The Prints Of Paul Klee Original 1945 Valentin SOBY Portfolio Complete Set

  
A complete set of 40 prints in very good condition plus accompanying book and portfolio. New York: Curt Valentin, 1945. First edition [1,000 copies]. Black cloth portfolio with paper labels to front and spine.

40 loose prints [complete], Booklet xv [vii] pp + 5 black and white illustrations, housed in original black cloth portfolio. The 40 etchings and lithographs were printed by the Meriden Gravure Company and The Golden Eagle Press. The eight color plates were reproduced in stencil by Esther Gentle. Booklet in uncoated paper wrappers with small black design to front panel [no title on stitched binding].

Wrappers slightly marked and dusted. 1 Jungfrau im Baum uniformly darkened to the fore edge margin. Close inspection reveals a couple of tiny dust spots randomly in the margins of a couple of plates.

Portfolio flaps lightly foxed, but a very good copy with complete set of nearly fine plates. Black cloth Portfolio housing [40] 9 x 12-inch [22.86 x 30.48 cm] plates printed by the Meriden Gravure Company with eight color plates reproduced in stencil by Esther Gentle, and a 24-page booklet that contains 5 additional full-page black and white reproductions of 3 pan and ink and 2 lithographs, a list of plates in the portfolio, and a Catalog of Prints, etchings and lithographs, prepared by the artist's widow and printed here as a basis for further research. The Prints of Paul Klee was first published in the summer of 1945 by art dealer Curt Valentin. The book features plates of facsimile impressions of 40 lithographs and etchings from 1903 - 1931 by Paul Klee and is accompanied by a brochure with an introduction by James Thrall Soby, former head of the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art. This first edition of Paul Klee Klee's etchings and lithographs shows his changing style, from academic traditionalist to abstractionist.

"I want to create something very humble, " he wrote in 1902. I will think of a very tiny formative motif; my pencil will be able to hold it without any technique. " "Klee's work was as much analytical as it was spontaneous. His rigor as an artist never got in the way of his humor, or his excitement at the inexplicable nature of things, both in the world itself and in the world confined by the edges of his painted vision.

Klee's art developed not by shucking off earlier modes or compartmentalizing different elements, so much as by reintegrating and reformulating what he had already achieved in a different register. And as much as he strove to understand the visible world rationally, he never lost that playfulness and openness to the unbidden that makes his work so lively, generous and unexpected (The Guardian).