In his teaching at the Bauhaus, Klee drew parallels between elemental aspects of everyday human existence and the fundamentals of artistic creation. The result was to endow both with that élan and magnificent spirit that it was his gift to perceive. He likened the development of painting technique to chemical analysis: if a commercial preparation of a given product (he did not specify the type, but was implicitly referring to substances like toothpaste or laundry detergent) sold well, he said, other manufacturers would be driven to have it analyzed so they could discover its components; the drive to master pictorial composition should inspire artists to do similar research. Here, too, he did not provide examples, but the implication was that an artist should try to understand what the underlying factors were that made Giotto’s altarpieces and Cézanne’s landscapes, however different on the surface, eternally beautiful.
The next comparison in this lecture on pictorial form came from the realm of food. If something eaten brought on illness, Klee pointed out, it would be necessary to discover its harmful components. The same applied to flawed pictures.
Then Klee allowed that those comparisons were only teasers. Having brought art down to earth, he elevated it. “In our kind of business our reasons or motives are naturally different. We do not analyze works of art because we want to imitate them or because we distrust them,” he asserted. Rather, even if art was just another métier, it depended on creativity; artists looked at the work of other artists “so as to begin to walk ourselves.”57
Independence and inventiveness were the goals he encouraged his students to strive toward; nonetheless, there were some vital general precepts that could be learned. Klee guided them to explore the art of others with the realization that it was not “something rigid, immutably fixed.” Rather like the world itself, art had developed from complex origins. He spoke about the book of Genesis and its account of the start of earthly life, using this to define art as the result of an essential human drive. “Before the birth of form … before the first mark is made, there is an entire pre-history which consists not just of man’s desire, his passion to express himself, … but also of …an attitude to the world. Driven by an inner necessity, this attitude demands expression in this or that direction.”58
Art is not peripheral to life, Klee believed. Its making is instinctive, and as grounded in irrefutable truth as is the growth of plants or animals. In turn, its creation should mimic development from a seed or an egg.
Form, Klee explained, comes after genesis. Form—meaning music or language or pictures—is essential to all expression. “The most profound feelings, the most beautiful soul, will be of no use to us if we do not have the forms at hand which correspond to them.”59
Klee then described to his students, most of whom were in their twenties, the way a child takes a pointed pencil and puts it into motion “in whichever direction causes pleasure.” Like a child psychologist discussing the beginnings of intelligence, he amplified on the pure instincts of babyhood that are subsequently tempered by the imposition of reason in toddler-hood. “The chaos of the initial game yields to the beginnings of order.”60
As he spoke, Klee resembled both a sage and a child. The students were made privy to his unabashed enthusiasm for life’s facts and possibilities, and to the intense pleasure he took in making his own work. Klee and his art exemplified his points about both the spark of creativity and the visual sophistication and technical knowledge imperative to good painting. “One remains primitive,” Klee told them. “But one cannot persevere with the primitive for long. One has to discover a means of enriching the impoverished result without destroying or erasing the clarity of the simple sketch.”61 His own pictures were, the students recognized, the perfect mix of freshness and spontaneity with know-how and aesthetic judgment.
Klee emphasized to these artists and designers who were just starting out that while they needed to take care never to lose their instinctiveness, they also were responsible for organizing their vision. A line could be “a walk for its own sake. Without destination.” But there were also other types of lines, more developed, designed to describe planar figures like triangles, squares, or circles, endowed with “a calming character” and “neither a beginning nor an end.”62 These concepts were, in their way, obvious, yet the students had never before heard them explained so clearly. Nor had the complementary relationship of chaos with calm previously been applied to what they could draw. Their teacher lived and breathed for artistic creation—it was his entire raison d’être, as they knew from observing how he lived—and he presented its essence just as it was his essence.
ONE STUDENT, HANS FISCHLI, described the effect of Klee’s teaching:
Klee taught us neither how to draw nor how to use colour, but what lines and points were. …
There was an infinite variety of marks—lacking in character, weak or strong in character, stuck-up fellows and bluffers, lines which one would have preferred to take to hospital because one feared that their end was imminent, and others which had had too much to eat. If a line stood up straight, then it was healthy, if it was at an angle, it was sick; if it was lying down, one thought that that was what it liked the most.63
The mutability of human and visual qualities was total; so was the link between the physical and the spiritual. Because he was ambidextrous, Klee used both hands to draw diagrams in chalk on the blackboard to demonstrate what he was saying; his two hands working at the same time gave the sense that the heart and the mind were functioning in tandem, that spiritual inspiration and its subsequent physical manifestation were of a piece.
KLEE HAD A BEARD in those days, and he often wore a fur cap, even on days when it wasn’t cold enough for the fur coat. “With his high forehead, dark brown eyes, hair combed forward like a Roman, and skin yellowish like an Arab’s, Klee made a strange impression.”64 Even people who were not aware of his mother’s partially Algerian background found that there was something in his bearing and his delivery that called to mind a North African potentate.
But whether he was bearded or clean-shaven, whether his head was doubled in size by the fur cap or confined by his closely cropped hair, the first thing that struck people when encountering Klee was his eyes. When he was a teenager, he had exceptionally long and thick dark eyebrows that hovered like the valances of a theater curtain, accentuating the porcelain-like clarity of the large whites of his eyes. Even when those eyebrows calmed down following puberty, separating from each other and growing thinner, Klee’s oval eyes seemed disproportionately big and clear, like those of a cat, with very dark pupils. They usually were looking upward, as if connecting with the heavenly sphere.
Everything about him was prophetlike. He walked with a slow gait and delivered pronouncements precisely and in notably economical language. “He frequently spoke a single word instead of a whole sentence, and, in true Eastern style, he might use an entire sentence as a parable.”65
When friends visited, they would look at his latest work—he was so prolific that there were always new pieces—and he was eager to hear their responses. He was often disappointed because the commentary was insufficient. He was perpetually curious about what other people thought of his work—not just whether they liked it, but if they had concrete ideas about the subject matter and the artistry. He discussed his own paintings as if he were observing someone else’s creation, and could be highly critical, encouraging whoever was with him to discover the flaws or strong points. On those occasions when he was unabashedly pleased with something he had done, he didn’t seem conceited, because he was crediting a force outside himself.
The naming of his work involved those viewers. Klee would have an idea, then he would listen to the interpretations others suggested, write down what they said, and finally, using his own words, decide what he wanted his work to be titled. Thus, Calypso’s Isle evolved into Insula Dulcamara. Desert Father ended up as Penitent. The naming, like the creating, was an evolution.