Stlukesguild

Poetry- Klee was certainly inspired by poetry... read poetry... even wrote poetry... but his works also have a constant poetic strain that runs through them. Like a great lyrical poem they are often quite small in scale, and yet display a heightened sensitivity to the most subtle nuances of visual form. The images themselves are often quite suggestive in symbolic or metaphoric ways... rather than illustrative or illusionistic.

Klee also made great use of the poetic title. While many artists are somewhat ambiguous... even hostile toward the idea of titling their works... many feeling that the visual image should not need words to clarify or explain it... Klee, on the other hand... took full advantage of the use of the title. Certainly the paintings succeed without any recourse to words... nevertheless, in many cases the title seems just as much a part of the work and an element key to its understanding as the title might be in certain lyrical poems. One cannot look at the title of some paintings without arriving at that state of "Aha!" where one nods in full agreement with the artist... acknowledging that what his title spells out is just exactly what the image conveys:

Twittering Machine-



Ghost of a Genius-



Ancient Sound-



Wintry Mask-



Refuge-



Fire at Evening-



The Art of Children- Children develop their artistic abilities at set stages. There are certain abstractions... certain stylizations or ways of attempting to depict objects, people, and space that in the large sense follow observable stages of development. Obviously even the greatest old masters once drew like a child. Rembrandt and even Michelangelo must have produced drawings like this at some stage of their development:



Children's art clearly lacks a certain finesse of finish, and surely we accept that it will not display a mastery of anatomy or illusionistic depictions of form and space. Children's art is also often erratic... largely because the child lacks the experience to recognize when something really works or even when it is truly brilliant. On the other hand... children's art often has a real audacity... a willingness to try anything... simply because "they don't know any better". In other words... they haven't reached that state that most people eventually head toward around the age of late-middle-school (and that most never abandon)... the state in which they begin to master certain rules for "drawing well" ... for achieving a degree of veracity to the visual object they are depicting.

The younger child doesn't yet think this way. Objects are often depicted pictographically or symbolically... The scale of images and objects will often have little to do with the logic of perspective and everything to do with the "importance" of that element to the child. Colors need not have anything to do with reality, and people, animals, objects can be readily bent, twisted, or otherwise deformed in order to make them fit the confines of the space.

I find it almost miraculous that none of these elements of children's art were ever appreciated prior to the 20th century. We have little or no examples of children's art from the past... even from the most talented artists. We have no naive drawings of figures and landscapes by Rembrandt or Michelangelo... nothing that Leonardo's mother would have pinned to the refrigerator with magnets had he been an 8-year-old today. Indeed, there is almost no mention of children's art... and certainly none that is in any way appreciative... until the last century. Perhaps one of the greatest contributions of artists such as Picasso, Matisse, and Klee is that they were among the first to recognized the value of children's art. Picasso famously declared, “It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child." Conversely... their art was profoundly influenced by the art of children... and through them, the whole of Modern art.

Western artists have long been inspired by the notion of the "other"... the Moor or Turk or Japanese or African or Native American Indian whom they imagined as something more savage... but consequently also closer to the real passions and emotions that inspire "real art". Gauguin found such inspiration in the art of the peasants of Breton and the natives of the Pacific Islands. Matisse was profoundly inspired by Islamic and Asian art. The Surrealists sought out inspiration from any source outside that of the logical/rational world: the art of the mentally ill, self-taught artists, the art of "outsiders" such as William Blake and Henri Rousseau.

Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Max Beckmann, Paul Klee, Joan Miro, and Jean Dubuffet (all counted among the greatest artists of the 20th century) were all profoundly inspired by the art of children. Klee saved art by his own children and children in the family... but also collected art by other children. There is an element in children's art that is almost impossible for the adult to mimic. Almost any experienced art teacher can discern the art of a child from that of an adult mimicking the look of children's art. The strength of Klee (and the other Modernists inspired by children's art) lie in his/their ability to synthesize the influences of this "other" and make it his/their own.

Paintings such as Ventriloquist and Crier on the Moor...



...Adam and Little Eve...



...or Portrait of Mrs. P. in the South...



... as well as any number of paintings posted above, were profoundly influenced and informed by the art of children... an fact that has often led to the comments of certain Philistines that "a child could draw that"... but they also display elements... a mastery of color harmonies... a certain sureness to the surface and materials... a compositional control... a crispness of line... a sophistication of pattern, design, balance... that is unquestionably adult... and quite masterful.

Klee's influence upon my own work is quite obvious. His impact upon subsequent art has been profound. The Abstract Expressionists, the Surrealists, Joan Miro, Adolf Gottlieb, Matta and certain other South American Modernists, Jean Dubuffet and the "Art Brut" movement, the CoBrA, Geometric Abstractionists, Henri Michaux and other "text/calligraphic" artists, and many more have had to acknowledge Klee as an important predecessor.