Paul Klee Quote

What had already been done for music by the end of the eighteenth century has at last been begun for the pictorial arts. Mathematics and physics furnished the means in the form of rules to be followed and to be broken. In the beginning it is wholesome to be concerned with the functions and to disregard the finished form. Studies in algebra, in geometry, in mechanics characterize teaching directed towards the essential and the functional, in contrast to apparent. One learns to look behind the façade, to grasp the root of things. One learns to recognize the undercurrents, the antecedents of the visible. One learns to dig down, to uncover, to find the cause, to analyze.

In: 'Bauhaus prospectus 1929'; as quoted in "Artists on Art, from the 14th – 20th centuries", ed. by Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves; Pantheon Books, 1972, London, p. 444