Early in Summer, 1976, Alice compares the unfinished artworks of her new friend, Diana, to early twentieth-century artist Paul Klee (pronounced clay). This overview of his work is adapted from articles by art historian Alexxa Gotthardt and Sabine Rewald, curator emerita at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Paul Klee (1879-1940) has been called many things: a father of abstract art, a Bauhaus master, the progenitor of Surrealism, and a very hard man to pin down. The Swiss-German artist’s paintings are tied to numerous groundbreaking 20th-century movements, from German Expressionism to Dada. But Klee’s body of work isn’t easily bucketed into a single category, thanks in large part to the system of throbbing forms, mystical hieroglyphs, and otherworldly creatures that he developed to populate his compositions.
In the early 1900s, Klee radically broke with a millennia-old tradition in art: the faithful representation of objects and environments from the real world. Along with Picasso and other turn-of-the-century, avant-garde artists, he jettisoned recognizable content, contributing to a form of art that would come to be known as “abstraction.”
This interest was galvanized with the onset of World War I and the deaths of his peers; as the traumas of war continued, abstract artists like Klee sought refuge in forms of expression that were divorced from the material world. The pictures he and his fellow artists produced teemed with lines and colors that crashed together ecstatically. In his 1920 “Creative Credo” Klee declared: “Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible,” a credo that influenced both his contemporaries and his Surrealist scions.
Black Columns in a Landscape (1919)
Klee’s painting “depicts Ionic columns, a large chestnut leaf, a thin black cross, a small red pavilion, and a boat on the River Isar, which flows through Munich.”— Sabine Rewald, Curator Emerita at The Met
It also caught the attention of Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus school in Weimar, which united art and craft and stressed function as well as form. Klee’s description of drawing as a “line going for a walk,” for instance, epitomizes his signature approach to artmaking—one that animated the elements of art (the line) with movement, spontaneity, and even an element of magic (going for a walk). Nearly half of Klee’s some 10,000 works (mainly small-scale watercolors and drawings on paper) were produced during the ten years he taught at the Bauhaus, and they vary widely.
Static-Dynamic Gradation (1923)
"To paint well means only this: to put the right colors in the right spot." —Paul Klee
“This watercolor reflects Klee’s preoccupation with color relationships as governed by the abstract form of the grid, and was painted during his time teaching with the Bauhaus school.” — Sabine Rewald, Curator Emerita at The Met
Ventriloquist and Crier in the Moor (1923)
“Imaginary beasts float within a transparent ventriloquist who appears to be all belly—except, of course, for a pair of legs, tiny arms, and a sort of head without a mouth. The little creatures inside the ventriloquist might symbolize the odd noises and voices that seem to emanate from him.” — Sabine Rewald, Curator Emerita at The Met
From 1931 to December 1933, Klee taught at the Academy of Fine Arts in Düsseldorf, Germany. When the National Socialists [the Nazi Party] declared his art “degenerate” in 1933, Klee returned to his native Switzerland. In 1937 the Nazis seized 102 of his works from public collections. Personal hardship and the increasing gravity of the political situation in Europe are reflected in the somber tone of his late work. Lines turn into black bars, forms become broad and generalized, scale larger, and colors simpler.
Comedians' Handbill (1938)
“In tune with the motto "the medium is the message," Klee designed this handbill on a sheet of newspaper that he had covered with caramel-colored gouache…. Leaping into our vision as boldly as an advertisement, Klee’s abbreviated black figures symbolize syncopated movement, frolicking creatures, and stick figures.” — Sabine Rewald, Curator Emerita at The Met
Angel Applicant (1939)
“In 1939, Klee composed twenty-nine works that feature angels, having in earlier years only sporadically depicted them. His angels were not the celestial kind but hybrid creatures beset with human foibles and whims.” — Sabine Rewald, Curator Emerita at The Met
