1969 After Paul Klee "Mask" Full Color Print

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A lovely full color print after pastel and paste-color painting "Mask" by Paul Klee. Comes from a rare art folio … Read more A lovely full color print after pastel and paste-color painting "Mask" by Paul Klee. Comes from a rare art folio published by Crown Publishers in Italy in 1969. Printed on one side. Hand tipped-in on a sheet of paper. Numbered: X. Information on the back of paper is related to another piece in the folio. Excellent condition - never framed.

Overall 9.5" W x 11.6" H
Image 7" W x 6.75" H

Klee painted this picture in the last year of his life. He faces the final menaces with the most superior means of his pictorial imagination. Through them he banishes the ghosts which haunt him. Suddenness and rigor, they both are marked in the masked face, as the masks in the religious feasts of primitive peoples. Rigor: The forms lie in the greatest repose and simplicity, crossed in each other, they follow no impetuous outbreak of temperament; they unite unmoving, one with the other and their eyes are glued on those of their vis-vis. Suddenness: The head is thrown back in a sudden movement, the ears are pointed, the victim is grasped. The stalked eyes grip like a black pair of tongues, a disastrous flickering life in the fixed look. But even such apparitions are familiar to Klee, the most terrible loses its terror and so in the end it is a rather friendly ghost -- in fact it is only a mask -- with which Klee is occupied. The teeth do not know how to bite, the violet-colored ears are a funny masquerade and the yellow moon on the narrow sky is a mere requisite of the creeps. Until the last Klee retained his familiarity with the powers of fate, the evil as well as the good ones, keeps his own human cheerfulness and serenity but also his unceasing joy in not quite human bizarreness. See less