Klee. Donald Wigal
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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.)
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