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paul klee The Boat passes the Botanical Gardens. ig2i
exhibitions under this title, Klee joined them and took a modest part in their activities. It was at this time that the influence of Delaunay, which I have already mentioned (see page 94) began to play an important part in Klee’s development. His translation of Delaunay’s essay ‘On Light’ was published in the periodical Der Sturm in January 1913.
By this time Klee had found himself and his style, and in the thirty years that were to follow he drew and painted with unfailing zeal. In February 1911 he began to keep a catalogue of all he did; including the few retrospective entries which he made for the earlier years, this accounts for nearly 9,000 individual works, beginning with a preponderance of pen or pencil drawings, but gradually making way for drawings in colour or oil-paintings.
The consistency of Klee’s development makes it unnecessary to follow it in detail in a general survey of modern painting, but there are three events in his life which perhaps had a decisive effect on his work. The first was a journey to Tunis in 1914, in the company of Macke and a Dr Jaggi from Berne. It lasted only seventeen days, but the experience of the light and colour, ‘the concentrated essence of the Arabian Nights’, penetrated deeply into Klee’s consciousness. ‘Colour has taken hold of me; no longer do I have to chase after it. I know that it has hold of me for ever. That is the significance of this blessed moment. Colour and I are one. I am a painter.’
The war broke out that year and Macke was one of its first victims—he was killed on 16 August, and Klee was profoundly shocked. At the beginning of 1915 he recorded in his diary these significant words: ‘The more horrifying this world becomes (as—it is these days) the more art becomes abstract; while a world at peace produces realistic art.’ A year later, on 4 March 1916, Franz Marc was killed. This senseless sacrifice of the two artists nearest to him in feeling and vision haunted him to the end of his life: intimations of death are never far from his work.
The third event is of a different character. In November 1920, Walter Gropius invited Klee to join the Bauhaus. He went to Weimar in January 1921, and remained on the Bauhaus staff until April 1931—ten years of painting and teaching in an atmosphere that re-created, for the only time in our age, something of the creative atmosphere of the workshops of the Renaissance. 13
This experience was important for Klee, and of inestimable value for posterity, not only because it compelled him to relate his work to a co-operate effort, but also because it compelled him to formulate, for his students, the principles of his art, which are the basic principles of all modern art. This theoretical work has been published in three volumes, the Padogogisches Skizzenbuch, Munich, 1925 (English translation by Sibyl Moholy-Nagy: Pedagogical Sketchbook , New York and London, 1953); Vber die
paul klee La belle Jardiniere, igjg
182 Klee''s Theory of Art
moderne Kunst, Bern-Biimplitz, 1945 (English translation by Paul Findlay: On Modern Art, London, 1947); and Das bildnerische Denken, Bascl/Stuttgart, 1956 (English translation by Ralph Manheim, London, 1959). An essay which he wrote in 1918 while still in the army (it was not published until 1920) summarizes his ‘Creative Credo’ ( Schofiferische Konfession). The following aphorism from (his essay will perhaps indicate its main line of thought: ‘Art does not render the visible; rather, it makes visible’; and Klee then goes on to emphasize the subjective nature of the artist’s inspiration, and to describe the way in which the graphic elements—dot, line, plane, and space—are set in action by an energy discharge within the artist’s mind. Klee, like the Futurists, was always to emphasize the dynamic nature of art. ‘Pictorial art springs from movement, is itself fixed movement, and is perceived through movements.’ ‘The creative impulse suddenly springs to life, like a flame, passes through the hand on to the canvas, where it spreads farther until, like the spark that closes an electric circuit, it returns to the source: the eye and the mind.’
These generalizations, however, had to be made more precise; simpler images had to be used for the purposes of instruction. The Pedagogical Sketchbook is mainly concerned with analyses of elementary forms and movements, and instructions for practical exercises in the constructive use of the basic elements of design. In the lecture ‘On Modern Art’ he makes his profoundcst statement about the nature of the artistic process, and in particular explains the transformations (or deformations) which the visual image undergoes before it becomes a significant symbol. He makes very effective use of the simile of the tree:
‘The artist has busied himself with this multiform world and has in some measure got his bearings in it, quietly, all by himself. He is so well orientated that he can put order into the flux of phenomena and experiences. This sense of direction in nature and life, this branching and spreading array, I shall compare with the root of the tree.
paul klee The Great Dome, igzy
‘From the root the sap rises up into the artist, flows through him, flows to his eye.
‘He is the trunk of the tree.
‘Overwhelmed and activated by the force of the current, he conveys his vision into his work.
‘In full view of the world, the crown of the tree unfolds and spreads in time and in space, and so with his work.
‘Nobody will expect a tree to form its crown in exactly the same way as its root. Between above and below there cannot be exact mirror images of each other. It is obvious that different functions operating in different elements must produce vital divergences.
‘But it is just the artist who at times is denied those departures from nature which his art demands. He has even been accused of incompetence and deliberate distortion.
I'AUL klee Battle scene from the fantastic comic opera ‘‘Sinbad the Sailor’. ig2j
‘And yet, standing at his appointed place, as the trunk of the tree, he does nothing other than gather and pass on what rises from the depths. He neither serves nor commands—he transmits.
‘His position is humble. And the beauty at the crown is not his own; it has merely passed through him.’ 14
The rest of the lecture is a subtle comparison of these two realms, the crown and the root, nature and art, and an explanation of why the creation of a work of art must of necessity be accompanied by distortion of the natural form—only in that way can nature be reborn, and the symbols of art revitalized. The parts played by line, proportion, and colour in this process of transformation is then analysed, and Klee shows how they combine in a composition which is an image of creation itself—‘Genesis eternal’, a penetration by human consciousness to ‘that secret place where primaeval power nurtures all evolution’.
Klee always showed the greatest respect for the science of the art of painting, and most of his pedagogical work is concerned with practical details. Das bildnerische Denken, his lectures at the Bauhaus and Weimar (a volume which, with its illustrations and diagrams, runs to more than five hundred pages), is the most complete presentation of the principles of design ever made by a modern artist—it constitutes the Principia Aesthetica of a new era of art, in which Klee occupies a position comparable to Newton’s in the realm of physics. If Klee had done nothing but reach these principles, he would still have been the most significant figure in the modern movement; but he taught on the basis of his own creative achievement, and this is his unique distinction.
Klee realized, perhaps more clearly than any artist since Goethe, that all effort is vain if it is forced: that the essential formative process takes place below the level of consciousness. In this matter he agrees with the Surrealists, but he would never accept their view that a work of art could be projected automatically from the unconscious: the process of gestation is complex, involving observation, meditation, and finally a technical mastery of the pictorial elements. It is this insistence, at one and the same time,
Klee's Influence 187
on the subjective sources and the objective means of art that makes Klee, as I have said, the most significant artist of our epoch. ‘Sometimes I dream’, he confessed at the end of his lecture, ‘of a work of really great breadth, ranging through the whole region of element, object, meaning and style’, and added: ‘This, I fear, will remain a dream, but it is a good thing even now to bear the possibility occasionally in mind.’ Can any artist of our period be said to have produced such a work of really great breadth? Perhaps Picasso, in Guernica. Picasso was once asked what he thought of Klee, and replied: ‘Pascal-Napoleon’—in which cryptic phrase, possibly intended as a physical description, he somehow conveyed a sense of Klee’s command of a universal breadth and power, his aphoristic intensity and profound humanity. Each drawing of Klee is a pensee : ‘Infinite movement, the point fitting everything, movement at rest, infinity without quantity, indivisible and infinite.’ 15
Klee’s influence has not been superficial: it penetrates to the sources of inspiration and is still at work, like a ferment in the heart of our culture. If that culture survives the threat of atomic warfare, and if the new epoch of art initiated in the first half of the twentieth century is allowed to develop in creative freedom, then the work of Klee, visual and pedagogical, will inevitably be the main sap and impulsive force of its growth. But:
‘Nothing can be rushed. Things must grow, they must grow upward, and if the time should ever come for the great work— then so much the better.
‘We must go on searching.
‘We have found parts, but not the whole!
‘We still lack the ultimate strength for: there is no people to sustain us.
‘But we are looking for a people. We began over there in the Bauhaus. We began there with a community to which each one of us gave what we had.
‘More we cannot do.’ 16
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