Book Description
Marcel Franciscono offers an exhaustive historical and critical study of
Klee's artistic personality and thought. Drawing extensively on
documentation published since 1940, Franciscono highlights the
extraordinary range of artistic, literary, and philosophical speculation Klee
brought to his work. The portrait that emerges is one of a great comic
artist, an ironist whose most characteristic pictures pit beauty of form and
color against the dubious nature of things, yet one whose satiric depictions
of everyday life extend to the most rarified evocations of nature.

"There is no comparable book in the recent Klee literature.
Marcel Franciscono introduces the reader to the artist and, in turn, to all
the major Klee problems uncovered by specialists working in one or
another area of the master's work. The result is a rich symposium in
which all these opinions, as well as the relevant biographical facts, are
returned to individual works of art, illuminating them exquisitely. In this
low-keyed fashion emerges the splendid general study that is required of
every generation for a great artist."--Daniel Robbins, Union College

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Marcel Franciscono offers an exhaustive historical and critical study of Klee's artistic personality and thought. Drawing extensively on documentation published since 1940, Franciscono highlights the extraordinary range of artistic, literary, and philosophical speculation Klee brought to his work. The portrait that emerges is one of a great comic artist, an ironist whose most characteristic pictures pit beauty of form and color against the dubious nature of things, yet one whose satiric depictions of everyday life extend to the most rarified evocations of nature.