Word: klee
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...DIARIES OF PAUL KLEE, 1898-1918, edited by Felix Klee. 424 pages. University of California Press...
...abstract with memories," was Paul Klee's artistic credo, and he propelled 20th century art away from the imitation of nature toward the imitation of the human mind. He was mainly a draftsman, and his sharp pen point pricked out tense traceries of squiggles dots and arrows that are hieroglyphs of the heart. Now fully published in English as edited by his son, Klee's diaries sketch the memories that his art made abstract...
Mostly, though, Klee worked harder than he played, and the "bent for the bizarre" he noted in himself as early as age nine was soon hammered into a credo. "I am not here," he proclaimed, "to reflect the surface (this can be done by a photographic plate), but must penetrate inside." That meant to Klee burrowing into the psyche and borrowing the squiggly insights of children and madmen, not to mention invoking his own unconscious, as in one of his diary's bursts of poetry: "Open thyself, thou gate in the depths . . . / Forth you beautiful pictures, wild beasts, / Spring...
...Klee's art was once attacked as infantile. Indeed its flat, scrawly appearance has a childlike look, but children are no longer believed to be quite so innocent or so immature. Certainly Klee was fascinated with children. While his wife Lily earned the family living as a piano teacher, he meticulously jotted down a calendar of his baby son's growth. Typical entry: "July 8. Says: Dayi-da; screams: day-dayi-da. This is the way he demands his breakfast in the morning." Klee's art, with its dah-dits and dayi-dahs, became a Morse code...
...Klee had already probed, as he put it, "beyond impressionism" and had become an unwitting prophet of the surrealism to come. More important, after many self-doubting years of dabbling at writing and moonlighting as a violinist, he declared during a Tunisian trip: "Color and I are one. I am a painter." Once he had wondered: "Am I God?" Now he was sure that his creative fire exceeded "white heat. In my work, I do not belong to the species, but am a cosmic point of reference...