Today would have been Paul Klee’s 139th birthday. Google have marked the occasion with a Doodle.
Google Doodle celebrates colors of artist Paul Klee
To celebrate Klee’s 139th birthday Tuesday, Google is paying homage to the artist’s sometimes dry and sometimes child-like approach with a Doodle reminiscent of Klee’s Rote Brücke (Red Bridge) — a 1928 painting that uses a pattern of shapes and contrasting yet harmonious hues to represent the rooftops and arches of a European city. The painting reflects Klee’s deep exploration of color theory — the mixing of colors and the visual effects of specific color combination.
Here’s a link to that Red Bridge painting. Yes, the Doodle mimics the shapes well, but it’s so hard to properly replicate the textures.
Paul Klee: 5 things you should know about the renegade German-Swiss painter
His legacy still permeates the art world. “The legacy of Klee is everywhere,” reads a New York Times headline from 1987. “The unemphatic art of Paul Klee has entered the universal language not only of fine art but of advertising, graphic design, high-quality cartooning and communications in general,” the newspaper wrote.
Senecio could be regarded as his most familiar work, but let’s not overlook paintings like this one.
Paul Klee – most important art – Highways and Byways
Klee visited Egypt in 1928, inspired by the North African country to create brightly colored abstract works. Yet, like many of his others, this painting is not quite fully divorced from its real world subject. Narrow blue rectangles at the top of the canvas suggest the sky, while uneven rectangles and trapezoids create paths leading one’s eye from the bottom of the page to the elevated horizon. Broad trapezoids painted pale hues are arranged down the center of the canvas to suggest a main road. Thus Klee manipulates color, shape, and line to create a sense of real-world depth and movement.
It reminds me a little of Monet’s Water Lilies, in that they hit you first in a forceful, abstract way, but then shortly their depth of field opens up to show you a much larger painting.
I’m not sure what colour it’s really supposed to be, though.
Miscellaneous Details 