Paul Klee’s Pictorial Writing

Paul Klee’s Pictorial Writing examines the artist’s appropriation of verbal signs, literary texts and written scripts in his pictorial works. K. Porter Aichele’s study is the first to examine how linguistic symbols function in Klee’s work and what they mean. Reconstructing the artist’s rich cultural milieu from his diaries, letters, lecture notes and visual allusions, Aichele shows how these sources provide the framework for fresh interpretations of works ranging from letter forms in pictorial settings to visual texts. Historically contextualized and interpreted as pictorial writing, Klee’s familiar line drawings are shown to be a radical reinterpretation of the ut pictora poesis tradition through which the artist questioned whether there is a substantive difference between writing and drawing. Aichele’s multilayered readings of works from every decade of Klee’s career demonstrate that the artist’s doubly coded language was his most far-reaching contribution to the aesthetics of modernism.