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Nature can afford to be prodigal in everything, the artist must be frugal down to the last detail. Nature is garrulous to the point of confusion, let the artist be truly taciturn.

Paul Klee

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Paul Klee
Age: 61 †
Born: 1879
Born: February 18
Died: 1940
Died: May 29
Designer
Graphic Artist
Lithographer
Painter
University Teacher
Visual Artist
Münchenbuchsee BE
p. klee
Klee
Paul Klee
Detail
Artist
Nature
Afford
Everything
Confusion
Garrulous
Must
Details
Taciturn
Truly
Prodigal
Lasts
Prodigals
Point
Frugal
Last

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Everything vanishes around me, and works are born as if out of the void. Ripe, graphic fruits fall off. My hand has become the obedient instrument of a remote will.
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The beholder's eye, which moves like an animal grazing, follows paths prepared for it in the picture.
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When looking at any significant work of art, remember that a more significant one probably has had to be sacrificed.
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I have a clear view of 12 years of history of my inner self. First the cramped self, that self with big blinkers, then the disappearance of the blinkers and the self, now gradually the reemergence of a self without blinkers.
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To give emphasis only to beauty makes me think of a mathematics that deals with positive numbers only.
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Beauty is as relative as light and dark. Thus, there exists no beautiful woman, none at all, because you are never certain that a still far more beautiful woman will not appear and completely shame the supposed beauty of the first.
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I still come closest to success with drawing. When I use color the results are dubious, for these painfully gained experiences bear less fruit.
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Becoming is superior to being.
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By using patches of color and tone it is possible to capture every natural impression in the simplest way, freshly and immediately.
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There is no substitute for intuition.
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Make chance essential.
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All the things an artist must be: poet, explorer of nature, philosopher!
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Genius is the error in the system.
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See with one eye, feel with the other.
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Gradually compositions make an appearance again. Political - satirical - conceits expressed in one figure or a few.
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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.
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All art is a memory of age-old things, dark things, whose fragments live on in the artist.
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My hand is entirely the implement of a distant sphere. It is not my head that functions but something else, something higher, something somewhere remote. I must have great friends there, dark as well as bright. They are all very kind to me.
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Everything passes, and what remains of former times, what remains of life, is the spiritual. In everything we do, the claim of the Absolute is unchanging.
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Color has got me. I no longer need to chase after it. It has got me for ever. I know it. That is the meaning of this happy hour.
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