An artistic biography masterfully written

Paul Klee (1879-1940) is one of the most well-known and recognisable artists in the world: in the sense that almost everyone in front of one of his works is able to say: “Look, that’s a Klee!”. Yet he painted ten thousand works, experi­menting, creating new techniques, using different languages, always reinventing himself: he was abstract and figurative, they called him post-cubist, surrealist, expressionist, but definitely no definition can encapsulate him. Who was Paul Klee really? Dominated by a powerful inspiration and inexhaustible crea­tive fury, he knew how to educate it with the most methodi­cal of lives. It was the Klee method: a rare case of a genius who knew how to live a regulated life with no room for boheme. He was a loving and ever-present father, a faithful and dedicated husband, an attentive and charming teacher, as his lecture notes and students’ recollections testify. The masterpiece of his life is precisely that of having managed to pour the incandescence and fury, after having tempered them well, into his work. Is there nothing more human? Through his Diaries - an extraordinary autobiography - and the dense theoretical writings he left behind, Gregorio Botta tells and interweaves the story of a man with an ordinary life and the birth of a new aesthetic that marked the 20th century and art history. This book is definitely a memorable portrait of an “ordi­nary” genius.