The above images are from
Paul Klee: Hand Puppets which I found while brousing the book store today. "Between 1916 and 1925
Paul Klee (1879-1940) made some 50 hand puppets
for his son, Felix, of which 30 are still in existence. For the heads,
he used materials from his own household: beef bones and electrical
outlets, bristle brushes, leftover bits of fur and nutshells. Soon he
began to sew costumes. These characters and small works, do not pretend
to be great art, but at the same time, they are superbly imaginative,
sweetly reminiscent of Klee's relationships with his family, and
beautifully illustrative of the artistic and social developments of the
time. Readers will see the chronological proximity of Dada and Kurt
Schwitters's collages in Klee's
Matchbox Ghost; the
German National
caricatures one of the era's more ominous political types. An
introductory essay tracks the work's links to other avant-garde puppetry
and to Klee's sculptural works, and notes his connections to the
theater. For their part, Klee's son Felix and his grandson Alexander
tell the story of how the figures were created."
