Search results for ""Author Annie Bourneuf""
The University of Chicago Press Paul Klee: The Visible and the Legible
The fact that Paul Klee (1879 - 1940) consistently intertwined the visual and the verbal in his art has long fascinated commentators from Walter Benjamin to Michel Foucault. However, the questions it prompts have never been satisfactorily answered - until now. In Paul Klee, Annie Bourneuf offers the first full account of the interplay between the visible and the legible in Klee's works from the 1910s and 1920s. Bourneuf argues that Klee joined these elements to invite a manner of viewing that would unfold in time, a process analogous to reading. From his elaborate titles to the small scale he favored to his metaphoric play with materials, Klee created forms that hover between the pictorial and the written, and his concern for literary aspects of visual art was both the motive for and the means of his ironic play with modernist art theories and practices. Through his unique approach, he subverted forms of modernist painting that were generally seen - along with film and other new technologies - as threats to a mode of slow, contemplative viewing. Tracing the fraught relations among seeing, reading, and imagining in early twentieth-century Germany, Bourneuf ultimately shows how Klee reimagined abstraction at a key moment in its development.
£39.00
The University of Chicago Press Behind the Angel of History: The "Angelus Novus" and Its Interleaf
The story of artist R. H. Quaytman’s discovery of an engraving hidden behind a famous artwork by Paul Klee. This book begins with artist R. H. Quaytman uncovering something startling about a picture by Paul Klee. Pasted beneath Klee’s 1920 Angelus Novus—famous for its role in the writings of its first owner, Walter Benjamin—Quaytman found that Klee had interleaved a nineteenth-century engraving of Martin Luther, leaving just enough visible to provoke questions. Behind the Angel of History reveals why this hidden face matters, delving into the intertwined artistic, political, and theological issues consuming Germany in the wake of the Great War. With the Angelus Novus, Klee responded to a growing call for a new religious art. For Benjamin, Klee’s Angelus became bound up with the prospect of meaningful dialogue among religions in Germany. Reflecting on Klee’s, Benjamin’s, and Quaytman’s strategies of superimposing conflicting images, Annie Bourneuf reveals new dimensions of complexity in this iconic work and the writing it inspired.
£28.53