Paul Klee Art Quotations

Art doesn't reflect what we see; it makes us see.

We document, explain, justify, construct, organize: these are good things, but we do not succeed in coming to the whole ... But we may as well calm down: construction is not absolute. Our virtue is this: by cultivating the exact we have laid the foundations for a science of art, including the unknown X.

When looking at any significant work of art, remember that a more significant one probably has had to be sacrificed.

Chosen are those artists who penetrate to the region of that secret place where primeval power nurtures all evolution. There, where the powerhouse of all time and space call it brain or heart of creation activates every function, who is the artist who would not dwell there?

Every artist would like to live in the central organ of creation... Not all are destined to get there... but our beating hearts drive us deep down, right into the pit of creation.

Democracy with its semi-civilization sincerely cherishes junk. The artists power should be spiritual. But the power of the majority is material. When these worlds meet occasionally, it is pure coincidence.

The more horrible this world (as today, for instance), the more abstract our art, whereas a happy world brings forth an art of the here and now.

The worst state of affairs is when science begins to concern itself with art.

The beautiful, which is perhaps inseparable from art, is not after all tied to the subject, but to the pictorial representation. In this way and in no other does art overcome the ugly without avoiding it.

Nature is garrulous to the point of confusion, let the artist be truly taciturn.

From the root, the sap rises up into the artist, flows through him, flows to his eye. Overwhelmed and activated by the force of the current, he conveys his vision into his work. And yet, standing at his appointed place as the trunk of the tree, he does nothing other than gather and pass on what rises from the depths. He neither serves nor commands he transmits. His position is humble. And the beauty at the crown is not his own; it has merely passed through him.

There is plenty of room left for exact experiment in art, and the gate has been opened for some time. What had been accomplished in music by the end of the eighteenth century has only begun in the fine arts. Mathematics and physics have given us a clue in the form of rules to be strictly observed or departed from, as the case may be. Here salutary discipline is come to grips first of all with the function of forms, and not with form as the final result … in this way we learn how to look beyond the surface and get to the root of things.

Nature can afford to be prodigal in everything, the artist must be frugal down to the last detail.Nature is garrulous to the point of confusion, let the artist be truly taciturn.

Spatial art does not begin with a poetic mood or idea, but with construction of one or more figures, with the harmonizing of several colors and tones, or with the devaluation of spatial relationships and so on.

What my art probably lacks is a kind of passionate humanity... There is no sensuous relationship, not even the noblest, between myself and the many.

My mirror probes down to the heart. I write words on the forehead and around the corners of the mouth. My human faces are truer than the real ones.

Color possesses me. I don't have to pursue it. It will possess me always, I know it. That is the meaning of this happy hour: Color and I are one. I am a painter.

Drawing is the art of taking a line for a walk.

I cannot be grasped in the here and now, For my dwelling place is much among the dead, As the yet unborn, Slightly closer to the heart of creation than usual, But still not close enough.

The creation of a work of art must of necessity, as a result of entering into the specific dimensions of pictorial art, be accompanied by distortion of the natural form. For, therein is nature reborn.

In earlier times artists liked to show what was actually visible... nowadays we are concerned with reality, rather than the merely visible.

All art is a memory of age-old things, dark things, whose fragments live on in the artist.

Kunst gibt nicht das Sichtbare wieder, sondern macht sichtbar. Art does not reproduce the visible; rather it makes visible.

I paint in order not to cry.

He has found his style, when he cannot do otherwise.

Art makes something a lot more visible or audible.

The artist of today is more than an improved camera, he is more complex, richer, and wider. He is a creature on the earth and a creature within the whole, that is, a creature on a star among stars.

Children also have artistic ability, and there is wisdom in there having it! The more helpless they are, the more instructive are the examples they furnish us; and they must be preserved free of corruption from an early age.

All the things an artist must be: poet, explorer of nature, philosopher!

The work of art is above all a process of creation.

The painter should not paint what he sees, but what will be seen.

First of all, the art of living; then as my ideal profession, poetry and philosophy, and as my real profession, plastic arts; in the last resort, for lack of income, illustrations.

Art does not reproduce what we see; rather, it makes us see.

Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible

Art does not reproduce the visible; it makes visible.

A line is a dot that went for a walk.

The art of mastering life is the prerequisite for all further forms of expression, whether they are paintings, sculptures, tragedies, or musical compositions.

A drawing is simply a line going for a walk.

Art should be like a holiday: something to give a man the opportunity to see things differently and to change his point of view.

Art does not reflect what is seen, rather it makes the hidden visible.

One eye sees, the other feels.

Genius sits in a glass house -- but in an unbreakable one --conceiving ideas. After giving birth, it falls into madness. Stretches out its hand through the window toward the first person happening by. The demon's claw rips, the iron fist grips. Before, you were a model, mocks the ironic voice between serrated teeth, for me, you are raw material to work on. I throw you against the glass wall, so that you remain stuck there, projected and stuck. (Then come the lovers of art and contemplate the bleeding work from outside. Then come the photographers. ''New art,'' it says in the newspaper the following day. The learned journals give it a name that ends in ''ism.'')