1- Insula Dulcamara
Insula dulcamara is an oil painting on newsprint glued to burlap made in 1938, when he was suffering from scleroderma. It is his largest work and is part of the collection of the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern.
Like much of Klee’s output, the image conveys a coded message to the viewer, asking them to reflect on the artist’s thought processes during its creation
The conventional interpretation, based on the fact that the original title of the painting was to be The Island of Calypso, is that the symbols arranged on a plain background represent a desert island with an idol and a passing steamship.
However, a more recent analysis by scholar Chris Pike suggests that the symbols represent Klee’s own identity and mortality, spelling out his name and referencing aspects of his life and interests. From the dotted sign enclosed in the center left, representing “origin,” it is possible to distinguish the letters of the word Paul
The letters of the word Klee are not so obvious, but can be determined with the imagination, especially in comparison with his written signature. The pale face of the letter P may represent his skin tone, a result of his state of health and approaching death. The red spots may represent the berries of the Solanum dulcamara (belladonna) plant mentioned in the title of the work.
9- Angelus Novus
Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus is a work from 1920, showing “an angel, contemplated and fixed on an object, slowly moving away from it,” according to the buyer of the work, German philosopher Walter Benjamin.
It was Benjamin’s opinion of the work that made it especially famous, but he was not the only owner of the work. He bought it from Klee in 1921 before it passed into the hands of those close to him, Theodor W. Adorno and later Gershom Scholem.
According to several experts and philosophers, Paul Klee painted what many imagine to be the Angel of History. Klee was drafted into the German forces during World War I, which affected him deeply.
Klee’s method of painting the Angelus Novus was invented by Klee himself. His oil transfer technique (monoprint) consisted of covering a piece of tracing paper with ink, placing a piece of drawing paper underneath and scratching the upper paper with a needle or other sharp object to make a copy on the lower one.
The Angelus Novus shows a seemingly stunned angel, eyes locked in an image of despair, stuck in a flying motion that neither advances nor recedes. You don’t see many paintings like this in the world, due to the inventiveness of Klee’s new technique and also the subject from which Paul created his work.
10- Highway and Byways
Highway and Byways is an oil painting on canvas. It belongs to the group of his many layered and striped paintings and was created in January 1929 after Klee’s second trip to Egypt
On loan from Werner Vowinckel, it was first exhibited at the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne and can now be seen at the Ludwig Museum, also in Cologne.
The title of the painting corresponds to its structure. In the center, runs the straight, contoured main path, divided into several parts, differentiated by color contrasts, which moves mainly between blue-orange and red-green, almost aligned with the center of the painting and narrowing in layers in its horizontal inner structure
The main road is not only a road, but also a “strip of fields splitting 45 times across the high area of the horizon striped with blue and purple”, more like a “painting of the celestial staircase of a step pyramid”
Личная жизнь
В юные годы Клее отличался довольно легкомысленным поведением. Он много времени проводил в пабах, где знакомился с женщинами и заводил романы. Плодом таких отношений стал незаконнорожденный сын, родившийся в 1900 году и умерший в младенчестве.
В 1906 году Пауль взял в жены баварскую пианистку Лили Штумпф, а спустя год в семье появился ребенок, которого назвали Феликс.
Пауль Клее и его жена Лили
Пара поселилась в пригороде Мюнхена, и пока молодая супруга давала частные уроки, Клее вел хозяйство и воспитывал сына. Для малыша Пауль мастерил перчаточных кукол, которые вскоре стали частью творчества живописца. На персонажах ярмарочных спектаклей Клее оттачивал технику воспроизведения формы и способы создания фактуры.
Другие подробности личной жизни художника не стали достоянием публики.
Известно, что с приходом к власти нацистов во главе с Гитлером Клее стал опальным художником в Германии. Прячась от режима, он переехал в Швейцарию, но при жизни так и не получил гражданства этой страны.
3- Fish Magic
Fish Magic is a surrealist painting from 1925. The painting belonged to the collection of Walter and Louise Arensberg before being donated in 1950 to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where it is currently housed.
It looks like a mixture of aquatic, celestial and terrestrial entities. The painting is covered with a delicate surface of black paint, beneath which is a dense layer of multicolored pigments. The colorful figures were scratched and scribbled by Klee on the dark background
A square of muslin was glued to the paint in the center, giving the painting the feeling of a collage. The painting’s dark palette and the fragility of the muslin create a mysterious, inky atmosphere.
According to Ann Temkin, Fish Magic is a masterpiece in which the intellectual and imaginative forces of Klee’s artistic gifts are reconciled, producing a “sense of magic.” In particular, Temkin points to the thin diagonal line extending from the right center of the canvas to the top of the clock tower, writing that the “long line painted from the side seems ready to tear away the muslin square to reveal something underneath.”
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Смерть
В 1934 году у Пауля появились первые симптомы смертельной болезни, и на протяжении 6 лет приступы боли сменялись периодами ремиссии.
Весной 1940 года страдания Клее достигли высшей точки, он не мог рисовать и постоянно думал о скором конце. Избавление пришло 29 июня. Живописец скончался в швейцарской коммуне округа Локарно. Врачи констатировали, что причиной смерти стал отказ внутренних органов, спровоцированный склеродермией.
Могила Пауля Клее
Художника кремировали в городе Лугано, а его прах захоронили на городском кладбище Берна.
В 1997 году потомки Клее передали Министерству культуры Швейцарии 700 картин мастера, для экспозиции которых сконструировали и возвели выставочный центр, названный в честь выдающегося мастера.
Литература о художнике[ | ]
- Парч С. Пауль Клее 1879—1940. — М.: Taschen/Арт-родник, 2004. — ISBN 5-9561-0062-1.
- Шевалье Д. Пауль Клее. — М.: Слово/Slovo, 1995. — ISBN 5-85050-098-7.
- Мастера рисунка и живописи. № 30 Клее / оригинальное издание под редакцией Фламинио Гвальдони. — 2020. — 95 с.
- Wilhelm Hausenstein. Kairuan oder eine Geschichte vom Maler Klee und von der Kunst dieses Zeitalters. München, 1921
- Klee : a Study of his Life and Work / G. Di San Lazzaro; transl. from the italian by Stuart Hood. — London: Thames and Hudson, 1957
- Klee F. Paul Klee, his life and work in documents. New York: G. Braziller, 1962
- Klee / text by Marcel Marnat. — New York : Leon Amiel Publisher, 1974.- ISBN 0-8148-0589-2
- Kagan A. Paul Klee/art & music. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1983
- Franciscono M. Paul Klee: his work and thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991
- Ferrier J.L. Paul Klee. Paris: Terrail,1999
- Paul Klee: Leben und Werk/ Jürgen Glaesemer (Hrsg.). Stuttgart: Hatje Cantz, 2001.
- Anger J. Paul Klee and the decorative in modern art. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge UP, 2004
- Porter Aichele K. Paul Klee, poet/painter. Rochester: Camden House, 2006
- Антонен Арто. Живописец мысли . Анри МишоПриключения линий // Пространство другими словами: Французские поэты XX века об образе в искусстве. СПб: Изд-во Ивана Лимбаха, 2005, с.37-38, 66-71.
5- Cat and Bird
Cat and Bird is a work from 1928. It was made with oil and ink on gessoed canvas mounted on wood. It is currently in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Klee was one of many modernist artists who wanted to practice what he called “the pure cultivation of the media” of painting, that is, to use line, form and color for their own sake and not to describe something visible. That priority allowed him to create images that dealt less with perception than with thought, so that the bird in this painting seems to fly not in front of the cat’s forehead, but inside it: the bird is literally in the cat’s mind
By making the cat all head, Klee concentrates on the thought, the fantasy, the appetite, the cravings of the brain. One of his goals as an artist, he said, was to “make secret visions visible.”
The cat is watchful, frightening, but also calm, and Klee’s palette is also calm, in a narrow range from tawny to pink with areas of blue-green. This and the suggestion of a childlike drawing lighten the mood
Believing that children were close to the wellsprings of creativity, Klee was fascinated by their art, and evokes it here through simple lines and shapes: ovals for the cat’s eyes and pupils (and, more loosely, for the bird’s body), triangles for its ears and nose. And at the tip of that nose is a red heart, a sign of the cat’s desire.
Redgreen and violet-yellow rhythms, 1920
This is an example of Klee’s ‘magic squares’ though still with recognisable, figurative elements i.e. the trees. Maybe this is a mountain scene with fir trees, but with Nature abstracted and reinvented into pure colours and forms.
Redgreen and violet-yellow rhythms (1920) The Metropolitan Museum of Art / Source: Art Resource/Scala Photo Archives
Comedy, 1921
An example of Klee’s technique of ‘oil transfer’, as well as his experiments with grading colours i.e. bars of deepening colour. It also shows his cartoon-ish approach to figures which are stick-like, moving to strange abstract shapes. The nominal subject is the imaginative fancy dress parties held at the Bauhaus where Klee started to teach in 1921: as one witness commented Kandinsky went dressed as an antenna, Klee as The Song of the Blue Tree.
Comedy (1921) Tate
Look at the border of Comedy. As the exhibition continued I found myself noticing the contrast between the unfinished rough edges of the paintings and the highly finished edges of the frames: a contrast between intuition and rationality; or between inspiration and the Swiss clockmaker precision of the detailed catalogue Klee kept; or between art and the calculating world of commodity capitalism it has to be packaged and marketed in.
Almost none of the paintings have straight boundaries. They are straight-ish. And almost none of them are on traditional canvas, but on a wide variety of surfaces including, later in the show, oil and watercolour on burlap sacking prepared with plaster!
Static-dynamic intensification, 1923
Another ‘magic squares’ painting. Note a) the colours aren’t random; the more you look the more there appears to be a pattern which, at the same time, stays elusive, is not mathematically rigid b) it’s another novel surface: this is a watercolour and transferred printing ink on laid paper with grey and green gouache and black ink mounted on light cardboard; in an unobtrusive way most of the works are collages i.e. made of more than one surface laid on another c) the title: I didn’t read any commentary on this, but it seems to me that Klee experimented with words as much as with colour and line: what happens if we combine these words in a title? what impact does it have on the viewer’s response (if any)?
Static-dynamic intensification (1923) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Steps, 1929
After a trip to Egypt Klee experimented with abstracts where the magic boxes had been expanded to become bars of colour stretching across the picture. The crucial element remains the non-mathematical nature of the lines; he is not Mondrian. In their imprecision, quirkiness, non-rationality, they give a strong feeling of instinct and intuition, maybe a childlike sense of freedom.
Steps (1929) Moderna Museet (Stockholm, Sweden)
Fire at full moon, 1933
Use of bolder, brighter colours, though with characteristic ‘quirky’ lines and squares.
Fire at Full Moon (1933) Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany
Park near Lu, 1938
In his final years, stricken with a wasting disease, Klee’s paintings became significantly larger and lost the flat, magic square aspect, to become more a case of bold black lines surrounded with a penumbra of vibrant colours. Gone are the scratchy little detailed cartoon people or fish of the 20s although you can, at a pinch, read some human or biological aspect into the shapes. Or not. Reminiscent of late Matisse, maybe.
Park near Lu (1938) Zentrum Paul Klee
This is an absolutely brilliant exhibition by a quiet genius of the 20th century. Everyone should see it in order to learn just how free and light and joyous, how unguilty, expressive, funny and awe-inspiring art can be.
6- Twittering Machine
Twittering Machine (Die Zwitscher-Maschine) is a watercolor and oil transfer with ink on paper from 1922
Like other works by Klee, it combines biology and machinery, depicting a group of birds loosely drawn on a wire or branch connected to a crank
Interpretations of the work are varied: it has been perceived as a nightmarish lure for the viewer or a representation of the artist’s helplessness, but also as a triumph of nature over mechanical activities. It has been seen as a visual representation of the mechanics of sound.
Originally exhibited in Germany, the image was declared “degenerate art” by Adolf Hitler in 1933 and sold by the Nazi Party to an art dealer in 1939, from where it reached New York. It is one of the best known of Klee’s more than 9,000 works, and is among the most famous images in New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)
It has inspired several musical compositions and, according to a 1987 New York Magazine profile, has been a popular piece to hang in children’s rooms.
4- Death and Fire
Death and Fire, known in German as Tod und Feuer, is an expressionist painting by Paul Klee from 1940. It was one of the last before his death on June 29 of that year
In 1935, Klee began to suffer from scleroderma, which manifested itself in fatigue, skin rashes, difficulty swallowing, shortness of breath, and pain in the joints of the hands
The paintings of this period tended to be simpler and more representative of the suffering he endured “Tod”, the German word for death, is a common motif throughout the painting. It is mostly seen in the features of the face, although the “d” and “t” are rotated. The word can also be seen in the figure’s raised arm as the “T”, the yellow orb as the “O” and the figure’s head (or torso) as the “D”.
The painting also depicts hieroglyphs, an interest of Klee’s during this time, which can also be seen in many of his other paintings from the late 1930s, such as Insula dulcamara and Heroische Rosen. Since 2014, it has been on display at the Zentrum Paul Klee, a museum in Bern, Switzerland, dedicated to the works of Paul Klee.