Posted 9 years ago
dj-reverb
(243 items)
This print came out of an old physicans house that was purchased as an estate. His wife was a collector of fine art, mainly modern. This piece is one of over 60 works I aquired as a lot. These works of art have been sitting in a dark, dusty back storage room forgotten for 6 years till I found them. Enjoy!
Paul Klee (German: [pa??l ?kle?]; 18 December 1879 – 29 June 1940) was a Swiss-German painter. His highly individual style was influenced by movements in art that included expressionism, cubism, and surrealism. Klee was a natural draftsman who experimented with and eventually deeply explored color theory, writing about it extensively; his lectures Writings on Form and Design Theory (Schriften zur Form und Gestaltungslehre), published in English as the Paul Klee Notebooks, are held to be as important for modern art as Leonardo da Vinci's A Treatise on Painting for the Renaissance.[1][2][3] He and his colleague, Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, both taught at the Bauhaus school of art, design and architecture. His works reflect his dry humor and his sometimes childlike perspective, his personal moods and beliefs, and his musicality.
Great find. There is a really interesting piece about this work, The Kettledrummer, on Paul Klee.net. He did it in 1940, the year he died.
Here is an excerpt from it:
With Kettledrummer, Klee attained an extremely expressive degree of symbolism, even though he used plastic and chromatic means so sparingly. The figure consists only of two arms, one of which is linked to an encircled eye while the other is isolated in space like an exclamation mark. Two red patches (magenta and vermillion) add a dramatic emphasis. They give an optical expression to the drum rolls. The mysterious eye fixes the spectator with a searching look. This Kettledrummer from the apocalypse seems to be saying: "It is time!"
On July 8, 1937, when Klee was very ill, Lily Klee wrote to Grohmann: "He stays up until eleven at night, and the drawings fall to the ground one after the other." And in connection with the making of this work, Grohmann remembers Klee remarking that he had, "felt so excited it was as if I was beating a drum."