modernist painting that were generally seen to threaten slow, contemplative viewing. Tracing the fraught relations among seeing, reading, and imagining in the early twentieth century, Bourneuf shows how Klee reconceptualized abstraction at a key moment in its development.
Reviews
I got this as part of my ever growing collection of works on Klee. I found this work rather uninformative about Klee and more about one person's imposition of possible meaning on Klee.The reproductions are somewhat ho-hum and, given the small text size and rather bland color rendering, they loose some of their power. I ordered this with great excitement based on the little I had heard about it, but must admit to being disappointed.Perhaps not being an art historian reduced my ability to appreciate the contributions being made by this author.