Magician's Handwriting

In the 16 years since Paul Klee died in Muralto-Locarno, Switzerland, his reputation for transmitting taproot messages from the unconscious and turning them into powerful, ironic, often haunting images has steadily increased. Today critics rank Klee with Picasso and Kandinsky as one of the great pioneers who have expanded 20th century vision. Klee's wandering line has been flattered into a cliche by modern cartoonists; some of his mannerisms (pointing arrows and large, arresting dots) are standbys in advertising art, on book jackets and record-album covers. Collectors, who traditionally lag a safe distance behind reputations, began grabing for his work in droves after World War II, have now bid up his prices to alpine levels. A painting which cost $5,000 in 1950 now brings $25,000; Klee drawings have increased in price tenfold.

In testimony to Klee's new stature, Bern's Kunstmuseum has mounted the largest and most comprehensive show of Klee's works ever: 756 oils, gouaches, watercolors, drawings, sculpture and prints, including loans from 38 museums and collectors in the U.S. On Nov. 1 U.S. gallerygoers will have their turn when Chicago's Art Club will show the big and choice Klee collection owned by Mrs. Nika Hulton, wife of British Publisher Edward Hulton and one of the world's most discriminating Klee buyers.

Alchemist's Work. The Bern show demonstrated, as never before, the full range of Klee's astonishing visual inventiveness, which is rivaled in this century only by the protean Pablo Picasso. Picasso rifled the whole treasure trove of Western and primitive art and transmuted it into a new idiom of his own. But Klee looked for inspiration to the trivia of nature--the butterfly wings, shells, roots and mosses he loved to collect--and to the minutiae of his own inner promptings, alchemized them into a unique visual poetry.

Klee was early committed to fantasy. At four he would run to his mother for comfort when the "evil spirits" he summoned up with pencil and paper became too terrifying. He disciplined his talent with a rigorous academic training at Munich's famed Art Academy. At 23 he was a bearded, slight young man with haunted eyes who already knew his way would be solitary: "I know I have to disappoint at first . . . I want to be as though newborn, knowing absolutely nothing about Europe, ignoring facts and fashions, to be almost primitive."

Conjurer's Secret. By never denying childhood's all-questioning view, Klee kept his magician's power to conjure up the fears and delights underlying the prickly defense of man's intellect. He viewed a line as a dot wandering through space, allowed his hand to follow his own inner promptings. But because what the unconscious tossed up was rigorously controlled by one of the keenest sensibilities in modern art, the result was a lifetime's staggering production of nearly 9,000 works which have an uncanny ability to communicate indirectly to man; their meanings can often be sensed long before they are fully understood. After the war, in which he served as clerk and airplane painter in the Kaiser's army, Klee for ten years was a member of the experimental Bauhaus movement in company with Lyonel Feininger, Josef Albers and Kandinsky. But the Bauhaus' dedication to the discipline of the machine did not alter Klee. In a Bauhaus prospectus he wrote defiantly: "Construction is not totality . . . intuition still remains an important element."

Red Is for Danger. The one quality Klee would not tolerate was vagueness. He contrived an elaborate visual lexicon in which he "explained" his favorite devices (dots, lines, arrows, planes) and assigned to each a meaning according to its direction or placement. But, as in Fire Wind (opposite), little more than the title is actually necessary to decipher a Klee painting. The red arrows indicate motion, in this case of wind feeding the fire, while the green arrows struggle to hem the flames in against the background darkness. She Howls, We Play uses lines that are a cross between wire sculpture and children's sidewalk scrawls; the figures might as well be cow with heifers as dog with pups. The message is the same: adult overconcern v. childhood unconcern. But the enveloping red which has already colored the bellowing female suggests the alarming possibility that this time the danger may be real.

High Water-Wood, in the Hulton col lection, belongs to Klee's final works. It was painted in 1938, after Nazi interference had driven him back to Bern. Klee was dying of a rare disease which produced progressive drying of his body tis sues, and he knew it. Painted on newspaper with thick paint and broad strokes, High Water-Wood is one of the most private of Klee's works. Areas of green, yellow and blue are laid out with perfect harmony.

Over them float squiggling black lines that might be found on a microscope slide. Perhaps Klee meant to indicate his awareness of a hostile, alien substance heralding the beginning of disintegration. Two years later, on June 29, 1940, Klee died of his wasting disease.

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