Paul Klee: Figures and Faces by Margaret Plant
Overview
This book looks into the work of the artist Paul Klee. Focusing on his works of the human face and figure throughout his lifetime. How his images can capture human frailty, how masks and puppets are linked to deception and self-deception and how marionette strings symbolise a person’s inability to control his own destiny.
Links to the Puppeteer and Puppet
To further understand the expressiveness of stillness and of that of the human face and figure as a whole, looking at Klee’s body of work and seeing how his depictions of the human form changed through the years and yet they still give the viewer the feeling of expression and movement. And though Klee did not begin to relate his works to puppets until later in his career, his exploration of masks in art and theatre can also hold true to that of the faces and uses of masks in puppet theatre, “Klee was concerned in his art almost exclusively with the human face and figure. Nature was not an important subject. He set himself quite consciously the task of making a satirical and moral comment on human nature.” Klee felt that even though art and masks were made with one expression that they could still show the viewer a whole range of human expressions, “Masks have taught me that a minimum of expression even the suppression of any expression, cannot prevent the mask being expressive with its fascinations, its stereotype, its inner being.”
Interesting ideas from Klee
“His interest in exposing hidden aspects of character was early attested by his exploration of the masked face, one on top of another, posing the question of which is truer.”
“Awareness of physical expression […] related to the delight in breaking through the borderlines of the body, overcoming the rigidity of the body image, dissolving and weakening its outlines.”
“The puppet could provide not only a visual renewal of the human figure, but a means to comment on it.”
Plant, M. (1978). Paul Klee: Figures and Faces. London: Thames and Hudson Ltd.
This book is crucial for any puppeteer to read and I can see how much it has impressed you. The work of the artist devoted non-naturalistically to the face and eyes is something important for every puppeteer to consider.
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