Academics From Germany

"Pictures have their skeleton, muscles, and skin like human beings. One may speak of the specific anatomy of the picture. A picture representing 'a naked person' must not be created by the laws of human anatomy, but only by those of compositional anatomy. First one builds an armature on which the picture is to be constructed."

"Nature can afford to be prodigal in everything, the artist must be frugal down to the last detail. Nature is garrulous to the point of confusion, let the artist be truly taciturn."

"Klee was my so-called form master [at the Bauhaus, where a. o. Kandinsky, Klee - and later Albers himself - were art teachers]. In the workshops there they had a crafts master and a form master. The crafts master had to direct the practical work, the mechanics of the workshop. And the form master had to develop the, formal qualities. Klee was my form master in the glass workshop. He came to me and never criticized anything. He talked about something else. Never asked about any form problem with the windows I was working on. Never a word. He was too respectful. He was the nicest master I could ask for. He talked about exhibitions. He thought I should exhibit. That's another story. We had a good relationship because we never dealt with the same problems. He didn't attack our problems. He never brought up a problem."

"It would be so nice to once again drink a cup of tea with you, as was so often and so pleasantly the case in Dessau. We frequently think of our former closeness, of watering flowers at the same time, of the bocce[?] battles and – sad thought – of our collective complaints about the BH Bauhaus meetings [until 1933]. How far behind us all of that is!"

"Alors sempre avanti! (Ever Forward / Always Ahead)"

"He [in general] has found his style, when he cannot do otherwise, i.e., cannot do something else."

"The changeover was complete; in the summer of 1907 I devoted myself entirely to the appearance of nature and upon these studies built my black-and-white landscapes on glass, 1907/1908."

"Then that great fellow Klee comes onto the scene, already famed as a Bauhaus teacher in Dessau. He tells everyone he's a thoroughbred Arab, but he's a typical Galician Jew."

"A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress."

"First of all, the art of living; then as my ideal profession, poetry and philosophy, and as my real profession, plastic arts; in the last resort, for lack of income, illustrations."

"Kandinsky and Klee: the two artists.. ..have been named together more and more frequently.. .Since: is it supposed to be a mere coincidence that, in quiet, remote Dessau.. ..two creative spirits equally liberated from the burden of earthly problems – connecting East and West – live under one roof, or is it a wake-up call, a sign of what is to come?!"

"The reader of the four 'Diaries' of Paul Klee.. ..will be initiated – being presumably an outsider – into a mysterious, rare, individual, and watchful world, that of Paul Klee the 'painter'. Indeed, the entries in his diaries were not originally intended for publication, but merely for his own reflection. During his lifetime my father allowed no one, not even myself, access to his most personal confession."

"Beyond the constructive elements of the picture, I studied the tonalities of nature by adding layer upon layer of diluted black watercolour paint. Each layer must dry well. In this way a mathematically correct scale of light and dark values is the result. Squinting facilitates our perception of this phenomenon in nature."

"At the Bauhaus, Klee exuded a healthy, generative atmosphere – as a great artist and as a lucid, pure human being."

"Yesterday was shaped by Kandinsky's move.. .This departure is what proves something for me.. .It is a friendship that overcomes a number of negative items, because the plus side stands firm and, in particular, because there is a link to my productive youth [in Munich]."

"At the moment, an unpleasant feeling presses on my stomach, as though the new year of the unified, national Germany has assisted in the advent of an all too torch-parade-like sparkling wine bacchanal."

"To emphasize only the beautiful seems to me to be like a mathematical system that only concerns itself with positive numbers."

"My etchings have.. ..the mistake of being processed as images and to have at the same time the meaning of epigrams. It is the union of pure painting with pure graphics.. .From now onwards my task will be the division of art and graphics, and the full development of both fields. The pure art has already turned to impressionism and the graphics is going to do it."

"Thought is the medially between earth and world. The broader the magnitude of his reach, the more painful man's tragic limitation. Thought is the medially between earth and world. The broader the magnitude of his reach, the more painful man's tragic limitation. To get where motion is interminate."

"I'll provide it if I'm officially asked to do so but it's below my dignity to initiate action against such primitive accusations. For even if I were a Jew, and did come from Galicia, this would alter neither my own worth nor that of my work one iota. My personal point of view is that a Jew and a foreigner is of no less intrinsic value than a German and a native, and I must not abandon it of my own accord, for if I did I would appear to posterity in an absurd light. I would rather cause myself trouble than become the tragicomic figure of one striving for the favour of those in power."

"The eye travels along the paths cut out for it in the work."

"The father of the arrow is the thought: how do I expand my reach? Over this river? This lake? That mountain ?"

"Since not even sufficient time for my main business remains to me. Production is taking a larger magnitude at a faster tempo, and can no longer wholly keep up with these children. They [very probably: his new art] issue forth."

"The beautiful, which is perhaps inseparable from art, is not after all tied to the subject, but to the pictorial representation. In this way and in no other does art overcome the ugly without avoiding it."

"Van Gogh is congenial to me, 'Vincent' in his letters. Perhaps nature does have something. There is no need, after all, to speak of the smell of earth; it has too peculiar a savor. The words we use to speak about it, I mean, have too peculair a savor. Too bad that the early Van Gogh was so fine a human being, but not so good as a painter, and that the later, wonderful artist is such a marked man. A mean should be found between these four points pf comparison: then, yes!"

"The contrast between man's ideological capacity to move at random through material and metaphysical spaces and his physical limitations, is Uneven lengths and uneven angle-degrees of the point-rudder result in a deviating course. the origin of all human tragedy. It is this contrast between power and prostration that implies the duality of human existence. Half winged-half imprisoned, this is man!"

"..(Then come the lovers of art / and contemplate the bleeding work from outside. / Then come the photographers. / "New art," it says in the newspaper the following day. / The learned journals / give it a name that ends in "ism")."

"His [ Van Gogh's] pathos is alien to me, especially in my current phase, but he is certainly a genius. Pathetic to the point of being pathological, this endangered man can endanger one who does not see through him. Here a brain is consumed by the fire of a star. It frees itself in its work just before the catastrophe. Deepest tragedy takes place here, real tragedy, natural tragedy, exemplary tragedy. Permit me to be terrified."

"The law that supports space - this should be the title appropriate to one of my future pictures!"

"Things are not quite so simple with 'pure' art as it is dogmatically claimed. In the final analysis, a drawing simply is no longer a drawing, no matter how self-sufficient its execution may be. It is a symbol, and the more profoundly the imaginary lines of projection meet higher dimensions, the better. In this sense I shall never be a pure artist as the dogma defines him. We higher creatures are also mechanically produced children of God, and yet intellect and soul operate within us in completely different dimensions."

"Am I God? / I have accumulated so many great things in me! / My head aches to the point of bursting. / It has to hold an overview of power. / May you want (are you worthy of it?) / that it be born to you."

"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."

"Reality and dream simultaneously, and myself makes a third in the party, completely at home here. This will be fine."

"Art should be like a holiday: something to give a man the opportunity to see things differently and to change his point of view."

"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."

"Everything that used to be foreign to me, at the rational procedures in my profession, I now begin to resort to after all, from necessity, at least as a matter of experiment. Apparently I am becoming perfectly sober and small, perfectly unpoetic and unenthusiastic. I imagine a very small formal motif and try to execute it economically."

"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)"

"I project on the surface; that is, the essence of the subject must always become visible, even if this is impossible in nature, which is not adapted to this relief style. The absence of foreshortening also plays a crucial part in the process.. .For I have discovered a very small, undisputed, personal possession: a particular sort of three-dimensional representation on the flat surface.. .I am my style."

"It is a great difficulty and great necessity to have to start with the smallest. I want to be as though new-born, knowing nothing, absolutely nothing, about Europe; ignoring poets and fashions, to be almost primitive. Then I want to do something very modest; to work out by myself a tiny, formal motive, one that my pencil; will be able to hold without any technique. One favorable moment is enough. The little thing is easily and concisely set down. It's already done! It was a tiny but real affair, and someday, through the repetition of such small but original deeds, there will come one work upon which I can really build."

"The naked body is an altogether suitable object. In art classes I have gradually learned something of it from every angle. But now I will no more project some plan of it: I will proceed so that all its essentials, even those hidden by optical perspective, will appear upon the paper. And thus a little uncontested personal property has already been discovered, a style has been created."

"Serious color studies of nudes and heads. Only as practice and first training. Very strict determination of color values through water color. On top of it, some oils, simply for blending. The results are quite unattractive, little of importance to be hoped for here. This month of February is devoted to color. I painted many nudes from nature and even the portrait of a head, my syster's!"

"But by way of consolation: it is valueless to paint premature things, what counts is to be a personality, or at least to become one. The domination of life is one of the basic conditions of productive expression. For me this is surely the case; when I am depressed I am unable even to think about it – and this holds true for painting, sculpture, tragedy, or music. But I believe that pictures alone will abundantly fill out this one life."

"I have a feeling that sooner or later I shall arrive at something legitimate, only I must begin, not with hypotheses, but with specific instances, no matter how minute. If I then succeed in distinguishing a clear structure, I get more from it than from a lofty imaginary construction. And the typical will automatically follow from a series of examples."

"I have now reached the point where I can look over the great art of antiquity and its Renaissance. But, for myself, I cannot find any artistic connection with our own times. And to want to create something outside of one's own age strikes me as suspect. Great perplexity. This is why I am again all on the side of satire. Am I to be completely absorbed by it once more? For the time being it is my only creed. Perhaps I shall never become positive? In any case, I will defend myself like a wild beast."

"When in Italy [Klee stayed in Italy, in 1901], I learned to understand architectural monuments.. .Even the dullest will understand that the obvious commensurability of parts, to each other and to the whole, corresponds to the hidden numerical proportions that exist in other artificial and natural organisms. It is clear that these figures are not cold and dead, but full of the breath of life; and the importance of measurements as an aid to study and creation becomes evident."

"I am God / So much of the divine / is heaped in me / that I cannot die. My head burns to the point of bursting. One of the worlds / hidden in it / wants to be born. / But now I must suffer / to bring it forth."

"The main thing now is not to paint precociously but to be, or at least become, an individual. The art of mastering life is the prerequisite for all further forms of expression, whether they are paintings, sculptures, tragedies, or musical compositions."

"To be a student of Stuck [1898 - 1900] sounded good. In reality, however, it was not half so splendid. Instead of coming to him with a sound mind I brought a thousand pains and many prejudices. In the realm of colour I found it hard to progress. Since the tone provided by mood predominated strongly in my mastery of form, I sought to find as much profit as possible here at least. And, in this respect, a great deal really was to be gained at Stuck's. Naturally I was not the only one, at this time, to be deficient in the realm of color. Later, in his monograph, Kandinsky passed a similar judgement on this school [of Stuck]."

"..I served Beauty by drawing her enemies."

"Twenty-one years old! I never doubted my vital force. But how is it to fare with my chosen art? The recognition that at bottom I am a poet, after all, should be no hindrance in the plastic arts! And should I really have to be a poet, Lord knows what else I should desire. Certainly, a sea swells within me, for I feel. It is a hopeless state, to feel in such a way that the storm rages on all sides at once and that nowhere is a lord who commands the chaos."