
Paul Klee's personal notebooks on his Bauhaus teachings (2016) - Anon84
http://www.openculture.com/2016/03/3900-pages-of-paul-klees-personal-notebooks-are-now-online.html
======
impostervt
His painting, The Limit of Reason, is my favorite, and always makes me think
of our attempts to develop AI.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limits_of_Reason_(Paul_Klee)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limits_of_Reason_\(Paul_Klee\))

------
Daub
I read his a ‘pedagogical sketchbook’ when I was a student. Quirky, difficult
to de-code, but sometimes illuminating. His art works are similar: quirky and
tough-going. He is one of the few artists who has gained a reputation on small
works.

This is a wonderful notebook. It shows someone in love with his practice. But
interestingly, he was not a popular teacher. Students found him too intense,
and difficult to comprehend.

------
Wistar
Klee is the poster child for works that often, at a glance, look simple but
upon a deep look reveals itself to be incredibly sophisticated.

~~~
patrec
You can't appreciate Klee without seeing his works in the flesh. I can't think
of another painter who used color so masterly and, sadly, this is still
something that does not survive in reproductions (I've seen).

~~~
01100011
> You can't appreciate Klee without seeing his works in the flesh

I don't think you can appreciate many of the works of the masters without
seeing them in person. I still remember the visceral feeling I had when I
first saw a Van Gogh in person at the Norton Simon Museum 20 years ago. Seeing
art in a book, even a nice book with big pictures, just isn't the same. I'm
not 'into' art, but seeing it in person was the first time I ever understood
how a person could be.

~~~
patrec
I agree that the sad state of color (in particular) reproduction (lemon
market?) greatly diminishes our art enjoyment in general.

And I encourage anyone to take an exhibition catalogue to an exhibition of old
masters and compare the colors and range, at least once. Carravaggios are a
good example, due to the Chiaroscuro.

But I can still _appreciate_ Hokusai, Rembrandt, Carravagio or Vermeer in
reproduction (van Gogh leaves me a bit cold, one way or other), although they
all suffer. But with Klee, I was really blown away by the fact that it was, to
me, a binary difference: when I first saw a major exhibition of his works, I
was in awe, felt profoundly saddened when I had to leave, hours earlier than I
wished, and to this day regret the fact that I had no chance to revisit the
exhibition a second time. But I was previously completely indifferent to him,
and a quick Google Image Search suggests, probably still would be, if I had
not seen the originals.

I must say that this is something that makes me both sad and angry; most
people will never have a chance to experience even a small fraction of great
art adequately, although we now have extremely sophisticated display
technology universally and comparatively cheaply available and surely even in
print it must be possible to do much better at some non-insane price-point
than e.g. a Taschen volume.

In addition to an undue reverence for originals, I suspect a mix of lemon
market and anti-social behaviour on the part of museums and collectors is to
blame for this (they have a vested interested in reproductions being low
quality or completely unavailable, and many publicly funded museums behave
outrageously about this).

If anyone knows more about the causes for the poor state of art reproduction
or good sources of high quality digital reproductions, I'd love to hear, BTW!

~~~
Daub
The best source currently is Google Art and Culture. Super high resolution
photos. Their camera rig (the so called art camera) is something else. In some
respect, one can learn more from these photos than from the real thing.
Certainly, they allow you to get closer to the work than museum guards do.

~~~
patrec
Thanks – they are very high quality, but sadly go out of their way to forbid
download.

------
metaphorical
My favorite quote from Klee: "Art does not reproduce the visible but makes
visible."

His shorter Pedagogical Sketchbook is also worth a read.

------
wyxuan
(2016)

~~~
dreyfiz
So?

~~~
staz
It's HN's guideline to put the year in the title when a resource is not from
the current year.

