Paul Klee Art Quotations

A line is a dot that went for a walk.

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

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

A drawing is simply a line going for a walk.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.'')

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

One eye sees, the other feels.

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

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 reproduce the visible; it makes visible.

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.

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

Art makes something a lot more visible or audible.

I paint in order not to cry.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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