Drawing Seminar December 5th 2013
from
Wikipedia
SCRIPT IN GREEN TO BE READ>>>>NOT ON SLIDES
Drawing Seminar December 5th 2013
Introduction to Seminar
Paul Klee (1879 –
1940)
This presentation is based around the 1925 book
Initial Plan for a
Section of the Theoretical Instruction at the German Bauhaus
Pedagogical
Sketchbook
Paul Klee:
(lived at an important time in history, he was born
into an unstable Europe, Germany
specifically, lived through the Great War and worked through the Weimar Republic
through to the end of the Second World War.
Many people believed both world
wars were as a result of over-materialism and of artistic over-indulgence, thus
Klee lived through the Euro-centric development of many important twentieth
century art movements and he was interested in most of them.
Klee was a child of two musicians and an exceptional
violinist and musician. He was a great
fan of literature and academically minded.
Expressionism: modernist, German,
subjective perspective, avant-garde, pre WWI
Cubism: modernist,
European, object depicted from multiple viewpoints, Cezanne inspired, pre WWI
Surrealism: unconscious
expression, Paris
based, early 1920s, grew from anti-art Dada, “thought in the absence of all
control exercised by reason” Breton 1924, post WWI
Orientalism: France, western interpretation of Middle East,
Arabic societies viewed as inferior to Western
Futurism: Italy, post WWI, preoccupations: speed, tech, youth, violence,
cars, and planes; associated with Fascism in 1920s (violence) but soon
classified as Degenerate. Art (art from a confusion of a psychologically
instable character)
German during WWI (declared Swiss 4
days posthumously as he tried to dissociate himself from Nazi ideals for his
entire life)
His Contemporaries: Kirchner and Kokoschka Expressionist (German/
Austrian) (bright coloured portraits and splodgy
landscapes)
Braque and Picasso Cubism (French) (cubist,
simultaneous views)
Why was Klee different from his contemporaries? They were STATIC and he was DYNAMIC. MUSIC, PAINTING AND
DRAWING meant Klee’s works were
COMPOSITIONS rather than images; he even used musical motifs in some of his
later works.
We can construct from Klee’s legacy of over 9000 works of
art, not just his life story but the timelines of early twentieth century art. He embraced multiple styles of work:
Oil, watercolour, ink, pastel, etching, canvas, burlap,
muslin, linen, gauze, card, foil, fabric, newsprint and wallpaper.
Born 1879
In 1905 he developed a new technique: Verre Eglomise ( scratching on a blackened glass panel with a needle)
Conscripted in WWI but continued drawing he managed to attain a desk job and his drawings were very
DIARISTIC
(Taught at Bauhaus 1921 to 1931 House of Construction)
founded by architect Walter Gropius) at the end of WWI as Germany and Europe
sought a new direction
Colleague of Kandinsky
In 1923 Klee said “For the artist, communication with nature
remains the most essential condition.
The artist is human; himself nature; part of the nature within natural
space”.
As a teacher Klee tried to renew his student’s perspectives
from the Renaissance towards FUNDAMENTALS OF OPTICAL AND STRUCTRAL ORDER (Sibyl
Moholy-Nagy wife of one of Klee’s colleagues).
Toward his students Klee believed that human intuition would
make obvious what to draw after sufficient observation. This is now
difficult to read without believing Klee to be incredibly pretentious.
Klee stated the art student must be “child of this earth;
yet also child of the Universe; issue of a star among stars”. He had spent his
entire life in the art world at this point and so might be forgiven for his
confusion.
Met Picasso in 1930’s of whom he
had been a great admirer
In 1936 Klee’s career was altered beyond recognition and his
drawing became of utmost importance.
Aged 57, Klee was diagnosed with SCLERODERMA an auto-immune condition which was only diagnosed after his
death. This caused fibrosis of the skin
and internal organs, leading to heart strain, renal failure, respiratory and
digestive problems and general weakness.
The Psychiatric conditions associated with this condition
include anxiety, depression and OCD, (PubMed.gov, Angelopoulos et al 2001). This is interesting as Klee had always been
interested in and inspired by outsider art and specifically the art of the
mentally ill.
At this time Klee’s output changed
dramatically.
From the fine lines and descriptive, naturalistic style of
Klee as a seventeen year old boy (see his drawing MY
ROOM), to the still fine-lined, but no-longer naturalistic style of the
twenty five year old Klee (see Tale a la Hoffman),
through his Bauhausian years as an academic drawer (struggling
to confine his naturalistic, symbolic
and intuitive mind into being a teacher)
to the time of his death in 1940 Klee was drawing crude, stick
figures in a heavy line (see Death and Fire).
The Metropolitan Museum of Art states that Late Paul Klee
became a rapid drawer, using heavy lines, using broader forms, aware he had
little time left to work.
Gunther Wolf writing in The Lancet (vol 353 issue 9163 May
1999) studied Klee’s work in the last year of his life with respect to his
illness.
In his final year of life Klee
produced more than 1000 works, most of which were drawings
Wolf determines these are mostly preoccupied with fate and
illness.
His most well-known series from 1940 was entitled SCHARFES
WORT (harsh words)
In the last two years of his life Klee drew over eighty
Angel drawings. Very
simple pencil drawings, line drawings on paper pasted onto card. The only ones introducing colour were a few
involving chalk.
The Museum Folkwang (Essen,Germany) which
has a collection of over 100 Klee drawings curates some of Klee’s uglier
Angel drawings as reflections on his own appearance as the Scleroderma altered
it very rapidly.
Klee is fascinating as someone who, putting aside his COLOUR
THEORY (the unification of drawing and the realm of
colour) can be biographically viewed in terms of his drawing alone.
Drawing was symbolic for Klee (a
fading line might symbolise mystery, reflections may symbolise relationships or
dialogues).
Recognisable forms (a face, a hand,
a house) may have been shorthand to convey universal meanings to the
viewers of his drawings so they could be understood amongst the “more complex
structure of lines” Klee.
He was a scientifically minded artist. He described his own art as a Devotion to
Small Things. He
was not EMPIRICAL in his research. He
believed that observation alone was
sufficient to distil that which he wanted to represent, he tried no
measurements or experimentation that I am aware of and so not actually
scientific.
Marcel Duchamp stated that at first glance, Klee’s work
appears childlike but it later becomes apparent how mature it truly is. He was “an artist’s
artist” as the cliché goes.
SUMMARY of the Pedagogical Sketchbook
Part 1) Proportionate Line and
Structure
- Dot into line
- Line walks, goes around itself, creates spaces and then leaves them empty or fills them in. According to Sibyl Moholy-Nagy this is like the rhythm Klee explores as a musician)
- Structural Proportion, like Euclid’s Golden Section
from
Wikipedia
or the 2/olden triangle or the 2/3
rule used to create ligaments and tendons, water
currents and plant fibres for example and may now soon be superseded by the
phenomenon of Fractals
Part 2) Dimension and Balance
·
An object has to be rendered by a LINE!
This is
subjective to the human eye, it is interpreted by man. Optical illusions are included in this, for
example perspective or a horizon. The
eye and brain working together prefer non-symmetrical balance like Euclid’s geometry.
Part 3) Gravitational Curve
·
Observation and Intuition combined
·
Motion can be projected using what Klee termed
Spiritual Dynamism
This
area of Klee’s work is very hard for me to interpret. He believes in a Gravitational Pull due to
eye/brain interaction. This is either
very high drawing theory or else it is so subjective that Klee has failed to
explain it adequately. A further
possibility is that the understanding of Neuroscience to which Klee was
alluding had not yet been investigated at his time of writing to the same
extent to which it has been today and so, as modern, educated people, we have
moved beyond his intuitive understanding.
Part 4) Kinetic and Chromatic
Energy
- Plato’s EIDOS – the inner essence of an object is distinct from the apparent outer form
- Aristotle’s ENTELECHY – a ‘form-giving-cause’, the reason that an idea has a manifest physical configuration or shape
Examples here include drawing a moving
object as it is in a moment of reality i.e. frozen, or to give it a sense of
movement by exaggeration of the dimensions.
- Chromatic and Thermodynamic Field (again beyond my comprehension. It involves the stirring of the dot from the static to the dynamic. Klee views motion as unending but it is not clear as to whether or not he was aware of the concept of Absolute Zero as described by Lord Kelvin regarding the temperature or energy state at which there is no movement on the atomic scale. Absolute Zero is 0Kelvin or -273oC. How this physically affects the movement of light upon an atom is in the realms of the study of Quantum physics, with photons being sub-atomic particles, and it is difficult to see how this affects the theory of drawing.
Conclusion
Klee was a thorough pupil of
drawing.
His Pedagogical Sketchbook remains relevant today
even if theoretical understandings have moved on somewhat since it was written.
Klee’s life can be described by
his drawing practice.
Klee may have worked in many
media but drawing under-pinned them all and is the discipline to which he
returned. That
is why he is the artist whose drawing style I find so fascinating and I hope
you have enjoyed this seminar.
Introduction to Seminar
Paul Klee (1879 –
1940)
This presentation is based around the 1925 book
Initial Plan for a
Section of the Theoretical Instruction at the German Bauhaus
Pedagogical
Sketchbook
Paul Klee:
(lived at an important time in history, he was born
into an unstable Europe, Germany
specifically, lived through the Great War and worked through the Weimar Republic
through to the end of the Second World War.
Many people believed both world
wars were as a result of over-materialism and of artistic over-indulgence, thus
Klee lived through the Euro-centric development of many important twentieth
century art movements and he was interested in most of them.
Klee was a child of two musicians and an exceptional violinist
and musician. He was a great fan of
literature and academically minded.
Expressionism: modernist, German,
subjective perspective, avant-garde, pre WWI
Cubism: modernist,
European, object depicted from multiple viewpoints, Cezanne inspired, pre WWI
Surrealism: unconscious
expression, Paris
based, early 1920s, grew from anti-art Dada, “thought in the absence of all
control exercised by reason” Breton 1924, post WWI
Orientalism: France, western interpretation of Middle East,
Arabic societies viewed as inferior to Western
Futurism: Italy, post WWI, preoccupations: speed, tech, youth, violence,
cars, and planes; associated with Fascism in 1920s (violence) but soon
classified as Degenerate. Art (art from a confusion of a psychologically
instable character)
German during WWI (declared Swiss 4
days posthumously as he tried to dissociate himself from Nazi ideals for his
entire life)
His Contemporaries: Kirchner and Kokoschka Expressionist (German/
Austrian) (bright coloured portraits and splodgy
landscapes)
Braque and Picasso Cubism (French) (cubist,
simultaneous views)
Why was Klee different from his contemporaries? They were STATIC and he was DYNAMIC. MUSIC, PAINTING AND
DRAWING meant Klee’s works were
COMPOSITIONS rather than images; he even used musical motifs in some of his
later works.
We can construct from Klee’s legacy of over 9000 works of
art, not just his life story but the timelines of early twentieth century art. He embraced multiple styles of work:
Oil, watercolour, ink, pastel, etching, canvas, burlap,
muslin, linen, gauze, card, foil, fabric, newsprint and wallpaper.
Born 1879
In 1905 he developed a new technique: Verre Eglomise ( scratching on a blackened glass panel with a needle)
Conscripted in WWI but continued drawing he managed to attain a desk job and his drawings were very
DIARISTIC
Taught at Bauhaus 1921 to 1931 (House of
Construction) founded by architect Walter Gropius) at the end of WWI as Germany and Europe
sought a new direction
Colleague of Kandinsky
In 1923 Klee said “For the artist, communication with nature
remains the most essential condition.
The artist is human; himself nature; part of the nature within natural
space”.
As a teacher Klee tried to renew his student’s perspectives
from the Renaissance towards FUNDAMENTALS OF OPTICAL AND STRUCTRAL ORDER (Sibyl
Moholy-Nagy wife of one of Klee’s colleagues).
Toward his students Klee believed that human intuition would
make obvious what to draw after sufficient observation. This is now
difficult to read without believing Klee to be incredibly pretentious.
Klee stated the art student must be “child of this earth;
yet also child of the Universe; issue of a star among stars”. He had spent his
entire life in the art world at this point and so might be forgiven for his
confusion.
Met Picasso in 1930’s of whom he
had been a great admirer
In 1936 Klee’s career was altered beyond recognition and his
drawing became of utmost importance.
Aged 57, Klee was diagnosed with SCLERODERMA an auto-immune condition which was only diagnosed after his
death. This caused fibrosis of the skin
and internal organs, leading to heart strain, renal failure, respiratory and
digestive problems and general weakness.
The Psychiatric conditions associated with this condition
include anxiety, depression and OCD, (PubMed.gov, Angelopoulos et al 2001). This is interesting as Klee had always been
interested in and inspired by outsider art and specifically the art of the
mentally ill.
At this time Klee’s output changed
dramatically.
From the fine lines and descriptive, naturalistic style of
Klee as a seventeen year old boy (see his drawing MY
ROOM), to the still fine-lined, but no-longer naturalistic style of the
twenty five year old Klee (see Tale a la Hoffman),
through his Bauhausian years as an academic drawer (struggling
to confine his naturalistic, symbolic
and intuitive mind into being a teacher)
to the time of his death in 1940 Klee was drawing crude, stick
figures in a heavy line (see Death and Fire).
The Metropolitan Museum of Art states that Late Paul Klee
became a rapid drawer, using heavy lines, using broader forms, aware he had
little time left to work.
Gunther Wolf writing in The Lancet (vol 353 issue 9163 May
1999) studied Klee’s work in the last year of his life with respect to his
illness.
In his final year of life Klee
produced more than 1000 works, most of which were drawings
Wolf determines these are mostly preoccupied with fate and
illness.
His most well-known series from 1940 was entitled SCHARFES
WORT (harsh words)
In the last two years of his life Klee drew over eighty
Angel drawings. Very
simple pencil drawings, line drawings on paper pasted onto card. The only ones introducing colour were a few
involving chalk.
The Museum Folkwang (Essen,Germany) which
has a collection of over 100 Klee drawings curates some of Klee’s uglier
Angel drawings as reflections on his own appearance as the Scleroderma altered
it very rapidly.
Klee is fascinating as someone who, putting aside his COLOUR
THEORY (the unification of drawing and the realm of
colour) can be biographically viewed in terms of his drawing alone.
Drawing was symbolic for Klee (a
fading line might symbolise mystery, reflections may symbolise relationships or
dialogues).
Recognisable forms (a face, a hand,
a house) may have been shorthand to convey universal meanings to the
viewers of his drawings so they could be understood amongst the “more complex
structure of lines” Klee.
He was a scientifically minded artist. He described his own art as a Devotion to
Small Things. He
was not EMPIRICAL in his research. He
believed that observation alone was
sufficient to distil that which he wanted to represent, he tried no measurements
or experimentation that I am aware of and so not actually scientific.
Marcel Duchamp stated that at first glance, Klee’s work
appears childlike but it later becomes apparent how mature it truly is. He was “an artist’s
artist” as the cliché goes.
SUMMARY of the Pedagogical Sketchbook
Part 1) Proportionate Line and
Structure
- Dot into line
- Line walks, goes around itself, creates spaces and then leaves them empty or fills them in. According to Sibyl Moholy-Nagy this is like the rhythm Klee explores as a musician)
- Structural Proportion, like Euclid’s Golden Section
from
Wikipedia
or the 2/olden triangle or the 2/3
rule used to create ligaments and tendons, water
currents and plant fibres for example and may now soon be superseded by the
phenomenon of Fractals
Part 2) Dimension and Balance
·
An object has to be rendered by a LINE!
This is
subjective to the human eye, it is interpreted by man. Optical illusions are included in this, for
example perspective or a horizon. The
eye and brain working together prefer non-symmetrical balance like Euclid’s geometry.
Part 3) Gravitational Curve
·
Observation and Intuition combined
·
Motion can be projected using what Klee termed
Spiritual Dynamism
This
area of Klee’s work is very hard for me to interpret. He believes in a Gravitational Pull due to
eye/brain interaction. This is either
very high drawing theory or else it is so subjective that Klee has failed to
explain it adequately. A further
possibility is that the understanding of Neuroscience to which Klee was
alluding had not yet been investigated at his time of writing to the same
extent to which it has been today and so, as modern, educated people, we have
moved beyond his intuitive understanding.
Part 4) Kinetic and Chromatic
Energy
- Plato’s EIDOS – the inner essence of an object is distinct from the apparent outer form
- Aristotle’s ENTELECHY – a ‘form-giving-cause’, the reason that an idea has a manifest physical configuration or shape
Examples here include drawing a moving
object as it is in a moment of reality i.e. frozen, or to give it a sense of
movement by exaggeration of the dimensions.
- Chromatic and Thermodynamic Field (again beyond my comprehension. It involves the stirring of the dot from the static to the dynamic. Klee views motion as unending but it is not clear as to whether or not he was aware of the concept of Absolute Zero as described by Lord Kelvin regarding the temperature or energy state at which there is no movement on the atomic scale. Absolute Zero is 0Kelvin or -273oC. How this physically affects the movement of light upon an atom is in the realms of the study of Quantum physics, with photons being sub-atomic particles, and it is difficult to see how this affects the theory of drawing.
Conclusion
Klee was a thorough pupil of
drawing.
His Pedagogical Sketchbook remains relevant
today even if theoretical understandings have moved on somewhat since it was
written.
Klee’s life can be described by
his drawing practice.
Klee may have worked in many
media but drawing under-pinned them all and is the discipline to which he
returned. That
is why he is the artist whose drawing style I find so fascinating and I hope
you have enjoyed this seminar.
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