Klee's Ways

Paul Klee (rhymes with fey) was one of the greatest artists of the 20th century, and he knew it. But the calculated modesty of Klee's art had the world fooled for a long time. Not until his death in 1940 (at 60) did it become apparent that Klee had raised the curtain on a thousand new ways of picturing things. Klee's ways are reassembled in a definitive study of his work by German Critic Will Grohmann (Paul Klee, Harry N. Abrams; $12.50), in U.S. bookstores last week.

Trouble at Four. Born into a cultivated music-teacher's family near Bern, Switzerland, Klee thought of making music his profession. He chose painting instead, simply "because it seemed to be lagging behind," and undertook rigorous formal training. Klee's chief means of advancing art was to let his unconscious whisper through his brush. At four, he would rush to his mother for protection from the "evil spirits" that appeared on his drawing paper. With age, he came to feel at home in his dream world of huge, dim forces, and was able to say, with none of the smugness of the dispassionate, that "evil must not be a triumphant or confounding enemy, but a constructive force, a co-factor in creation and development."

At 22 Klee knew the course of his life and art precisely. "I have to disappoint at first," he confided to his journal. "I want to be as though newborn, knowing absolutely nothing about Europe; ignoring facts and fashions, to be almost primitive. Then I want to do something very modest, to work out by myself a tiny, formal motif, one that my pencil will be able to encompass without any technique . . . Pictures will more than fill the whole of my lifetime ... it is less a matter of will than of fate."

Splotched Fantasies. From that point forward, Klee produced a frosty torrent of little dream pictures (there are some 900 in U.S. collections alone). By catching his dreams on the wing, and being quite satisfied with just a feather, he was able to produce an almost endless variety. Some of his works resemble children's squiggles, others the splotched fantasies of the mad. Still others are made entirely of dots, or squares, or crosshatchings, or Oriental arabesques. Some of his pictures are composed simply of illegible script--foreshadowing Cartoonist Saul Steinberg. He illustrated Candide with raggedy stick figures of the sort Giacometti and George Grosz were later to employ, and created telling juxtapositions (e.g., a bird engraved on a cat's forehead) that inspired the surrealists. He drew and painted on everything, from glass to burlap, and always with iron control. Klee's demons almost never failed him; he had them under the yoke of wit and taste.

By taking his own amoral unconscious as a point of departure for half-romantic, half-eclectic labors Klee followed a great German tradition which began with Goethe. Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, mystic Rudolph Steiner and Psychologists Freud and Jung all worked the same way.

As a personality, Klee was withdrawn almost to the vanishing point. "Not even Klee's closest friends," Grohmann recalls, "could tell what manner of man he was."

For a time he made a living teaching art at Germany's famed Bauhaus, but he would lecture almost inaudibly, sitting hunched over with his back to the class.

At a beach outing he would stumble along behind the party, gazing at a seashell in his fist. His withdrawal may have been necessary, for it concealed an inhuman sort of pride. This passage from Klee's journal stands engraved on his tombstone: "I cannot be understood in purely earthly terms. For I can live as happily with the dead as with the unborn. Somewhat nearer to the heart of all creation than is usual. But still far from being near enough."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.