ABSTRACT
Painting as Page It has often been said that Paul Klee’s paintings are more like pages from a book than like other paintings.1 This is the analogy Clement Greenberg uses to talk about how different Klee’s work is from Picasso’s. Picasso’s paintings “move about in actual physical space”—”take place among other events and other objects”—whereas “Klee’s live in a more fictive medium and require of the spectator a greater dislocation, a greater shift.”2 Picasso’s painting is architectural, monumental, public; Klee’s is the opposite: “Klee’s private lyricism is more sympathetic to those who live in industrial countries … where the scope of art is essentially private.”3 Summing up these differences, Greenberg writes: “The difference is that [Picasso] sees the picture as a wall, while Klee sees it as a page.”4
