Art Art 01 Nov 2011 05:37 am
Klee – Theater Everywhere
- If there is any artist I would call my favorite, it would have to be Paul Klee. I must have at least a dozen art books on the man’s work, and I can’t get enough. My dear Heidi gifted me, recently, with a treasure of a book focusing on the artist’s love of theater and his representation of theatrical pieces in his art. We know that he was a theatrical man, having been taught to play the violin from an earlier age than when he’d started to paint. He was a virtuoso who performed on the instrument regularly. He couldn’t get enough of performance art in his life, and that’s well obvious from the drawings and paintings in this book.
One of my favorite periods at the Hubley studio was in the preparation for the CTW series, Letterman. I did a lot of library research for John Hubley on Paul Klee. The TV series grew out of Klee’s comic art, and I went to a lot of private libraries searching for elements that I thought John could use. This book would have been enormously helpful back then.
I intend to pull from Klee – Theater Everywhere a few times to post on this blog some of the great pieces in the book. Here are a few.
The book’s cover – Semitic Beauty
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1Comic Actor Acting Out A Riding Accident
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2Actor
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3Comic Character From A Bavarian Folk-Play
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Dance of the Red Skirts
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5Fool In A Trance
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6Figurine – the Fool
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7Portrait Sketch of a Costumed Lady
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8Don Juan
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9Trio With Don Giovanni
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10Fire Mask
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11Trial for Antigone
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12Puppet number 7A
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Group Portrait of Hand Puppets
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on 01 Nov 2011 at 6:34 am 1.Kellie Strøm said …
Most Klee drawings don’t really engage me, but I do like those puppets!
It’s curious that this style was considered modern in the ’50s when it was already several decades old, and is still considered contemporary now after having been around for over a century.
on 01 Nov 2011 at 8:17 am 2.slowtiger said …
#6 proves that Klee is in fact inventor of the Smiley …
Thx for posting these, I don’t think I have seen any of them before – and I studied every Klee book in the library when I was 15.
on 01 Nov 2011 at 1:22 pm 3.Tom Minton said …
It’s unlikely but one would swear that the 1950s Terrytoons logo was inspired to some degree by Klee’s “Fire Mask.”