1910s
1920s
20th century
A01=Annie Bourneuf
abstract
art
Author_Annie Bourneuf
avant garde
blatter
caricature
Category=AFC
Category=AGA
Category=AGB
criticism
draft
draftsman
drawing
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
fantastic
foucault
graphic
grotesque
history
humor
imagination
imagining
interpretation
military
mixed media
modern
modernism
obscene
painter
painting
paul klee
printmaker
reading
seeing
senses
soldier
verbal
visible
walter benjamin
watercolor
Product details
- ISBN 9780226091181
- Weight: 936g
- Dimensions: 19 x 24mm
- Publication Date: 20 Jul 2015
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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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, and his concern for literary aspects of visual art was both the motive for and the means of his ironic play with modernist art theories and practices. Through his unique approach, he subverted forms of modernist painting that were generally seen - along with film and other new technologies - as threats to a mode of slow, contemplative viewing.
Tracing the fraught relations among seeing, reading, and imagining in early twentieth-century Germany, Bourneuf ultimately shows how Klee reimagined abstraction at a key moment in its development.
Annie Bourneuf is assistant professor of art history at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
