Modern Visionary
by Phyllis Tuchman
JULY 22, 2010 TAGS:
Paul Klee’s paintings and works on paper initially may look light-hearted and whimsical. Radiant and colorful, many of the Swiss artist’s small-sized masterpieces feature meandering lines. Then too, as they defy gravity to float in space, his idiosyncratic figures are often as buoyant and festive as balloons.
Unfortunately, such interpretations shortchange Klee’s subtle, elusive work. It’s not comic, much less benign. When the artist portrayed a wide-eyed cat pondering a bird, Hitler was rising to power, scoping out his own prey.
To be sure, Klee embraced Modernism. Robert Delaunay, who rendered Paris with fetching blue, yellow, and green geometries, and Wassily Kandinsky, the Russian abstractionist, were cherished colleagues who played significant roles in his career. And, upon returning from a trip to Tunisia, the Swiss artist declared, “Color has taken hold of me…It will possess me always…Color and I are one. I am a painter.” As for his graphic flourishes, he once suggested that in his work, a line “goes out for a walk, so to speak, aimless only for the sake of the walk.”
Klee was a 20th-century visionary who belongs among the heroes he admired early on. Like his pantheon of European predecessors --William Blake, Henry Fuseli, Odilon Redon, James Ensor, and Francisco Goya -- he stressed subject matter. He depicted angels, monsters, ghosts, perversities, a tormented soul or two, even barbarians. Klee had a gift for caricature and for rendering complex notions as vivid tableaux. Would this have been clear had he lived deeper into the 20th century?
Klee belonged to a generation of achievers. However, it took him longer than many contemporaries to find himself. Unlike, say, Pablo Picasso, the drawings he made with pencils and crayon as a child look like the work of an adolescent. Even the prints he etched when he was in his mid-20s are unremarkable. Yet he thrived in a community of like-minded artists.
Klee was born near Bern, where he was raised, on Dec. 18, 1879. His father, a German, was a professional musician and an orchestra conductor; his Swiss mother was an accomplished singer. The young boy played several instruments and developed a life-long love for music. Lyonel Feininger, with whom he taught at the Bauhaus, once observed, “Klee the painter is unthinkable without Klee the musician.”
At 18, Klee went to Bavaria to study art. Eventually, he entered the Munich Academy, where he took classes with Franz Stuck, a Symbolist painter who also taught two other Bauhaus instructors, Kandinsky and Josef Albers.
In 1901-02, Klee spent half a year touring Italy. His taste, as the legendary MoMA director Alfred H. Barr Jr. pointed out, was unorthodox. The 21-year-old “preferred Early Christian art to that of the Quattrocento, Baroque to High Renaissance painting, and the Naples aquarium to the classical antiquities of the Naples Museum.” He didn’t catch up with the avant-garde for a while: neither in 1905, when he spent two weeks in Paris, nor during a trip to Berlin in 1906. After he married Lily Stumpf, a pianist, in 1906, the couple settled in the artists’ district of Munich.
Things started to change in 1911, when Klee met Kandinsky and August Macke and then Franz Marc and Alexei Jawlensky, the German Expressionists who exhibited as the Blaue Reiter. Now the 31-year-old painter started to come into his own. After his second visit to Paris in 1912, when he went to Delaunay’s studio, and after a trip to Tunisia in 1914, he developed the style that made him the artist we’ve come to know.
Instead of relying on line, Klee began to make watercolors comprising patches of color. With additional strokes, he introduced trees and hills and houses. Though the first group of these works was based on his sojourn to Tunisia, the artist’s new manner owed a huge debt to the art of Robert and Sonia Delaunay.
Klee served in the German army during the Great War, painting airplanes, accompanying military transports to the front, and clerking in a paymaster’s office. His watercolors took on a richer complexity. Atop the colored backgrounds, he portrayed a topsy-turvy world. Using fine lines and cross-hatching, he introduced fantastic apparitions. Because these watercolors are small and intimate, you feel as if you are looking directly into his mind.
In January 1921, at the invitation of architect Walter Gropius, its founding director, Klee began teaching at the Bauhaus. When the school moved from Weimar to Dessau four years later, Klee and his wife shared a Gropius-designed faculty house with the Kandinskys. During the decade Klee spent at the Bauhaus, he created some of his most endearing art works, including The Twittering Machine, Dance You Monster to My Sweet Song, and Highroads and Byroads. The first two have a theatrical orientation as if you are watching performances on a stage under colored spotlights; the latter appears to be a riff on the endless stretch of fields the artist saw out the window of a train. All three are the sort of watercolors and oil paintings Barr included in a 1930 Klee retrospective held at MoMA, the first devoted to a living European artist.
Klee left the Bauhaus for the Dusseldorf Art Academy in 1931, but he taught there for just two years. Soon after Hitler became German chancellor, the artist was suspended for his modernity, and he returned to Bern. The Fuhrer was stifling a major artist: Klee had had major exhibitions, two in Berlin and Dresden, and another at the National Galerie in Berlin. As world events became more dire, Klee’s art entered a new phase. Rotating gears replaced directional arrows; ideograms rather than recognizable letters were introduced. A number of remarkable oils were composed from hundreds of mosaic-like bits of color.
Klee’s resilient personality kept him going. In 1936 he was so ill, from what would later be diagnosed as scleroderma, a degenerative skin disease, that he made only 25 works of art. Three years later, he painted 1,253 oils and watercolors. All told, during a career spanning four decades, and ending at age 60 on June 29, 1940, the artist executed 9,000 works of art: almost 4,000 paintings and more than 5,000 works on paper.
The sheer numbers might be one reason his art has been so enduring. To explain who Paul Klee was, many different strands based on, say, subject matter or quirky imagery or formal invention can be isolated from the whole. You can see the Paul Klee you want to see: an artist who was whimsical, grave, stylish, evasive, audacious, diaristic, challenging. Barr got it right when he noted, “For a work by Klee is scarcely subject to methods of criticism which follow ordinary formulae. His pictures can not be judged as representations of the ordinary visual world. Usually, too, they can not be judged merely as formal compositions, though some of them are entirely acceptable to the esthetic purist.”
Perhaps Klee summed up his legacy best with the inscription on his tomb: “I can not be pinned down here and now/because I live as well with the dead/as with the unborn/Somewhat closer to the heart of creation than usual/and still not close enough.”
Phyllis Tuchman writes about art and artists for Obit.
Unfortunately, such interpretations shortchange Klee’s subtle, elusive work. It’s not comic, much less benign. When the artist portrayed a wide-eyed cat pondering a bird, Hitler was rising to power, scoping out his own prey. To be sure, Klee embraced Modernism. Robert Delaunay, who rendered Paris with fetching blue, yellow, and green geometries, and Wassily Kandinsky, the Russian abstractionist, were cherished colleagues who played significant roles in his career. And, upon returning from a trip to Tunisia, the Swiss artist declared, “Color has taken hold of me…It will possess me always…Color and I are one. I am a painter.” As for his graphic flourishes, he once suggested that in his work, a line “goes out for a walk, so to speak, aimless only for the sake of the walk.”
Klee was a 20th-century visionary who belongs among the heroes he admired early on. Like his pantheon of European predecessors --William Blake, Henry Fuseli, Odilon Redon, James Ensor, and Francisco Goya -- he stressed subject matter. He depicted angels, monsters, ghosts, perversities, a tormented soul or two, even barbarians. Klee had a gift for caricature and for rendering complex notions as vivid tableaux. Would this have been clear had he lived deeper into the 20th century?
Klee belonged to a generation of achievers. However, it took him longer than many contemporaries to find himself. Unlike, say, Pablo Picasso, the drawings he made with pencils and crayon as a child look like the work of an adolescent. Even the prints he etched when he was in his mid-20s are unremarkable. Yet he thrived in a community of like-minded artists.
Klee was born near Bern, where he was raised, on Dec. 18, 1879. His father, a German, was a professional musician and an orchestra conductor; his Swiss mother was an accomplished singer. The young boy played several instruments and developed a life-long love for music. Lyonel Feininger, with whom he taught at the Bauhaus, once observed, “Klee the painter is unthinkable without Klee the musician.”
At 18, Klee went to Bavaria to study art. Eventually, he entered the Munich Academy, where he took classes with Franz Stuck, a Symbolist painter who also taught two other Bauhaus instructors, Kandinsky and Josef Albers.
In 1901-02, Klee spent half a year touring Italy. His taste, as the legendary MoMA director Alfred H. Barr Jr. pointed out, was unorthodox. The 21-year-old “preferred Early Christian art to that of the Quattrocento, Baroque to High Renaissance painting, and the Naples aquarium to the classical antiquities of the Naples Museum.” He didn’t catch up with the avant-garde for a while: neither in 1905, when he spent two weeks in Paris, nor during a trip to Berlin in 1906. After he married Lily Stumpf, a pianist, in 1906, the couple settled in the artists’ district of Munich. Things started to change in 1911, when Klee met Kandinsky and August Macke and then Franz Marc and Alexei Jawlensky, the German Expressionists who exhibited as the Blaue Reiter. Now the 31-year-old painter started to come into his own. After his second visit to Paris in 1912, when he went to Delaunay’s studio, and after a trip to Tunisia in 1914, he developed the style that made him the artist we’ve come to know.
Instead of relying on line, Klee began to make watercolors comprising patches of color. With additional strokes, he introduced trees and hills and houses. Though the first group of these works was based on his sojourn to Tunisia, the artist’s new manner owed a huge debt to the art of Robert and Sonia Delaunay.
Klee served in the German army during the Great War, painting airplanes, accompanying military transports to the front, and clerking in a paymaster’s office. His watercolors took on a richer complexity. Atop the colored backgrounds, he portrayed a topsy-turvy world. Using fine lines and cross-hatching, he introduced fantastic apparitions. Because these watercolors are small and intimate, you feel as if you are looking directly into his mind.
In January 1921, at the invitation of architect Walter Gropius, its founding director, Klee began teaching at the Bauhaus. When the school moved from Weimar to Dessau four years later, Klee and his wife shared a Gropius-designed faculty house with the Kandinskys. During the decade Klee spent at the Bauhaus, he created some of his most endearing art works, including The Twittering Machine, Dance You Monster to My Sweet Song, and Highroads and Byroads. The first two have a theatrical orientation as if you are watching performances on a stage under colored spotlights; the latter appears to be a riff on the endless stretch of fields the artist saw out the window of a train. All three are the sort of watercolors and oil paintings Barr included in a 1930 Klee retrospective held at MoMA, the first devoted to a living European artist.
Klee left the Bauhaus for the Dusseldorf Art Academy in 1931, but he taught there for just two years. Soon after Hitler became German chancellor, the artist was suspended for his modernity, and he returned to Bern. The Fuhrer was stifling a major artist: Klee had had major exhibitions, two in Berlin and Dresden, and another at the National Galerie in Berlin. As world events became more dire, Klee’s art entered a new phase. Rotating gears replaced directional arrows; ideograms rather than recognizable letters were introduced. A number of remarkable oils were composed from hundreds of mosaic-like bits of color.
Klee’s resilient personality kept him going. In 1936 he was so ill, from what would later be diagnosed as scleroderma, a degenerative skin disease, that he made only 25 works of art. Three years later, he painted 1,253 oils and watercolors. All told, during a career spanning four decades, and ending at age 60 on June 29, 1940, the artist executed 9,000 works of art: almost 4,000 paintings and more than 5,000 works on paper.The sheer numbers might be one reason his art has been so enduring. To explain who Paul Klee was, many different strands based on, say, subject matter or quirky imagery or formal invention can be isolated from the whole. You can see the Paul Klee you want to see: an artist who was whimsical, grave, stylish, evasive, audacious, diaristic, challenging. Barr got it right when he noted, “For a work by Klee is scarcely subject to methods of criticism which follow ordinary formulae. His pictures can not be judged as representations of the ordinary visual world. Usually, too, they can not be judged merely as formal compositions, though some of them are entirely acceptable to the esthetic purist.”
Perhaps Klee summed up his legacy best with the inscription on his tomb: “I can not be pinned down here and now/because I live as well with the dead/as with the unborn/Somewhat closer to the heart of creation than usual/and still not close enough.”
Phyllis Tuchman writes about art and artists for Obit.
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