Uncle's Nemesis

In 1924, Swiss Painter Paul Klee, as unfettered as a yodeler on the Matterhorn, gave his fellow artists some advice. If a literalist should look at one of their portraits, he told them, and say, "But that isn't a bit like uncle," the disciplined artist should reply, "To hell with uncle! I must get on with my building . . ."

Klce faithfully followed his own advice, painstakingly built his own delicate, rainbow-touched pictures and his light-fingered, witty drawings until his death in 1940.

Anything served Artist-Philosopher Klee for bricks. Starting around 1900 with meticulous etchings and realistic portraits, he was soon collecting ideas for paintings from needlework, mosaics, carpets, runic stones, the scrawls of children and madmen. No matter how simple the material he borrowed, his perceptive, neurotic vision transformed it into something immeasurably sophisticated. He experimented endlessly with techniques, scratched designs on blackened glass, painted on burlap, mixed his media until it was impossible to describe a painting as oil, watercolor or tempera.

Last week many Americans were getting their first good look at the subtly romantic, hilarious and nightmare worlds of Paul Klee. The largest Klee exhibit ever to be shown in the U.S. was in Portland, Ore., on the second lap of a transcontinental tour. At the San Francisco Museum of Art it had broken attendance records for the year.

The 202 paintings, drawings and prints, gathered together by Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art, showed Klee at his wittiest, his most charming, and most terrifying. Landscape with Accents and Little Dune Picture had the skilled naivete of antique Chinese drawings, while Lady Demon, Country Dwarf and Mask of Fear were like small windows into a skeleton-filled closet. Exercises, a few squiggly lines portraying an amazed dog watching three uncomfortably contorted human beings, was as sharp and prodding as a Thurber vignette.

Most of the gallerygoers, whether pro-or anti-Klee, wore a solemn mien, as required by traditional museum etiquette. But a visiting watercolorist walked in and asked: "Why isn't anybody laughing?"

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