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From Choice:
This in-depth study of the influence of Paul Klee on American artists, collectors, and curators provides informative, illuminating, and innovative additions to the transatlantic dialogue of pre-sixties US art. In the excellent exhibition catalogue, seven original essays and perceptive catalog entries...greatly enhance the exhibition's intellectual component. (Includes) beautiful full color plates; excellent chronology; documentary photographs; footnotes...Highly recommended. ... Read more

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Worthwhile
There are approx 1150 works by Klee in various collections across America. This book accompanies the "Klee and America" exhibition on view at the Neue Gallerie, NY; The Phillips Collection, DC; The Merril Collection, Houston. The book offers an in-depth exploration of what attracted the various collectors to Klee, the circumstances during which Klee painted and how they affected him (WW2), and the influence of Klee on American art. Approx 100 works from the exhibit are illustrated in high quality, plus photos etc. For anyone interested in the world of Paul Klee this is a worthy book to add to your collection. ... Read more

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Paul Klee, best known for his mastery of color and semi-abstract patchwork paintings of squares, completed more than 10,000 paintings, drawings, and etchings during his life. His work is difficult to classify but widely admired and highly sought after. Carl Djerassi, scientist, novelist, philanthropist, most famous for inventing the birth control pill, was a great fan of Klee and amassed one of the most important private collections of his work in the world.

This catalog reproduces highlights from the collection, now owned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, including full-color images of nearly one hundred rarely published works. These drawings, sketches, gouache and watercolors reflect the whole of Klee’s short but prolific career and are among his most beautiful and important works. The text includes background and critical commentary from noted Klee experts. In addition, an interview with Djerassi reveals his artistic endeavors and passion for Klee, a creative genius whose energy, versatility, productivity, and vision speak volumes to the scientist and anyone interested in the inventive power of the imagination. ... Read more

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An intimate look at the art of a great artist
This book is the catalogue for a 2002 exhibition ofa private collection exclusively devoted to Paul Klee's works, a collection that was built over 40 years by a Vienna-born Californian collector, Doctor Carl Djerassi, who pledged most of it to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The bulk of the collection is formed by a wonderful series of prints, drawings and watercolors, complemented by a few paintings. The book starts with some essays describing how the collection was formed and how the collector's passion was born. The interview of Djerassi is particularly interesting to understand the psyche of a passionate art collector.

The illustrations of some 80 works that follow are good but not outstanding and give a fair idea of Klee's creative power. Do not expect a full retrospective of the artist's career, though; this is not the aim of this book. ... Read more

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Published in 1966, Paul Klee on Modern Art has an introduction by Herbert Read.
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Pioneering manifesto on Modern Art which I had difficulty understanding
Herbert Read in his Introduction to this work says that it constitutes " the most profound and illuminating statement of the aesthetic basis of the modern movement in art ever made by a practicing artist" I do not have the professional knowledge or aesthetic training to quarrel with Read. I can only give my personal impression of Klee's treatise which was given at the opening of an exhibition in Jena in 1924. I understand that Klee is in the Treatise arguing against the view that the criterion for judging the work of the artist is its being an accurate copy of nature. Klee puts the emphasis on the organic shaping power of the creative process , and gives examples of how this works. The text contains sketches by Klee illustrative of the process. My suspicion is that this focus on the 'organic ' the growing and developing element is what makes Klee so congenial to Herbert Read whose Theory of Art focuses on this concept.
However I personally could not really understand the process as Klee describes it in this work. Read says the book is cryptic and aphoristic. I did not find it aphoristic but I did find it cryptic and more.
Perhaps here however it is wiser to "Trust the Artist and not the Reader" as my own understanding in these matters is limited.
One point. The work is very short, the illustrations 'pleasant' if not perhaps as profound as Klee maintains them to be.
Other readers truly have to judge for themselves.

Incorrect page number information
Just a quick note on the number of pages. It only contains 56 pages of text amd images, not the over 150 pages as provided in the item description.

As for the content 5 out of 5.

as valid today as 72 years ago
This slim volume is the text of a lecture Klee delivered in 1924 on the occasion of the opening of a museum exhibit of modern art. It is both an educational lecture on color and form and an explanation of modern art that largely escapes being a defense. Klee's discourse is not simply an historical piece. It is as valid today as it was when he delivered it seventy-two years ago. Klee was Kandinsky's neighbor during the years they both taught at the Bauhaus. They shared more than the basement that connected their duplex apartments; they shared a belief in art as a spiritual pursuit. ... Read more

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Marcel Franciscono offers an exhaustive historical and critical study ofKlee's artistic personality and thought. Drawing extensively ondocumentation published since 1940, Franciscono highlights theextraordinary range of artistic, literary, and philosophical speculation Kleebrought to his work. The portrait that emerges is one of a great comicartist, an ironist whose most characteristic pictures pit beauty of form andcolor against the dubious nature of things, yet one whose satiric depictionsof everyday life extend to the most rarified evocations of nature.

"There is no comparable book in the recent Klee literature.Marcel Franciscono introduces the reader to the artist and, in turn, to allthe major Klee problems uncovered by specialists working in one oranother area of the master's work. The result is a rich symposium inwhich all these opinions, as well as the relevant biographical facts, arereturned to individual works of art, illuminating them exquisitely. In thislow-keyed fashion emerges the splendid general study that is required ofevery generation for a great artist."--Daniel Robbins, Union College ... Read more

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Five beautifully reproduced paintings by Paul Klee celebrate the work of one of the twentieth century's undisputed masters.Amazon.com Review
Paul Klee's launched his artistic career in Munich, where hebegan to study painting in 1898. This volume picks up in 1913 afterthe artist shifted from line drawings and etchings to color and beganmoving toward the distinctive painting style for which he is so wellknown. It includes more than 60 reproductions of Klee's most importantworks. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

a brief survey of a master of painting
"Colour possesses me... That is the meaning of this happy hour: colour and I are one. I am a painter." --Paul Klee

This book contains 48 full-color plates. They are of high quality and full page (I'm not sure the exact dimensions of the book, but it is quite large). I'm not sure how I feel about Klee's work as a whole, since there isn't a large enough sample contained here, but the paintings contained in this book are amazing, or most of them are at least. Klee was truly an astounding artist. That, though, brings up my only fault with the book, it is such a brief book that you don't get enough of Klee's work. Hopefully there are other surveys of his work out there, one that is more complete. And if not, I hope that one soon will be, from what I've seen here, he certainly deserves one.

The book starts with a medium length essay by Douglas Hall, who I understand to be one of the world's leading experts on Klee. It's not as inclusive as a book-length biography, but Hall definitely gives you a fair sense of Klee's life and a good idea of how to look at Klee's work. He goes in depth on several of the paintings represented within.

I believe this book is out of print so you will have to go to your local library and check out a copy, but it is worth doing so, so that you can get an introduction to one of our more important artists. ... Read more

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In 1933, Paul Klee's work was branded as "Entartete Kunst" ("Degenerate Art") by the National Socialists and he was dismissed from his professorial post at the Due sseldorf Academy of Fine Arts. This led him, together with his wife Lily, to return to his 'real home' of Bern. Here his avant-garde art was not understood and Klee found himself in unasked for isolation. In 1935, Klee started to suffer from a mysterious disease. The symptoms included changes to the skin and problems with the internal organs. In 1940 Paul Klee died, but it was only 10 years after his death that the illness was actually given the name 'scleroderma' in a publication about Klee. However, the diagnosis remained mere conjecture. Since his adolescence, the dermatologist and venereologist Dr. Hans Suter has been fascinated by Paul Klee and his art, and more than 30 years ago this fascination spurred him to commence research into the illness and its influence on the art of Paul Klee's final years. It was due to Dr. Suter's meticulous investigations that Klee's illness could be defined as 'diffuse systemic sclerosis'.In this book, the author assembles his findings and describes the rare and complex disease in a clear and comprehensible way. Further, he empathetically interprets more than 90 of Klee's late works. The point of view of a dermatologist renders a unique source of information. It provides, on one hand, new insights into everyday medical practices at the University of Bern in the 1930s, which will fascinate doctors and local historians alike. While, on the other hand, art historians and art lovers will be absorbed by the newly discovered links between Paul Klee's work and his illness. ... Read more

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A brief biography of this twentieth-century German artist accompanies reproductions and analyses of several of his works. ... Read more

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Like many of his Bauhaus contemporaries, Paul Klee (1879-1940) was deeply influenced by theater and the stage. Throughout his life Klee attended theatrical performances, from the opera to puppet shows, with an almost fanatical zeal, and characters from plays or opera--Hamlet, Falstaff and Don Giovanni, for example--populate his enigmatic visual world. Various types of character roles and theatrical elements, like clowns and masks, were firmly established themes in his repertoire, and as last year's delightful Paul Klee: Hand Puppets showed, he also delighted in puppetry, making bizarre bricolaged puppets out of household materials to amuse his son Felix. Primarily, though, Klee understood the sympathies between theater and life, absorbing the topos of the world as a stage into his observations: People became actors or marionettes and theatrical events touched upon scenes from everyday life. This publication sheds light on all of these aspects of Klee's fascination with the arts of the stage. A chronology gives a panoramic outline of his several encounters with the theater and a selection of works by contemporary artists makes it clear that Klee was not the only artist to be fascinated with the sharp-eyed perception of theatrical scenarios--the topic is one that continues to engage artists today. ... Read more

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The prominent Genovese architect Renzo Piano--recipient of the 1998 Pritzker Award and architect of the Whitney Museum of American Art and Morgan Library renovations, as well as the new New York Times building--has just completed a new and unusual museum building--the Zentrum Paul Klee on the outskirts of Bern. The center, says Piano, is dedicated to the ìpoet of silence,î and thus it was fitting to consider building a museum that would speak softly. The Zentrum Paul Klee rises upward in the form of three hills connected by a 150-meter-long thoroughfare, the ìMuseum Streetî serving as a path within the complex. The three structures make up a harmonious yet prominent landscape sculpture whose roofs are supported by innovative steel construction. Includes photographs, design sketches, plans and models--a living image of a magnificent building. ... Read more