Customer Reviews

In Paul Klee's Enchanted Garden

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This book is the catalogue for a recent exhibition at the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern, Switzerland, centered on the artist's fascination with botanic. It is full of high-quality illustrations of paintings, drawings and prints, most of them drawn from the Zentrum's own holdings, but also from some private collections.

The text is divided into five chapters, the first, strictly chronological,shows that plants were a lifelong theme in Klee's works, the second studies Klee's dialogue with nature, the third is a very interesting comparison between Klee's theories and ideas on nature and those of the XVIIIth century Swedish scientist Carl Von Linné, the "father of taxonomy" (who, as a widely travelled scholar, endeavoured to register and describe the outer appearance of all living forms), the fourth chapter dwells on a series of 1939 drawings that Klee called "Inferner Park" to study his interest on motion, on becoming, on genesis, on growth, and the fifth and last is an overlook on the most important philosophical writings on Klee's art (by Heidegger,Deleuze, Foucault, Merleau-Ponty, etc).

A very interesting book, full of beautiful reproductions enhanced by a text that sheds new light and opens new fields of study on the work of one of the greatest painters of the XXth century.

It's a wonderful book---I only wish the reproductions had been a little larger. Art is to be SEEN, and there is a lot of excess margin around the paintings. Better still, a bigger book.

It may come as a surprise to many that Paul Klee had a strong interest in botany, having made a miniature herbarium of his own as a child and beginning his artistry by drawing botanical specimens. Five writers in this book describe his development as an artist and his paintings of plants, his motives and his methods. Illustrations are mostly from the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern. Persons interested in botanical art, in this artist, and the history of 20th century art will appreciate this work.