THE COLLECTION
Paul Klee (German, born Switzerland. 1879–1940)
Around the Fish
- Date:
- 1926
- Medium:
- Oil and tempera on canvas mounted on cardboard
- Dimensions:
- 18 3/8 x 25 1/8" (46.7 x 63.8 cm)
- Credit Line:
- Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Fund
- MoMA Number:
- 271.1939
- Copyright:
- © 2013 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
2006
A garnished platter of fish is surrounded by a constellation of seemingly disparate elements—a cross, full and crescent moons, an exclamation point, a forked red flag—all hovering against a dark abyss. Some of Klee's iconography grew out of his teaching; the arrow, which he initially used as a teaching tool to indicate force and emotion for his students at the Bauhaus, here points confrontationally towards a stylized head, possibly alluding to human consciousness. Although they are often enigmatic, Klee believed his personal hieroglyphs and figurative elements had wider connotations: "The object grows beyond its appearance through our knowledge of its inner being, through the knowledge that the thing is more than its outward aspect suggests."
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