Art-Klee-Crystal Gradation TB

Please drop this item in rural OR Premium Member Only caches.  Do not place it in an urban cache or abandon it at a caching event.  Transport the bug in the original plastic bag for as long as the bag lasts; the bag keeps the trackable clean, preserves the tracking number and prevents tangling with other items.  Otherwise, take the travel bug anywhere you wish.  No permission is needed to leave the U.S.

Travel bug photos are appreciated.  I will re-post them here, where they can be seen by other cachers.

I have already released series of art-themed travel bugs based on works I have seen in person.  I will continue the series mostly including works I simply admire.  There will also be famous works or works by famous artists that I otherwise do not particularly care for, but they are….well,..famous.  My disdain extends to most Modern Art and a good amount from the Pop Art movement.

Paul Klee (December 1879 – June 1940) was a Swiss-German painter.  His highly individual style was influenced by movements in art that included Expressionism, Cubism, and Surrealism. Klee was a natural draftsman who experimented with and eventually deeply explored color theory, writing about it extensively.  His “Writings on Form and Design Theory,” published in English as the Paul Klee Notebooks, are held to be as important for modern art as Leonardo da Vinci's A Treatise on Painting for the Renaissance.  His works reflect his dry humor and his sometimes childlike perspective, his personal moods and beliefs, and his musicality.

In his early years, following his parents’ wishes, Klee focused on becoming a musician; but he decided on the visual arts during his teen years, partly out of rebellion and partly because of a belief that modern music lacked meaning for him.  At sixteen, Klee’s landscape drawings already show considerable skill.

With his parents' reluctant permission, in 1898 Klee began studying art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich.  Heexcelled at drawing but seemed to lack any natural color sense. He later recalled, "During the third winter I even realized that I probably would never learn to paint."  During these times of youthful adventure, Klee spent much time in pubs and had affairs with lower class women and artists' models.  He had an illegitimate son in 1900 who died several weeks after birth.

After receiving his Fine Arts degree, Klee went to Italy. He stayed in Rome, Florence, and Naples, and studied the master painters of past centuries.  He responded to the colors of Italy, but sadly noted, "that a long struggle lies in store for me in this field of color."

Returning to Bern, he lived with his parents for several years, and took occasional art classes. By 1905, he was developing some experimental techniques, including drawing with a needle on a blackened pane of glass, resulting in fifty-seven works.  In the years 1903-5 he also completed a cycle of eleven zinc-plate etchings called Inventions, his first exhibited works, in which he illustrated several grotesque characters.  He commented, "though I'm fairly satisfied with my etchings I can't go on like this. I’m not a specialist." Klee was still dividing his time with music, playing the violin in an orchestra and writing concert and theater reviews.

Klee's artistic breakthrough came in 1914 when he briefly visited Tunisia.  He was impressed by the quality of the light there and wrote, "Color has taken possession of me; no longer do I have to chase after it, I know that it has hold of me forever... color and I are one.”  Klee began to delve into the "cool romanticism of abstraction.  After returning home, Klee painted his first pure abstract, composed of colored rectangles and a few circles. The colored rectangle became his basic building block, what some scholars associate with a musical note, which Klee combined with other colored blocks to create a color harmony analogous to a musical composition. His selection of a particular color palette emulates a musical key. Sometimes he uses complementary pairs of colors, and other times "dissonant" colors, again reflecting his connection with musicality.