Pictographs, Ideograms, and Alphabets in the Work of Paul Klee

Abstract

Paul Klee (1879-1940), the Swiss artist who taught at the German Bauhaus, used ancient and modern p ictographs and alphabets in many of his paintings and drawings. The discreet characters of the various systems of writing were well adapted to Klee's unusual additive technique by which he retained the expressive purity o[ the formal elements. In the 191O's and 1920's, Klee used roman letters to construct abstract formal pauerns, but in the 1930's he reanimated the conventional symbols of the alphabet, turn ing them into active representational figures suggestive of their pictographic origins. His most revolutionary achievement was the invention of bold ideograms, combining different pictographic schemata in a set of double images which enrich a basic idea through chains of associated ideas, thus altering the notion of a picture as representi ng a scene fixed in time and space.