It is no coincidence that most of the artists at the vanguard of early 20th-century modernist art were poets as well as painters. Paul Klee (1879-1940) was among them. Known today almost exclusively as a visual artist, he was also a poet who experimented across a range of poetic forms. In 1901, while still vacillating between a career as a painter and one as a poet, Klee predicted he would end up expressing himself through the word, -the highest form of art.- This first scholarly monograph devoted to Klee's poetry proposes that he lived up to that prediction. It considers poems he identified...

This study examines the function and meaning of linguistic symbols in Klee's work. Using the artist's diaries, letters, lecture notes and visual allusions, K. Porter Aichele shows how these sources provide the framework for fresh interpretations of works ranging from letter forms in pictorial settings to visual texts. Klee's familiar line drawings are revealed as a radical reinterpretation of the ul pictora poesis tradition, through which the artist questioned whether there is a substantive difference between writing and drawing.