Paul Klee: An Interpretation Of Reality

Many things in our life that we know, we know because we can directly experience it. We know the general form of a chair because we have seen it or sat on it. We know the taste of chocolate milk because we have drunk it before. However, how we can know things that transcend reality? How can we gain truths about the human condition without experiencing it in nature or interacting with others? A solution to this seems to be through art. Art is considered to be the special expression of ideas, feelings, and values in a perceptible form. Essentially, Art is a way for us to be able to realize truths about the world that we would not be able to determine in any other form. Many people have played with this idea of art revealing further truth, like …show more content…
Klee states that “art does not reproduce the visible, it makes visible”. According to my interpretation, Klee is stating that art does not directly copy reality. He says that, instead, art is a creative reinterpretation of reality, and reveals to us things that we may not have known without the use of the work of art. I agree with what Klee has said. I believe that art is not supposed to be a direct copy of reality. Instead, the purpose of art is to be a different perspective of reality that provides us ideas which can enable us to determine truths about the world that we could not have known from our own direct reality (the reality that we individually experience).

When trying to determine the purpose of art, one must consider the effect of it. That brings up the question of what truly defines what the artwork is. In my opinion, while the intent of the author is important, the interpretation of the artwork by the public is the …show more content…
Langer, in her essay “Problems of art” states that the arts can help reveal things that the normal discursive form (our language) can not. Art can help transmit to us an emotion that we can feel, but we can not describe in words. Thus, the art can help us gain knowledge on that certain emotion. This can be experienced when you feel something within you, and you have to explain this to the class, but you can’t find the right words to accomplish this goal. That is where art comes into hand. By illustrating a picture or drawing something, you can showcase that emotion so that others can understand it (like a certain feeling of sadness that can be felt when viewing Picasso’s Old Guitarist). These emotions that we in turn feel can help us gain a more concrete understanding of certain events, according to Jane Adam’s disruptive emotional epistemology. While facts and statistics can provide us abstract knowledge over a certain subject, it is with the emotion (emotive knowledge) that one can gain a concrete understanding off of the original propositional knowledge. This could be demonstrated by the song about Gallipoli that was shown in class. Before hearing the song, I knew some basic information about the battle of Gallipoli, the many people that died, and the sufferings that they