Paul Klee: The Thinking Eye

Paul Klee : The Thinking Eye (The Notebooks of Paul Kless, The Documents of Modern Art Series, Vol. 15)Paul Klee; Jurg Spiller (editor); Ralph Manheim (translator), 1964.

This is the finest artist's notebook I've ever seen. Perhaps it's time to revisit my dream of studying its concepts more thoroughly. Copies of this out of print masterwork often range from $200-$800 in the antiquarian book market.

541 pages with hundred of illustrations in black and white as well as tipped in color plates; introduction, towards a theory of form production, contributions to a theory of pictorial form (lecture notes from the Bauhaus at Weimar and at Dessau).

Paul Klee was a natural draftsman who experimented with and eventually mastered color theory, and wrote extensively about it; his lectures Writings on Form and Design Theory (Schriften zur Form und Gestaltungslehre), published in English as the Paul Klee Notebooks, are considered so important for modern art that they are compared to the importance that Leonardo da Vinci's A Treatise on Painting had for Renaissance. He and his colleague, the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, both taught at the German Bauhaus school of art, design and architecture. His works reflect his dry humour and his sometimes childlike perspective, his personal moods and beliefs, and his musicality.

Paul Klee (1879-1940).