Paul Klee
A Swiss-born painter and graphic artist
whose personal, often gently humorous
works are replete with allusions to
dreams, music, and poetry, Paul Klee, b.
Dec. 18, 1879, d. June 29, 1940,
is difficult to classify. Primitive art,
surrealism, cubism, and children's
art all seem blended into his small-scale,
delicate paintings, watercolors,
and drawings. His family was very interested in
the arts. The jobs that
Paul's parents had were strange for 1879. His mom helped
support the family
by giving piano lessons. His father did the housework. He
cooked, cleaned,
and painted. Paul's grandma taught him how to paint. After much
hesitation he
chose to study art, not music, and he attended the Munich Academy
in 1900.
Klee later toured Italy (1901-02), responding enthusiastically to
Early
Christian and Byzantine art. Klee was a watercolorist, and etcher,
who was one
of the most original masters of modern art. Belonging to no
specific art
movement, he created works known for their fantastic dream
images, wit, and
imagination. These combine satirical, grotesque, and surreal
elements and reveal
the influence of Francisco de Goya and James Ensor, both
of whom Klee admired.
Two of his best-known etchings, dating from 1903,
are Virgin in a Tree and Two
Men Meet, Each Believing the Other to Be of
Higher Rank. The paintings of Klee
are difficult to classify. His earliest
works were pencil landscape studies that
showed the influence of
impressionism. Until 1912 he also produced many
black-and-white etchings; the
overtones of fantasy and satire in these works
showed the influence of
20th-century expressionism as well as of such master
printmakers as Francisco
Goya and William Blake. Klee often incorporated letters
and numerals into his
paintings, but he also produced series of works that
explore mosaic and other
effects. "Klee's career was a search for the
symbols and metaphors that would
make this belief visible. More than any other
painter outside the Surrealist
movement (with which his work had many affinities
- its interest in dreams,
in primitive art, in myth, and cultural incongruity),
he refused to draw hard
distinctions between art and writing. Indeed, many of
his paintings are a
form of writing: they pullulate with signs, arrows, floating
letters,
misplaced directions, commas, and clefs; their code for any object,
from the
veins of a leaf to the grid pattern of Tunisian irrigation ditches,
makes no
attempt at sensuous description, but instead declares itself to be a
purely
mental image, a hieroglyph existing in emblematic space. So most of the
time
Klee could get away with a shorthand organization that skimped the
spatial
grandeur of high French modernism while retaining its unforced
delicacy of mood.
Klee's work did not offer the intense feelings of
Picasso’s, or the formal
mastery of Matisse’s. The spidery, exact line,
crawling and scratching around
the edges of his fantasy, works in a small
compass of post-Cubist overlaps,
transparencies, and figure- field play-offs.
In fact, most of Klee's ideas about
pictorial space came out of Robert
Dulaunay’s work, especially the Windows.
The paper, hospitable to every
felicitous accident of blot and puddle in the
watercolor washes, contains the
images gently. As the art historian Robert
Rosenblum has said, 'Klee's
particular genius [was] to be able to take any
number of the principal
Romantic motifs and ambitions that, by the early
twentieth century, had often
swollen into grotesquely Wagnerian dimensions, and
translate them into a
language appropriate to the diminutive scale of a child's
enchanted world.'
After his marriage in 1906 to the pianist Lili Stumpf, Klee
settled in
Munich, then an important center for avant-garde art. His wife, Lily,
gave
music lessons, while Paul babysat their only son, he was a good
babysitter.
Klee painted in a unique and personal style; no one else
painted like he did. He
used pastels, tempera, watercolor, and a combination
of oil and watercolor, as
well as different backgrounds. Besides using the
canvas that he usually painted
on he used paper, jute, cotton, and wrapping
paper. A turning point in Klee's
career was his visit to Tunisia with Macke
and Louis Molliet in 1914. He was so
overwhelmed by the intense light there
that he wrote: "Color has taken
possession of me; no longer do I have to
chase after it, I know that it has hold
of me forever. That is the
significance of this blessed moment. Color and I are
one. I am a painter." He
now built up compositions of colored squares that
have the radiance of the
mosaics he saw on his Italian sojourn. The watercolor
Red and White Domes
(1914; Collection of Clifford Odets, New York City) is
distinctive of this
period. His paintings and watercolors for the next 20 years
showed a mastery
of delicate, dreamlike color harmonies, which he usually used
to create flat,
semiabstract compositions or even effects resembling mosaic, as
in Pastoral.
Klee was also a master draftsman, and many of his works are
elaborated line
drawings with subject matter that grew out of fantasy or dream
imagery; he
described his technique in these drawings as taking a line for a
walk. After
1935, afflicted by a progressive skin and muscular disease, Klee
adopted a
broad, flat style characterized by thick, crayon like lines and large
areas
of subdued color. His subject matter during this period grew
increasingly
brooding and gloomy, as in the nightmarish Death and Fire. Klee
died in Muralto,
Switzerland, on June 29, 1940. His work influenced all
later 20th-century
surrealist and nonobjective artists and was a prime source
for the budding
abstract expressionist movement. "If Klee was not one of the
great form
givers, he was still ambitious. Like a miniaturist, he wanted to
render nature
permeable, in the most exact way, to the language of style -
and this meant not
only close but ecstatic observation of the natural world,
embracing the Romantic
extremes of the near and the far, the close-up detail
and the "cosmic"
landscape. At one end, the moon and mountains, the stand of
jagged dark pines,
the flat mirroring seas laid in a mosaic of washes; at the
other, a swarm of
little graphic inventions, crystalline or squirming, that
could only have been
made in the age of high-resolution microscopy and the
close-up photograph. There
was a clear link between some of Klee's plant
motifs and the images of plankton,
diatoms, seeds, and microorganisms that
German scientific photographers were
making at the same time. In such
paintings, Klee tried to give back to art a
symbol that must have seemed lost
forever in the nightmarish violence of World
War I and the social unrest
that followed. This was the Paradise-Garden, one of
the central images of
religious romanticism - the metaphor of Creation itself,
with all species
growing peaceably together under the eye of natural (or divine)
order." Pail
Klee’s Dancing Girl is a painting that he did in 1940 that
stood out from all
the rest on our visit to the Art Institute. Dancing Girl is a
painting made
up of simple short bold line strokes and a couple of circles to
high light
her head and hands. Done in 1940 Klee used a far-fetched medium for
this
piece. Dancing girl was composed on oil on linen and then glued on to
a
panel. As strange as it must seem it still has a strong appeal to it.
Dancing
Girl follows the pattern of man of Klee’s past work. His work at
times seems
hard to explain but understanding to the mind. There are certain
suttle objects
in the painting that make it obvious that this is a girl
dancing. One is the
distinguishing fact that this is a young woman. This is
shown by the 3 main
lines that make up her body. Halfway down the middle line
there is a curve that
forms the shape of a triangle as well as her other leg.
Under the triangle on
the background is a shade of red that gives the
triangle and you the visual
effect of her wearing a dress. The painting
itself is simple yet dramatic as
most of Paul Klee’s works were. The
Background was a tealish green color with
highlights of yellow around the
circles to distinguish her hands and feet. What
makes the main object stand
out at the viewer more is the white highlight around
the girl. This effect
draws your eye to the center of the piece and then lets
you wonder around the
rest of the painting. It appears as if he (Paul Klee) used
watercolors and
inks for this and implemented small pictures and childlike
symbols to give it
appeal. Klee valued the primitive look especially art of
children. I believe
that he envied their freedom and respected their innocence.
. As the art
historian Robert Rosenblum has said, 'Klee's particular genius
[was] to be
able to take any number of the principal Romantic motifs and
ambitions that,
by the early twentieth century, had often swollen into
grotesquely Wagnerian
dimensions, and translate them into a language appropriate
to the diminutive
scale of a child's enchanted world.' . "Formerly we used to
represent things
visible on earth,' he wrote in 1920, 'things we either liked to
look at or
would have liked to see. Today we reveal the reality that is behind
visible
things, thus expressing the belief that the visible world is merely
an
isolated case in relation to the universe and that there are many more
other,
latent realities"