A friend of mine was invited to a colleague's house for lunch and met their 5 year old daughter for the first time. When she asked him what he did, he told her he taught drawing at an art school. For a moment she looked puzzled and then asked: “You mean they forget?”
Her question could be a key to the work of Paul Klee. “Child-like” is an epithet often used dismissively by people familiar only with a fraction of Klee's ork – the funny stick-figures perched on Heath-Robinson pieces of machinery. They see infantile doodles, lines that appear to have no logic. But others claim Klee is a “towering figure of modern art”, precisely because of his “child-like”, though not childish, vision. Much of his life he jettisoned technique in a deliberate attempt to represent the world through the uneducated eyes of a child. A major exhibition of his work dominated London's Tate Modern from October 2013 to March 2014. So since when have doodles been considered Great Art?
Paul Klee was born in Bern, Switzerland, in 1879. His German father was a music teacher, his Swiss mother a singer, so Klee grew up in a family where music was a natural form of expression and from the age of 7 he learnt the violin. He went to school in Bern, then, despite a marked talent as a musician, he enrolled at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts. After graduating there he returned to live with his parents, earning his living as a violinist in the Bern orchestra and writing concert reviews, while spending every spare moment painting. At 27 he married a pianist, Lily Stumpf and they moved back to Munich, where his wife's piano lessons kept them afloat. When a son was born, Lily Klee continued earning the money and Paul stayed at home with the baby to paint.
The American critic Clement Greenberg claims that being brought up in a small city in Switzerland gave Klee a “very important personal asset”: sheltered from the major cultural currents of the time, he was surrounded by middle-European folk art. Since the 16th century, mainstream Western painting had been dominated by Renaissance principles of perspective, colour and subject-matter. A painter's talent was measured by how accurately he reproduced external reality. It is art for show. Folk art is personal, direct. Emotion more important than formal complexity. Although at art school Klee was recognised as a very fine draughtsman (Beardsley was a major influence), he chose not to follow the Western tradition. Indeed he deliberately unlearnt his technical skills, not only taking himself back to the folk art he had grown up with but, rather as the girl at the head of this article suggests, attempting to see the world again as a child, before all the layers of sophistication are imposed. Perspective on a canvas is fictional – we know that canvas doesn't really have depth. Klee wanted to state that obvious truth in his work, to produce a purely visual experience in only two, unambiguous directions.
In 1912, aware of the influence of African “folk” art on his contemporaries in France, Klee went to Paris to meet Picasso, Braque and Matisse. Like Klee, they were painting their own personal vision of the world, their own inner reality, though the German painter seems never to have been tempted to join them, perhaps aware his particular talent would not flourish so close to those giants of modernism. For whereas Picasso painted major, culture-quaking statements, imperiously upsetting our world view and stood defiantly, a colossus in the History of Art, Klee remained modest, both as a man and as a painter. Yet in many ways he was far more daring than his Spanish contemporary, with an enormous output, some 10,000 paintings, dug out of a more fertile imagination.
His paintings are mostly small, unassuming, private. They continue the tradition of illuminated manuscripts, illustrations, northern European bourgeois paintings. We can too easily pass them by. But Klee's painting needs to be looked at and for a good length of time. They need to work on something within us. Where figurative painting holds a mirror up to nature, abstract painting generally and Klee's work in particular holds a mirror up to ourselves. They are soliloquies which demand our total attention.
His first exhibition, in 1910, can reasonably be described as a failure: “several well-known, respected personalities asked us to stop displaying them,” the owner of the gallery wrote to him with tactful understatement. Four years later, following the example of Picasso and Matisse, he went to North Africa to experience the pure light of the Mediterranean. “Colour has taken hold of me,” he wrote. “I know it has hold of me. Colour and I are one. I am a painter.”
Klee was 35 at the start of the First World War. Since his father was German, he knew sooner or later he would be called up. In the second month of the war his great friend, the painter Auguste Macke was killed. Had he lived I have no doubt Macke would now also be seen as a “towering figure of modern art”. Slightly older, Klee was luckier, spending most of the war far from the front as paymaster's clerk in a flying school. Even during the war he had several exhibitions, and by 1919 he was considered one of Germany's leadingmodern artists. In 1920, after a retrospective in Dusseldorf where he showed over 300 paintings, he was invited to teach at Walter Gropius's newly opened Bauhaus in Weimar.
Klee's media of choice were watercolour – even now considered a “minor” art form – and the similar though more opaque gouache. Both gave him greater fluidity than oil, enabling him to create soft washes of gently graduating colour, often forming a border around the highly imaginative, eccentric, apparently illogical pen and ink figures, or doodles, that many remember. Klee was a relentless experimenter, developing his own home-grown techniques that served him all his life. One of these was the very distinctive “oil-transfer”. First he coated a sheet of paper with black oil paint. Before it was completely dry he laid this face down on a second, blank sheet. Then he placed one of his drawings on top of both sheets. By re-tracing the outline of the drawing with an etching needle, he pushed the oil paint on to the bottom sheet. The result is an interestingly imperfect copy of his original drawing, often with smudges of black oil which affected the flow of the watercolour wash Klee then painted over the etching.
As a scientific experimenter he was methodical. Almost his entire career he kept his oeuvre catalogue: a notebook containing a list of every work he considered important, the year he completed it and its number for that year. So “Classification, 1918, 167” means that his painting “Classification” was the 167th he had finished in 1918. Because the oeuvre catalogue is an exact chronological record, we can see that he painted totally disparate works one after the other or, very often, simultaneously. For one of the most extraordinary things about Klee was his ability to create four or five very different works at the same time – rather like Mozart. Visitors to his studio noted the painter was “surrounded by a number of easels. For hours he would sit quietly in a corner, smoking, apparently not occupied at all – but full of inner watching. Then he would rise and quietly, with unerring sureness, would add a touch of colour here, draw a line or spread a tone there[1].”
While Germany was still painfully trying to come to terms with defeat, Klee moved to the city of Weimar to teach at the Bauhaus, very much the centre of German modernism. The school’s credo was that art should meet the needs of society – form and function should be indistinguishable. Klee spent the next ten years at the Bauhaus teaching “form”, or what we might today call aesthetics, in bookbinding, mural painting, stained glass and later weaving. It was all part of what he saw as reforming art, seeing art differently, breaking away from our pre-conceptions, creating a new world.
Like all of us, Klee was a child, or victim, of his own times, and we tend to forget how terrible the second quarter of the 20th century was for Germans. Two million Germans had died in the Great War – apparently for no reason since the survivors were further humiliated by the conditions imposed in the Treaty of Versailles. Extreme poverty, the 1918 flu pandemic, hyperinflation, all set against a background of political instability that saw the rise of Communism and Nazism, two irreconcilable extremes. The Russian Revolution, with its bloody aftermath of purges, added to the febrility of the times – in 1918 Munich, the town where Klee was living with his wife and child, was declared a Socialist republic. Almost immediately the new prime minister, Kurt Eisner, was assassinated by a right-wing nationalist. A second republic, Soviet this time, was established, but in turn collapsed after a month.
“The main drive behind Klee’s art is a psychic reaction to certain experiences, his pictures are like a seismographic record of this reaction,” wrote the art critic Georg Schmidt. Klee’s 1915 painting “Classification” is a good example of his way of first internalising and then expressing the horrors he lived through. Thick, zig-zag lines of red and black, like distorted lightning, force their way into a jangled mess of disembodied yellow eyes and perhaps fragmented skulls. Smudges of grey and black, like drifting smoke, create a frame which, with the jagged lines, encroaches on the eyes, threatening to blot them out. Of the bodies only the eyes remain. Indeed the eyes fix our eyes and draw us into the picture. They are the windows on the soul – Klee's preferred landscape.
For from within this political ferment, uncertainty and very real suffering, there came also the extraordinary rise of the study of the mind. Freud was only one of many doctors convinced of the power of the unconscious – and almost all these ground-breaking mind doctors were working in the same small area of Europe as Klee. During the first third of the century, books on dreams, sexuality and child-hood flourished, their findings were the subject of animated, often shocked conversation and controversy, especially in a hothouse of modern ideas like the Bauhaus. Klee's work is a sort of painterly digest of this violent yet productive period. Perhaps one reason we have difficulties with Klee is that on the surface so many of his images are light, ironic – one way of coping with those turbulent times. But underneath Klee's witty little stick figures is a struggle to understand. The fact that Klee could not understand his times and expressed that impossibility in his work is what, for me, makes him so strong. In “Guernica” Picasso expressed unequivocally his horror at the aerial bombing of civilians. Klee does not do fireworks, his work is private, as incoherent as a waking thought, but for all that no less powerful.
At the Bauhaus Klee took his teaching seriously, meticulously preparing every lesson. Although by then he was famous, what today we might call “a brand”, he was still a shy man. Speaking in public did not come easily. A student wrote that for his first lesson: “Klee walked into the auditorium backwards. Without turning round he sidled slowly to the blackboard, took two pieces of chalk and started to draw with both hands, muttering all the time to the students behind him.”
At the Bauhaus Klee had time to paint and money to live. The 1920's saw two series of works in which he was clearly investigating the power of colour. As an art student Klee had great difficulty understanding colour -- in fact by the end of his time at the Munich Academy he had decided colour was not his thing. Then in Tunisia, just before WW1, his perception of colour had changed. He saw that colour was not just a means of defining mass or surface, an aid to telling a story, it could exist for itself, as the principal element in a pure painting. He worked on gradations of colour, making rectangular blocks of different sizes, interspersed with triangles, juxtaposing yellows against red against brown. It is very beautiful: purely painterly -- it could not be any other medium – and scientific in its broadest sense.
This exploration of colour gradations evolved into his so-called “magic squares”, smaller self-contained blocks of colour, usually darker in tone, irregular in size, rarely square and never bleeding one into another. They look carefully pre-planned, but almost certainly grew from the hours Klee spent sitting, watching over the easels in his studio. They are prime examples of works you should just let your eyes wander over, without analysing, without rationalising. They don’t “tell” you anything but they suggest a very real harmony, something Klee as a musician understood perfectly: “notes played simultaneously to form chords or a pleasing effect.” All his life Klee thought like a musician, and music is never far from his work.
Many of the staff and students of the Bauhaus were left-wing, influenced politically by the Communist Revolution in Russia and artistically by the official Soviet art, Constructivism. Works like “Separation in the Evening” (above) fitted into their conception of politically correct art and they claimed Klee as a major Constructivist. But many of his paintings are unstructured. He would begin a drawing with no definite idea in mind, just letting his line wander until his mind saw accidental resemblances. Seeing these, the Surrealists in Paris claimed Klee as their champion. One camp advocated functionalism – art without usefulness is decadent: the other automatism – sit trance-like before your canvas and let your hand drift wherever your subconscious guides it. Many of Klee’s paintings at this time were of fish, for surrealists the symbol of the subconscious: what goes on under the surface, half-seen, barely understood. “Like a child, Klee plays beyond the reality which lurks at the periphery of the dream,” wrote the influential art-critic Carl Einstein. This comparison of Klee’s work to that of children was common, again tying in with Freud's work on childhood, with its apparently unfettered “innocence”. Another group with unfettered minds was of course the mentally ill – also a source of fascination for the Surrealists, and “mad” was another label which stuck to Klee and his work. In 1925 a former Bauhaus student turned medical student published a doctoral thesis entitled “Modern Art and Schizophrenia: Under Special Consideration, Paul Klee”. “He never sought to conceal what was childlike, possibly even mad in his character, he simply expressed it in his art,” wrote Nicholas Fox Weber in a biography of several Bauhaus teachers from the reminiscences of their students.
Klee's abiding strength was to remain outside all this ultimately sterile warfare between Constructivists and Surrealists. Perhaps his finest statement reconciling Constructivist, Bauhaus principles and the looser, inspirational ideas of the Surrealists is his 1927 “Portrait of an Artist”, also called (significantly, given the narrow line Klee was being obliged to walk between Surrealists and Constructivists), “Portrait of a Tight-Rope Walker”. A Constructivist face: straight, inter-connecting geometric lines with two circles for the eyes. But the stark white lines are set against a flat black background, so they are the only part the face visible, everything behind and around them is unseeable, unknowable. A small ladder and thicker line suggest that maybe the artist /tight-rope walker is on a stage, a public figure. If Klee invited you to his house in the evening he would rarely say much, but usually perform a piece of Mozart or Bach on his violin, accompanied by Lily on the piano.
By 1930 the Bauhaus was becoming a difficult place for Klee to work. Communist social engagement was becoming even more important to the school's ethos, Klee's work was seen as anachronistic. Many of Klee's colleagues had already resigned and finally he was offered a teaching post at the Dusseldorf Academy.
The new job gave him greater freedom and his painting changed radically. The two years he was in Dusseldorf mark his period of pointillism. Throughout his career, Klee had been searching for a way to convey light on to his paper or canvas. Now, 30 years after the death of Seurat, he began exploring the techniques Seurat had made famous, themselves based on the scientific work of Chevreul, a French chemist who had shown how colour is perceived differently according to what colour is next to it. It may seem odd that such an experimental painter as Klee should take a deliberate step backwards – maybe he was following Jean Cocteau’s precept “Cultivate what others criticise in you, that’s the real you.” But in fact Klee's pointillism is a perfect summing up of his philosophy of painting: that it should express the delicate balance between lyricism and science. People see those two as irreconcilable opposites, but not Klee: “Dark and light stand apart of their own accord,” he wrote. “So they share a peaceful compromise.” Klee's very beautiful credo: compromise. Two opposites agree to be opposite, and in that compromise lies reconciliation and peace.
In fact Klee's pointillism is different from Seurat and Signac's - most obviously because he was not painting figures. At first he didn't use small dots but mosaic-like squares of different tones to suggest shapes, vaguely seen in the dying light – a castle, a garden. In others he painted the squares in blocks or in lines against a changing ground, creating an optically different effect. So behind the gauze of coloured squares, one sees, or thinks one sees, the fluid shape of maybe a bird or something else ethereal. For me the 70 so-called pointillist works in oil, pastel and watercolour are the most sublime of all Klee's work, culminating in “Ad Parnassum” which like a Byzantine mosaic seems to shimmer with its own internal light.
In January 1933 Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, in February citizens' basic rights were suspended, in March Nazi officers ransacked Klee's house. He was labelled a degenerate artist and suspended from the Dusseldorf Academy. In the same year he began to suffer from a degenerative systemic autoimmune disease, scleroderma. Klee managed to leave Germany with his paintings and family to settle in his parents' house in Bern. Despite his evident suffering he continued painting, producing 500 works in 1933 and a staggering 1,253 works in 1939.
During the last seven years of his life he often re-worked themes he had painted in the past. His childhood pictures, re-discovered, became a source of inspiration for him, and, as he had in 1912, he deliberately cast off his formal and technical skills to return to a naive art. His last painting, still on the easel when he died, and so called by his son Felix, “The Last Still Life”, includes, bottom left, one of his most recent paintings of angels and, top right, a sculpture waving at the viewer. There are the vases and flowers he was painting in the 1920's, but if you look closely, the flowers are in fact stick-figures riding uni-cycles turned upside-down. In their original state they featured in a 1939 drawing. Unlike the “giants” of modern art, Klee never took himself too seriously, combining deep thought with a child-like sense of humour.
“I have never seen a man who had such creative quiet,” wrote one of his colleagues at the Dusseldorf Academy. “It radiated from him like the sun. His face was that of a man who knows about day and night, sky and sea and air. He did not speak about these things. His concern is more with the human soul.”
Paul Klee died in June 1940, the month the German army conquered France and the Luftwaffe began their Blitzkreig of London -- revenge for Germany’s defeat in 1918.
[1]Lyonel and Julia Feininger “Recollections of Paul Klee” in Paul Klee: Three Exhibitions catalogue; Museum of Modern Art, New York 1945