Stlukesguild

Paul Klee was the first true Modernist artist whose work I admired. As a first year art student I worshiped the great old masters (still do) and struggled to grasp the innovations of Impressionism... and Post-Impressionism (Van Gogh, Gauguin, etc...) High Modernism... the art of the early 20th century... however, was another beast altogether. With my love of the well-rendered figure or landscape what was I to make of the distortions and fragmentations of Picasso, Matisse, and Beckmann... to say nothing of the absolute abandonment of imagery with Abstract Expressionism?

In spite of this I attended a major Paul Klee exhibition that had come to Cleveland. Logically, I should have disliked everything this man did... but for some reason it piqued by curiosity... I actually found I liked it... without even being able to tell you why. Today I am certain that it had something to do with the manner in which Klee played with many of the same influences that were central to me: books, writing, games, music, etc...

Klee continues to stand as one of the greatest influences upon my work, and I am happy to see that his reputation within the history of art has also continued to grow. I can hardly come across a well-stocked selection of art books without there being at least one or two books on Klee. One artist suggested that Klee had virtually invented the whole of 20th century art... on a miniature scale. It would be hard to refute this. I can think of no other artist, not even Picasso, that has conveyed himself masterfully in such a varied manner.

Writing/Texts/Books- Klee was one of those artists who are not locked solely into a single genre. He was trained and quite talented as a musician and was also deeply in love with books, reading and literature (His own journals are certainly worth reading for anyone interested in the artist's thought process). From the start Klee struggled to find a visual language that might blur the boundaries between painting and other art forms. He was long fascinated with writing and from early on in his career made attempts at infusing the written word with a visual impact:



In Once Emerging from the Gray of Night... Klee took a poem he had composed and not only infused them with a visual element, but building upon some of the theories of synchronism currently being explored by the French artist, Robert Delaunay, he sought to also convey something of the movement, rhythm, counterpoint, and harmony of music.

In the painting, Ad Marginum...



Klee playfully echoes the flora and fauna grotesques that were commonly slipped into the margins of medieval illuminated manuscript.

The simple pictographic form was an element that would fascinate Klee for most of his career. In a painting such as Arrow in the Garden...



Klee built up the surface of his painting with plaster (or some such material) into which he scraped simple pictographic forms reminiscent of some ancient writings... like a tablet from Mesopotamia. In other instances, such as the painting, Contemplating...



... the pictographic forms dance across the filed-like surface in a manner that would have a profound impact upon Abstract Expressionism. Late in his career Klee would reduce his images to a single bold pictograph...



...painted in a manner that suggested Asian Zen painting and surely influenced painters such as Gorky, Gottlieb, and Motherwell.

Geometry/Architecture- One of the most fascinating aspects of Klee's work is the manner is which he could freely move from total abstraction to figurative work... and from playful biomorphic imagery to hard-edged geometric abstractions at ease... and yet always maintain an ineffable something that was clearly his own.

His earliest breakthroughs as an artist came in responding to the landscapes/cityscapes of Tunisia...



... in which forms began to shatter under the blinding light as if the colors were seen through a prism.

These geometries of architecture became more and more complex until they danced across the surfaces playfully:



Color itself could lend a variety of mood to these images... such as the more mysterious Dream City:



Architecture was a key element of his most famous... perhaps his most important painting, Ad Parnassum...



...in which the ancient mythic worlds of the Egyptian and Greco-Roman Empires are fused and reduced to the architectural elements of the arch, the pediment, and the pyramid... all seen under the brilliant red Mediterranean sun as if shattered into a million points of light... like a Byzantine mosaic.

Music- Music was a central element of Klee's entire life. He had studied as a musician himself, and his wife helped to support the couple early on in his career through her own efforts as a music teacher. Klee was highly fond of musical theater, and produced any number of paintings based upon the opera or puppet theater, such as the mysterious Carnival in the Mountains...



the silly Bavarian Don Giovanni...



or the fabulous Battle Scene from the Comic-Operatic-Fantasy, "The Seafarer":



Music had an even more profound impact upon Klee than merely the subject matter of operas or theatrically staged scenes. Klee was very much of the same belief as Walter Pater who had declared that "All art constantly aspires toward the condition of music." Music, unlike any other art form, was seen as having succeeded in attaining a perfect merger of form and subject (or content). Klee stated early on, "What an attractive destiny it would be to master painting today (just as musicians once did)...Achievements made in music by the end of the 18th century remain (for the present) in their infancy in the visual arts."

Klee's notion of a visual art that might convey ideas, movement, passion, emotion through the purely abstract elements of color, form, repetition, rhythm, texture, line, etc... were reinforced by the writings of others with whom he was well aware. Tieck and Wackenroeder spoke of a "poetry" that might be attained by elimination the imitative element in art and replacing it with the purely formal organization of colors and forms. The French painter, Robert Delaunay, and his compatriots at the Bauhaus school, especially Vassily Kandinsky were exploring similar concepts.

Much of Klee's geometric work was inspired by musical concepts of repetition, counterpoint, gradual transition, variation, and harmony. The titles themselves often made this link obvious:

Color Table in Gray Major:



Nocturne:



Fugue in Red:



Aeolian Harp:



New Harmony:



Harmony in Blue=Orange:



continued...