It’s Paul Klee week on Dangerous Minds! After who knows how many years of never mentioning him once in a headline, we’re now going to do it two days in a row. We did so yesterday, with Paul Gallagher’s post about the welcome news that the Swiss artist’s enormous collection of notebooks is available to be viewed online. Not failing to notice that the nation, nay the very planet, was gripped with a kind of Klee fever, we’re doing our best to keep up.

So today we bring you some evocative pics of the many charming and amusing hand puppets that Klee made for his son Felix. He made about 50 of them, but only 30 are still in existence. He used whatever materials were at hand: beef bones and electrical outlets, bristle brushes, nutshells and fur. The puppets date from between 1916 and 1925.

In researching the topic, I came across the German word Kasperl (pron. KASH-pell), which is the German-language equivalent of British Punch and Judy puppets and the French Guignol puppets, both of which find their origins in Puncinella, a clown character from Italy’s commedia dell’arte. I bring it up only because I remember Kasperl quite well from my own childhood, from the Austrian side of my family (let me tell you about Krampus sometime…..).

Here’s a group picture of the puppets (click for a larger view):
 

 
And an amusing picture of Felix Klee playing with one of the puppets 48 years after his father’s death in 1940:
 

 
Anyway, enjoy these pictures. If you want to learn more about this topic, an exhaustive coffee table book about them came was published in 2006.
 

 

 

 
Lots more after the jump…....
 

 
“Art,” Paul Klee (1879-1940) once observed, “does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible.” It’s a fair description of Klee’s rich and diverse body of artworks produced during his forty year career. Just looking at his phenomenal output of some 10,000 artworks tells a fairly accurate history of Modern Art, as Klee adopted, studied then discarded the ideas and forms of the twentieth century’s major artistic movements—Expressionism, Cubism, Surrealism, Abstraction and the Bauhaus school.

Klee became a great artist, and was also a poet, writer, composer and musician, but he could have been just an ordinary, run-of-the-mill traditional painter had he not had a startling epiphany in his early twenties, circa 1900. He was studying painting under artist Franz von Stuck in Germany. Klee excelled at drawing but was deeply frustrated and dissatisfied by his lack of aptitude as a painter. He felt unable to express himself, to move beyond mere reproduction. One day, he was browsing through his old belongings in the attic when he chanced upon paintings he had made as a child. There in front of him was what he was desperately trying to achieve—immediacy, vibrancy, and color.

Klee later wrote:

Children also have artistic ability, and there is wisdom in there having it! The more helpless they are, the more instructive are the examples they furnish us; and they must be preserved free of corruption from an early age.

It changed his approach to painting and so began the career of one of the twentieth century’s most influential artists.
 

‘Steps’ (1929).
 
Everyone’s seen a Klee painting—they’re forever appearing on greeting cards or postcards or posters. His work is ubiquitous because he kept developing and changing as an artist while maintaining a very personal vision. When collected together in a gallery, the variety and power of each of his paintings demands close attention “like reading a book or a musical score.”
 

‘Park near Lu’ (1938).
 
During his life, Klee wrote down his theories and ideas about art in various notebooks.  In particular two volumes of lectures he gave at the Bauhaus gymnasiums during the 1920s—The Thinking Eye and The Nature of Nature—are “considered so important for understanding Modern Art that they are compared to the importance that Leonardo’s A Treatise on Painting had for the Renaissance.”
 

 

 

Pages from the ‘The Thinking Eye.’
 
If that wasn’t grand enough of blurb for a book jacket, the renowned art critic, anarchist and thinker Herbert Read (1893-1968) declared Klee’s notebooks as:

...the most complete presentation of the principles of design ever made by a modern artist – it constitutes the Principia Aesthetica of a new era of art, in which Klee occupies a position comparable to Newton’s in the realm of physics.

The reason these notebooks are so valuable is perhaps best described by Klee himself who claimed when he came to be a teacher he had “to account explicitly for what I had been used to doing unconsciously.”

More after the jump…