Paul Klee Quotes

Alfred Kubin, my benefactor, has arrived! He acted so enthusiastic that he carried me away. We actually sat entranced in front of my drawings! Really quite entranced! Profoundly entranced!

Kandinsky wants to organize a new society of artists. I came to feel a deep trust in him [ Kandinsky ]. He is somebody, and has an exceptionally beautiful and lucid mind.

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

These are primitive beginnings in art, such as one usually finds in ethnographic collections or at home in one's nursery. Do not laugh, reader! Children also have artistic ability, and there is wisdom in their having it! The more helpless they are, the more instructive are the examples they furnish us; and they must be preserved from corruption at an early age. Parallel phenomena are provided by the works of the mentally diseased; neither childish behaviour nor madness are insulting words here, as they commonly are. All this is to be taken very seriously, more seriously than all the public galleries, when it comes to reforming today's art.

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

A line is a dot that went for a walk.

In art, too, there is room enough for exact research.. .What was accomplished in music before the end of the eighteenth century has hardly been begun in the pictorial field.

Receptively it [the work as human action] is limited by the limitations of the perceiving eye. The limitation of the eye is its inability to see even a small surface equally sharp at all points. The eye must "graze" over the surface, grasping sharply portion after portion, to convey them to the brain which collects and stores the impressions.

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

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

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)

In earlier versions of 'Woman and Beast' the woman suffered too much. Later I gave her that not altogether disgusted expression. Dissertations could be written about the significance of the 'ugliness' of my figures.

It is possible that a picture will move far away from Nature and yet find its way back to reality. The faculty of memory, experience at a distance produces pictorial associations.

As time passes I become more and more afraid of my growing love of music. I don’t understand myself. I play solo sonatas by Bach: next to them, what is Böcklin? It makes me smile.

Formerly it frequently happened to me that when questioned regarding a picture I simply did not know what it represented. I had not seen the subject, so to say. Now I have also included the content so that I know most of the time what is represented. But this only supports my experience that what matters in the ultimate end is the abstract meaning of harmonization (note from a letter, 1903)