Individual Artists, Puppets & Puppetry, General & Miscellaneous European Art, Cubism, Abstract Art, Modern Art

Klee: Hand Puppets

Name: Klee: Hand Puppets
Author: Paul Klee
ISBN: 9783775717403

by Paul Klee, Paul Klee (Illustrator), Christine Hopfengart

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Overview

Between 1916 and 1925 Paul Klee (1879-1940) made some 50 hand puppets for his son, Felix, of which 30 are still in existence. For the heads, he used materials from his own household: beef bones and electrical outlets, bristle brushes, leftover bits of fur and nutshells. Soon he began to sew costumes. These characters and small works, do not pretend to be great art, but at the same time, they are superbly imaginative, sweetly reminiscent of Klee's relationships with his family, and beautifully illustrative of the artistic and social developments of the time. Readers will see the chronological proximity of Dada and Kurt Schwitters's collages in Klee's Matchbox Ghost; the German National caricatures one of the era's more ominous political types. An introductory essay tracks the work's links to other avant-garde puppetry and to Klee's sculptural works, and notes his connections to the theater. For their part, Klee's son Felix and his grandson Alexander tell the story of how the figures were created.

Synopsis

Essays by Christine Hopfengart, Alexander Klee, Felix Klee, Osamu Okuda, Tilman Osterwold and Eva Widerkehr.

About the Author, Paul Klee

Paul Klee was born in Munchenbuchsee near Bern in 1879. In the early 1910s, he met Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc in Munich, and together they founded the Blaue Reiter movement. Through his involvement with Cubism, Klee then began to move towards abstract representation and to add greater depth of differentiation to his palette by using watercolor painting. He taught at the Bauhaus under Walter Gropius and later at the Dusseldorf Academy of Fine Arts, leaving his post to escape the Nazis for Bern, where he died in 1940.