Thepicturetree image bank

Description:
The Paul Klee portfolio features high quality prints that beg to be framed. Tucked in the portfolio are 14 large-format reproductions, each with a brief description. For Klee, the making of art was a simile for the creation of the world. Like Goethe, whom he considered the "only bearable German", and whose experience of nature seemed allied to his own, Klee attempted to capture nature in terms of primal images; and like the poet, the artist discovered "analogies to the universal design in the tiniest leaf". On an early trip to Italy, undertaken with the Swiss sculptor Hermann Haller, Klee was intrigued less by the legacy of visual artists – with the exception of Leonardo – than by the structural principles of Italian architecture, which he saw as a continuation of natural laws by human hands, and by the fantastic aquatic flora and fauna in the Naples aquarium. Between these two poles lay the garden, organic nature domesticated and shaped by man, which inspired many of Klee's finest pictures. And it was between these two poles, those of construction and imagination, that his rich ?uvre slowly and continually developed.