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11th
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11th
Paul Klee on possible worlds
“First, he does not attach such intense importance to natural form as do so many realist critics, because, for him, these final forms are not the real stuff of the process of natural creation. For he places more value on the powers which do the forming than on the final forms themselves.
He is, perhaps unintentionally, a philosopher, and if he does not, with the optimists, hold this world to be the best of all possible worlds, nor to be so bad that it is unfit to serve as a model, yet he says:
“In its present shape it is not the only possible world.”
Thus he surveys with penetrating eye the finished forms which nature places before him.
The deeper he looks, the more readily he can extend his view from the present to the past, the more deeply he is impressed by the one essential image of creation itself, as Genesis, rather than by the image of nature, the finished product.
Then he permits himself the thought that the process of creation can today hardly be complete and he sees the act of world creation stretching from the past to the future. Genesis eternal!
He goes still further!
He says to himself, thinking of life around him: this world at one time looked different and, in the future, will look different again.
Then, flying off to the infinite, he thinks: it is very probable that, on other stars, creation has produced a completely different result.
Such mobility of thought on the process of natural creation is good training for creative work.
It has the power to move the artist fundamentally, and since he is himself mobile, he may be relied upon to maintain freedom of development of his own creative methods.”
“First, he does not attach such intense importance to natural form as do so many realist critics, because, for him, these final forms are not the real stuff of the process of natural creation. For he places more value on the powers which do the forming than on the final forms themselves.
He is, perhaps unintentionally, a philosopher, and if he does not, with the optimists, hold this world to be the best of all possible worlds, nor to be so bad that it is unfit to serve as a model, yet he says:
“In its present shape it is not the only possible world.”
Thus he surveys with penetrating eye the finished forms which nature places before him.
The deeper he looks, the more readily he can extend his view from the present to the past, the more deeply he is impressed by the one essential image of creation itself, as Genesis, rather than by the image of nature, the finished product.
Then he permits himself the thought that the process of creation can today hardly be complete and he sees the act of world creation stretching from the past to the future. Genesis eternal!
He goes still further!
He says to himself, thinking of life around him: this world at one time looked different and, in the future, will look different again.
Then, flying off to the infinite, he thinks: it is very probable that, on other stars, creation has produced a completely different result.
Such mobility of thought on the process of natural creation is good training for creative work.
It has the power to move the artist fundamentally, and since he is himself mobile, he may be relied upon to maintain freedom of development of his own creative methods.”
— Paul Klee, in his lecture Über moderne Kunst (“On Modern Art”), delivered at his exhibition at the Jenaer Kunstverein on January 26, 1924. Available in Robert L. Herbert’s Modern Artists on Art, Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications, 2000, p. 112. Essay begins on p. 103. Source: Entersection
