"The painter should not paint what he sees, but what will be seen"
About this Quote
Klee’s line flips the usual romance of “painting from life” into something cooler and more prophetic: the job isn’t to mirror the visible world, but to prefigure the way vision itself will change. “What he sees” is mere intake, a private retinal fact. “What will be seen” is a wager on perception as a social technology - shaped by new media, new speeds, new wars, new abstractions. In early 20th-century Europe, photography had already stolen realism’s thunder, and modernism was busy dismantling the idea that sight equals truth. Klee, teaching at the Bauhaus, treats painting less like description and more like research.
The subtext is ambition with a dash of skepticism. If the visible is unstable, then the painter’s authority can’t rest on fidelity; it rests on inventing a visual language that later audiences will recognize as inevitable. That’s why the sentence is future tense, almost market-savvy: not “what should be seen” (moralizing), but “what will be seen” (historical force). It implies the artist as antenna, catching signals before they’re legible to everyone else.
It also reads as a quiet indictment of nostalgia. Painting “what he sees” is complacent, even provincial - a refusal to acknowledge that modern life is reorganizing perception. Klee’s genius is making that sound less like theory and more like a practical brief: don’t chase reality; redesign the viewer.
The subtext is ambition with a dash of skepticism. If the visible is unstable, then the painter’s authority can’t rest on fidelity; it rests on inventing a visual language that later audiences will recognize as inevitable. That’s why the sentence is future tense, almost market-savvy: not “what should be seen” (moralizing), but “what will be seen” (historical force). It implies the artist as antenna, catching signals before they’re legible to everyone else.
It also reads as a quiet indictment of nostalgia. Painting “what he sees” is complacent, even provincial - a refusal to acknowledge that modern life is reorganizing perception. Klee’s genius is making that sound less like theory and more like a practical brief: don’t chase reality; redesign the viewer.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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