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When most people think of Paul Klee (1879-1940), they probably picture a poster or print of one of his most famous paintings, "Senecio," from 1922. In that small work, roughly 15 inches square, Klee melded the graphic impact of African tribal
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When most people think of Paul Klee (1879-1940), they probably picture a poster or print of one of his most famous paintings, "Senecio," from 1922. In that small work, roughly 15 inches square, Klee melded the graphic impact of African tribal masks with elements of Cubism, which had been championed in the first decades of the 20th century by Pablo Picasso, George Braque, Robert Delaunay, and many others. The painting also revealed Klee's explorations of color, geometry, and line—in Klee's hands, these basic building blocks of fine art were used to create compositions of improbable humor and humanity. Klee's output as an artist was actually much more diverse than the ubiquity of "Senecio" in today's contemporary culture at large would suggest. Sometimes his lines resembled abstract hieroglyphics or calligraphy, producing a style that's been emulated—or perhaps only admired—by everyone from Brice Marden to A.R. Penck. Other times, his lines would find one another on the picture plane to create stick figures, almond-shaped fish, or mosaic- and quilt-like landscapes. Similarly, Klee's geometry and colors frequently teamed up to become everyday objects: when he added red to a circle it became a balloon, yellow produced a sun, and two perfectly round circles within a larger circle read instantly as a globe-shaped head. Within that head, triangles often doubled as misshapen noses and eyebrows, but elsewhere, they were pressed into service as a stick figure's dress. Nor did Klee hew to one look or style during his relatively brief career. He was an accomplished draftsman, as his early drawings demonstrated, yet he was comfortable with Abstraction and Surrealism. He even experimented with Pointillism 40 years after that fleeting movement had come and gone, albeit a uniquely Klee form of Pointillism grounded in Constructivism rather than landscape painting and portraiture, as had been the practice of the great French painter George Seurat. Klee's aesthetic...
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