Georgios Kordis

Paul Klee’s short book Über moderne Kunst (‘On Modern Art’) was the stimulus for the dialogue attempted in this particular text. It is a dialogue on the part of an artist who has built his reflections on aesthetics on the basis of what is known as Byzantine art, which is a continuation of the Greek artistic tradition. It presents, as counterpoint, the particular mode of thinking of an iconographer on all the central issues and themes which govern artistic practice. It therefore discusses the role of the artist, how nature is perceived, the function of pictorial elements and, of course, the deeper reason determining the composition. It shows the wide gap which exists between an artistic creator belonging to modernism and a painter of the Byzantine/Greek tradition, for whom painting is conceived as a liturgy, as regards the community, and is not primarily a tool for the artist to express his personal visions.

Prologue

In 1924, Paul Klee wrote a series of notes to sketch out the basic points of a lecture he then gave at the opening of an exhibition in Jena, Germany. These notes later became the book published under the titleÜber moderne Kunst (‘On Modern Art’) and became one of the most important texts written by an active Modernist artist. Despite the fact that these notes are of a fragmentary and often vague nature, with many points not particularly well developed, they still, to this day, constitute significant and valuable material for any artist, art historian, and those interested in the arts in a general way, who would like to understand how an artist conceives the style and the nature of creation and of a work of art in general.