Pedagogical Sketchbook : Bauhausbucher 2

The second installation in the Bauhausbücher facsimile series, presenting Paul Klee’s legendary Pedagogical Sketchbook

Active at the Bauhaus between 1920 and 1931, teaching in the bookbinding, stained glass and mural-painting workshops, Paul Klee (1879–1940) brought his expressive blend of color and line to the school—and, with the second volume in the Bauhausbücher series, beyond its walls.

In his legendary Pedagogical Sketchbook, Klee presents his theoretical approach to drawing using geometric shapes and lines. Evincing a desire to reunite artistic design and craft, and written in a tone that oscillates between the seeming objectivity of the diagram, the rhetoric of science and mathematics, and an abstract, quasi-mystical intuition, Klee’s text expresses key aspects of the Bauhaus’ pedagogy and guiding philosophies. And while Klee’s method is deeply personal, in the context of the fundamentally multivocal Bauhaus, his individual approach to abstract form is typical in its idiosyncrasy. In the Pedagogical Sketchbook, Klee presents his own theories about the relationships between line, form, surface, color, space and time in art in the context of the Bauhaus. The book testifies to Klee’s intensive theoretical explorations of art and exemplifies how the Bauhaus masters interconnected the various realms of art and design.

In the present volume, the 1953 English translation of Pedagogical Sketchbook by Sibyl Moholy-Nagy is combined with the design and physical qualities of the original German edition from 1925.