Paul Klee - Ad Parnassum: Landmarks of Swiss Art

In the 1920s, German-Swiss artist Paul Klee (1879 1940) began his long-lasting engagement with polyphonic art - multi-voiced way of painting analogous to music. A relentless experimenter, Klee began these studies while teaching at the Bauhaus in Dessau, developed them further during his tenure at the art academy in Dusseldorf, and brought them to conclusion after his return to Switzerland in 1933. In this book, distinguished art historian Oskar Batschmann explores Klee’s seminal painting Ad Parnassum (1932). Painted shortly after the artist’s departure from the Bauhaus, it symbolises a new era, also one of Klee’s own self-discovery. Batschmann documents how the artist strove for a connection of music and painting in his colour hues and in the rhythmic movement of coloured dots. Richly illustrated, this book places Klee’s polyphonic understanding of art in an art-historical context by using this key work and offers insight into the synesthetic thinking that emerged in the art world during that time. Text in English and German.
AUTHOR: Oskar Batschmann is professor emeritus of early modern art history at University of Bern. He was a member of the Paul Klee Foundation and co-initiator of the Catologue raisonne of the artist published from 1998 to 2004. SELLING POINTS: . A profound study of Paul Klee’s painting Ad Parnassum, a key work in the painter’s oeuvre . Examines the origins of Klee’s search for polyphonic painting analogous to polyphonic music
40 colour illustrations