Paul klee the visible and the - Legible

The book offers a new, original look at the great European modernist Paul Klee and the interplay of word and image in the work he produced after WWI, when the European avant-garde was at its most adamant. Bourneuf asks: why was it that Klee immersed himself in crossings of image and text at the same time that so much avant-garde art focused fiercely on the visual? She proposes that Klee created forms that hover between the pictorial and the written to provoke the viewer to look slowly and contemplatively, a mode of viewing the artist saw as both analogous to reading and threatened by new technological media such as film, mass printing, telephones, and radio. Bourneuf demonstrates how Klee s concern for the literary aspects of visual art is both the motive for and the means of his ironic play with modernist art theories and practices."

List of contents

About the author

Annie Bourneuf is professor of art history at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is the author of Paul Klee: The Visible and the Legible, which was also published by the University of Chicago Press and won the 2016 Robert Motherwell Book Award.

Summary

Paul Klee consistently intertwined the visual and the verbal in his art has long fascinated commentators, including such illustrious figures as Walter Benjamin and Michel Foucault. This book offers an account of the interplay between the visible and the legible in Klee's works from the 1910s and 1920s.

Product details

• Authors: Annie Bourneuf, Bourneuf Annie
• Publisher: Chicago Review Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 30.06.2015
• EAN: 9780226091181
• ISBN: 978-0-226-09118-1
• Dimensions: 188 mm x 237 mm x 25 mm
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Art > Art history; ART / History / Modern (late 19th Century to 1945), ART / Individual Artists / Monographs, History of Art, Early 20th century c 1900 to c 1950, Painting & paintings, Individual artists, art monographs, Art & design styles: c 1900 to c 1960, Paintings and painting