Paul Klee – Ad Parnassum

A profound study of Paul Klee’s painting Ad Parnassum, a key work in the painter’s oeuvre.

In the 1920s, German-Swiss artist Paul Klee (1879–1940) began his long-lasting engagement with polyphonic art—a multi-voiced way of painting analogous to music. A relentless experimenter, Klee began these studies while teaching at the Bauhaus in Dessau, developed them further during his tenure at the art academy in Düsseldorf, and brought them to a conclusion after his return to Switzerland in 1933. In this book, distinguished art historian Oskar Bätschmann explores Klee’s seminal painting Ad Parnassum (1932). Painted shortly after the artist’s departure from the Bauhaus, it symbolizes a new era—one of Klee’s own self-discovery. Bätschmann documents how the artist strove for a connection of music to painting in his color hues and in the rhythmic movement of colored dots.

Richly illustrated, this book uses Ad Parnassum to place Klee’s polyphonic understanding of art in an art-historical context and offers insight into the synesthetic thinking that emerged in the art world during his time.