Читать книгу Klee - Donald Wigal - Страница 3

In the Quarry

1913

Watercolour on paper on cardboard, 22.3 × 35.2 cm.

Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern.

Homage to Picasso

1914

Oil on cardboard, 38 × 30 cm.

Private collection.

Klee (pronounced as ‘clay’) was born in Münchenbuchsee, near Bern, Switzerland, on 18 December, 1879. His father, Hans, was German and a music teacher at the teacher training college at Bern-Hofwyl. Paul’s mother, Ida Marie, received her music education in Stuttgart. His paternal great-grandfather was an organist in Thuringia. His most famous drawing from his earliest childhood is With the Hare, done at age five. While he was young, he also drew “devils”, which he felt “acquired real presence.” Early in his diaries he remembers how the devilish figures frightened him so much that he would run to his parents for comfort.

Before the Gates of Kairouan

1914

Watercolour on paper on cardboard, 20.7 × 31.5 cm.

Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern.

Red and White Domes

1914–1915

Watercolour on Japanese vellum, 14.6 × 13.7 cm.

K 20 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein Westfalen, Düsseldorf.

However, the first signs of young Paul Klee’s artistic temperament were expressed not in visual art, but in music. The family supported the young man’s efforts to master the violin, which he played from age seven in 1886 until he was forced by poor health to give up playing in 1935. Like the great Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780–1867), he would play violin for an hour before each painting session. He likewise drew every day, as did Picasso and Matisse.

Untitled

1914

Watercolour and ink on Ingres paper, 17 × 15.8 cm.

Kupferstichkabinett, Kunstmuseum, Basel.

He played violin in chamber groups and in the local municipal orchestra even while he was still in school. However, the group was admittedly unpolished. Pablo Casals (1886–1973), the great Spanish cellist, heard the orchestra play in January, 1905. Afterwards he was reported to have said, in French, that it would be “terrible” to play with the orchestra.

View of a Harbour at Night

1917

Gouache and oil on paper coated with chalk and glue, 21 × 15.5 cm.

Musée d’art moderne et contemporain, Strasbourg.

Even though Klee had a fine musical background, in 1898, at age twenty, he decided to study art, not music, at the Munich Academy. However, throughout his life, music was essential. He was also a music critic for publications. In his diary, Klee often documented opinions on the concerts or operas he attended during his travels in Italy, France, and Germany.

Warning of the Ships

1917

Ink and watercolour on paper on cardboard, 24.2 × 15.6 cm.

Graphische Sammlung, Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart.

Around 1925, while at the Dessau Bauhaus, Klee met the composer Paul Hindemith (1895–1963). The artist apparently befriended the young composer and liked his chamber music. By then Hindemith had written a piano concerto and several songs, as well as over twenty major works for strings, including three of his six works titled Chamber Music.

Evidence of the permanent influence of music on Klee would run throughout his diverse oeuvre. Works showing direct reference to music include drawings in the “Eidola” series, such as the drawing of a pianist, or the works about kettle drummers. Several of his titles have music-related titles, such as Heroic Fiddling or Heroic Strokes of the Bow (1938). Specific characters from his favourite operas and dramas appear in several of Klee’s works. See Genii (Figures from a Ballet) (1922), and Singer L. as Fiordiligi (1923). In 1921, Klee painted Tale a la Hoffman. (One of the eight operettas by Jacques Offenbach [1819–1880] was “The Tales of Hoffman,” published posthumously in 1881.)

Dittlsam

1918

Ink and watercolour on paper, 26.5 × 16.5 cm.

Musée d’art moderne et contemporain, Strasbourg.

In these and many other works, Klee seemed to have seen what he heard and heard what he painted.

Versunkene Landschaft (Engulfed Landscape)

1918

Watercolour, gouache and ink on paper on cardboard, top and bottom borders in satiny paper, 17.6 × 16.3 cm.

Museum Folkwang, Essen.

The elements and familiar traits of music (line, harmony, rhythm, tempo), as well as many of its forms (fugue, polyphony, and so forth) can be seen throughout his body of work. Sometimes the connection with music is obvious even in the titles, such as Fugue in Red (1921), Polyphonic White (1930), Polyphony (1932), and New Harmony (1936).

Castle at Sunset

1918

Watercolour, gouache and ink on paper on cardboard mounted on canvas primed with plaster, border with ink 18.5 × 27.8 cm.

Berggruen Collection, Neue Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Berlin.

At least two of Klee’s early works remain among his better known: Virgin in a Tree and Two Men Meet, Each Believing the Other to Be of Higher Rank, both of which are from 1903. The odd elongated and emaciated bodies and dotted shading used in the drawings show the young artist’s search for a distinctive style. However, small graphic marks in these early works prefigure his mature style. Even this early, Klee used strange figures whimsically as commentary on the human condition, almost always presented with subdued irony.

Once Emerged from the Gray of Night…

1918

Watercolour on paper on cardboard, 22.6 × 15.8 cm.

Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern.

Klee’s work in general anticipated the surrealists sans explicit Freudian references. His work retains a spirit of innocence and gentle, sometimes ironic, laughter. However, Klee was also aware of the concept of the archetypes as developed by his contemporary, the renowned psychologist Carl G. Jung (1875–1961). Individual artists (more than movements) interested Klee. In 1900, at the Munich Academy, Klee began studies with his most influential teacher, Franz von Stuck (1863–1928), the German symbolist artist, and sculptor. Stuck’s students included Josef Albers (1888–1976), the founder of Op Art, and Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944), Klee’s friend thereafter. Upon completion of his study at the Academy, Klee toured Italy for a year. There Early Christian mosaics, Florentine Gothic art, and Byzantine art, as well as the fauna and flora of the Neapolitan aquarium enraptured him. The memory of the mosaics he saw during this Italian sojourn also would be called on after his later visit to Tunisia. Memories of such observations would appear throughout his work, such as in Flora on the Rocks (1940), and his many works with direct references to fish, from The Aquarium in 1926 to Muddle Fish in 1940. The Klee work purchased by the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan in 1939 was Around the Fish (1926).

Flower Myth

1918

Crushed chalk on paper and watercolour on canvas, 29 × 15.8 cm.

Sprengel Museum Hannover, Hanover.

Under a Black Star

1918

22.2 × 15.9 cm.

Kunstmuseum, Basel.

Klee spent the years 1902–1906 in Bern, continuing his study of art, specifically experimenting to discover his own style. Throughout his prolific life he continually experimented in painting on original surfaces, including cloth, blotting paper, newsprint (several works especially in 1938), and even cement. Park Near Lu (1938) for example, is on oil on newsprint on burlap. Several works are with chalk on paper in 1939–1940. Unusual combinations of media were used on some of his most familiar works, including the very popular Death and Fire (1940) which is with oil-colour and coloured paste on jute mounted on second paste-primed jute mounted on stretcher with original double frame strips.

The Tamer Irma Rossa

1918

Watercolour and Indian ink on paper on cardboard, 29.5 × 23 cm.

Sprengel Museum Hannover, Hanover.

Villa R

1919

Oil on wood, 26.5 × 22 cm.

Öffentliche Kunstsammlung (1936), Kunstmuseum, Basel.

The dimensions of the frames that Klee found during his semi-annual trips to flea markets would often determine the format of his work. He often “made the foot fit the shoe,” as a traditional German maxim noted. Reproductions sometimes included the original frames. Several of the reproductions, as also in this book, show the original frames.

Tree Rhythm in Autumn

1920

Oil and ink on canvas primed with plaster, on cardboard, original framing, 42 × 49 cm.

Private collection.

(The architect Mies van der Rohe collected Klee’s works and displayed them in his own unusually large frames.)

During his youth, Klee also visited the Munich Cabinet of Engravings where he saw works by Aubrey Beardsley (1872–1898), William Blake (1757–1827), and Francisco de Goya (1746–1828). Klee especially commented on the wit and eccentric themes of Beardsley, the mysticism of Blake, and the dark pondering of the last period of Goya’s work.

Park Landscape

1920

Watercolour and ink on paper on cardboard, 14.5 × 29 cm.

Private collection.

However, it would seem the works of Goya, mainly etchings and pen-and-ink drawings, and the works of James Ensor (1860–1949) more obviously influenced Klee’s early output. Goya and Ensor shared convictions about Modernism and Expressionism. Goya also showed Post-impressionistic values, while the Belgian artist Ensor displayed positive convictions about Symbolism and Primitivism. These latter two influences would especially leave their mark on Klee, while all three artists shared and contributed greatly to Modernism.

Where?

1920

Oil and pencil on paper on cardboard, 23.5 × 29.5 cm.

Collezione Città di Locarno, Pinacoteca Casa Rusca, Locarno.

Klee discovered for himself Ensor’s use of line as an expressionist graphic artist. It was a contrast to Klee’s representational graphic work. But even Klee’s earlier works were marked by his distinctive quirks of fantasy, without Ensor’s bitterness and obsessive search for evil as seen in his masterpiece Christ’s Entry into Brussels (1888).

Three Flowers

1920

Oil on cardboard primed, verso oil painted, 19.5 × 15 cm.

LK donation, Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern.

During this preparatory time in his young life, Klee also visited Paris in 1905, where he studied the works of Odilon Redon (1840–1916). It was in Redon’s independent lines that Klee found inspiration, not in his following of the classical lines of the Romanticism of Eugène Delacroix or the Classicism of Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796–1875). Rather, it was the surrealism and expressionism of Redon that made him a forerunner of Marc Chagall (1887–1985) and Joan Miró (1893–1983) as well as Klee. It might then be that the impact of Klee is most obviously also seen in the works of Miró.

Railway Station L112, 14 km

1920

Watercolour and Indian ink on paper on cardboard, 12.3 × 21.8 cm.

Hermann and Margrit Rupf Foundation, Kunstmuseum, Bern.

At age twenty-seven, Klee married the classical pianist Lily Stumpf, the daughter of a Munich physician. The couple settled in Munich, where avant-garde art was flourishing. During their first ten years of marriage, Lily Klee gave piano lessons to pay the household expenses. In 1907, the Klees had their son Felix.

In 1909–1910, Klee exhibited for the first time. He showed fifty-six works, mostly etchings of bizarre subjects. Later the artist admitted these early works were pessimistic and even decadent.

Angel Serving a Light Breakfast

1920

Lithograph, 19.8 × 14.6 cm.

Sprengel Museum Hannover, Hanover.

Between 1908 and 1911, Klee saw the Munich exhibitions of Paul Cezanne (1839–1906), Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890), and Henri Matisse (1869–1954). While Klee did not imitate these masters, his work did show personal insights into their work. He began to especially notice Cubism, which had roots dating back to 1901 as pioneered by Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) and Georges Braque (1882–1963). Both were indebted to Cezanne’s use of multiple points of view within a single painting. As seen even in the small selection of Klee’s works reproduced in this book, an aspect of Cubism continued to influence Klee thereafter.

Architectural Plan for a Garden

1920

Watercolour and oil on canvas on cardboard, 36.5 × 42.9 cm.

Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern.

In 1911, Klee had a one-man show in Munich. Even though it was not well displayed in the corridors of the Thannhauser Gallery, Kandinsky and other artists of the Der Blaue Reiter noticed it. Klee soon met other artists of similar aesthetic philosophies, including Jean (also known as Hans) Arp (1886–1966). But it was Kandinsky with whom he began a long friendship and collaboration. After developing friendships with Kandinsky and fellow artist August Macke (1887–1914), Klee became interested in and then joined their expressionist group, Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Horseman, or The Blue Rider).

Camel in Rhythmic Wooded Landscape

1920

Oil on gauze coated with chalk, 48 × 42 cm.

K 20 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein Westfalen, Düsseldorf.

The group took its name from one of the works in the 1911 series of canvases, “Three Red Horses” by Franz Marc (1880–1916). In the same year as Klee’s one-man show, Franz Marc presented his famous coloured horses series. In these and other works, Marc used pure complementary colours (red-green, blue-orange, yellow-violet). The name of the group indicates that its focus was on the use of colour for expressive purposes. Kandinsky and Marc, and then later Klee and his friend Macke, the true colourist in the group, headed the group.

Transparent and Perspective

1921

Watercolour, ink on paper on paper, on cardboard 23.4 × 25.9 cm.

Private collection.

Choir and Landscape

1921

Gouache and pencil on oil on paper on cardboard, 35 × 31 cm.

Long term loan of a private collection, Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern.

Also in 1911, Klee created his illustrations for a German edition of Candide, the classic novel by the French author Voltaire (1694–1778). Klee rendered Voltaire’s characters as insect-like beings, giving them human postures and expressions. The illustrations seemed as if a child artist had tried to read the sophisticated work, but fancied his own story line. In the fantasy world of Klee the surreal was typical, and at its most horrific, retained sensitivity and wit. See for example Luftschloss (1922), a title that means “castle in the air” or “chateau en Espagne.” In it Klee built a vertical structure that is somehow transparent and light. Depth is implied, but gravity seems ineffective. Like Klee’s beloved myths and fantasies in general, its beauty is partly built on its freedom from a fixed foundation.

Bird Islands

1921

Oil transfer and watercolour on paper on cardboard, 28 × 43.8 cm.

Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern.

In 1912, Klee wrote an article for the journal Die Alpen about the move to reform art. The often-quoted passage from the article is surely hyperbole: “The works of mental patients are to be taken more seriously than all the world’s galleries.” However, when comparing the art of mental patients to the art of children he adds, “Children also have artistic ability, and there is wisdom in their having it. The more helpless they are, the more instructive are the examples they furnish us, and they must be preserved free of corruption from an early age.” Elsewhere he noted, “Take a look at those religious pictures (done by mental patients): a depth and a force of depression I shall never achieve. A truly sublime art!”