Paul Klee's Bauhaus Notebook is Now Online

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The Swiss-born artist Paul Klee lived between 1879 and 1940, and was a noted Bauhaus lecturer who experimented deeply in color theory. His vibrant, mechanical sketches which formed the basis for his Bauhaus teaching throughout the 1920s, have now been made freely accessible online after the Zentrum Paul Klee published almost all 3900 pages of his personal notebooks.

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As reported by Open Culture, the illustrative notebook contains extensively detailed musings on the mechanics of art and color. Although published in German, the variety of graphics will appeal to all viewers for their vividness, clarity, and honesty.

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Klee’s style was highly influenced by Expressionism, Cubism, and Surrealism, with his publication “Writings on Form and Design Theory” (published in English as “Paul Klee Notebooks”), held to be as important for modern art as Leonardo de Vinci’s “A Treatise on Painting” for the Renaissance. 

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Klee is credited as an early adopter of abstraction, breaking from the established tradition of faithful representation in the early 1900s along with Picasso and other avant-garde artists, with the trauma of the First World War furthering his endeavor to use art to escape the material world.

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In 1920, Klee was invited by Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius to teach at the trailblazing school, animating elements of art with movement and spontaneity to lay the foundations for modern design. He left the Bauhaus in 1931 shortly before the school was shut down by the Nazis.

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In 2005, architect Renzo Piano designed the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern, Switzerland, exhibiting 150 of Klee’s 4000 works in a six-month rotation. The museum was commissioned by the artist’s heirs, with a form defined by the distant profile of the Alps.

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News via: Open Culture

Beautifully-Designed, Downloadable Bauhaus Architecture Books

Last year Monoskop delighted the architecture and art community by making many of the Bauhaus publications available to freely download. As a perennial fan of all types of architecture communication, I had previously written about the exceptional qualities of Bauhaus-produced books and journals and how these visual teaching tools ultimately influenced more recent, canonical publications.