FREE ESSAY ON PAUL KLEE

PAUL KLEE

A Swiss-born painter and graphic artist whose personal, often gently humorous works are
replete with allusions to dreams, music, and poetry, Paul Klee, b. Dec. 18, 1879, d. June
29, 1940, is difficult to classify. Primitive art, surrealism, cubism, and children's art
all seem blended into his small-scale, delicate paintings, watercolors, and drawings. His
family was very interested in the arts. The jobs that Paul's parents had were strange for
1879. His mom helped support the family by giving piano lessons. His father did the
housework. He cooked, cleaned, and painted. Paul's grandma taught him how to paint. After
much hesitation he chose to study art, not music, and he attended the Munich 
Academy in 1900. Klee later toured Italy (1901-02), responding enthusiastically to Early
Christian and Byzantine art.
Klee was a watercolorist, and etcher, who was one of the most original masters of modern
art. Belonging to no specific art movement, he created works known for their fantastic
dream images, wit, and imagination. These combine satirical, grotesque, and surreal
elements and reveal the influence of Francisco de Goya and James Ensor, both of whom Klee
admired. Two of his best-known etchings, dating from 1903, are Virgin in a Tree and Two
Men Meet, Each Believing the Other to Be of Higher Rank.
The paintings of Klee are difficult to classify. His earliest works were pencil landscape
studies that showed the influence of impressionism. Until 1912 he also produced many
black-and-white etchings; the overtones of fantasy and satire in these works showed the
influence of 20th-century expressionism as well as of such master printmakers as
Francisco Goya and William Blake. Klee often incorporated letters and numerals into his
paintings, but he also produced series of works that explore mosaic and other effects.
Klee's career was a search for the symbols and metaphors that would make this belief
visible. More than any other painter outside the Surrealist movement (with which his work
had many affinities - its interest in dreams, in primitive art, in myth, and cultural
incongruity), he refused to draw hard distinctions between art and writing. Indeed, many
of his paintings are a form of writing: they pullulate with signs, arrows, floating
letters, misplaced directions, commas, and clefs; their code for any object, from the
veins of a leaf to the grid pattern of Tunisian irrigation ditches, makes no attempt at
sensuous description, but instead declares itself to be a purely mental image, a
hieroglyph existing in emblematic space. So most of the time Klee could get away with a
shorthand organization that skimped the spatial grandeur of high French modernism while
retaining its unforced delicacy of mood. Klee's work did not offer the intense feelings
of Picasso's, or the formal mastery of Matisse's. The spidery, exact line, crawling and
scratching around the edges of his fantasy, works in a small compass of post-Cubist
overlaps, transparencies, and figure- field play-offs. In fact, most of Klee's ideas
about pictorial space came out of Robert Dulaunay's work, especially the Windows. The
paper, hospitable to every felicitous accident of blot and puddle in the watercolor
washes, contains the images gently. As the art historian Robert Rosenblum has said,
'Klee's particular genius [was] to be able to take any number of the principal Romantic
motifs and ambitions that, by the early twentieth century, had often swollen into
grotesquely Wagnerian dimensions, and translate them into a language appropriate to the
diminutive scale of a child's enchanted world.'
After his marriage in 1906 to the pianist Lili Stumpf, Klee settled in Munich, then an
important center for avant-garde art. His wife, Lily, gave music lessons, while Paul
babysat their only son, he was a good babysitter. Klee painted in a unique and personal
style; no one else painted like he did. He used pastels, tempera, watercolor, and a
combination of oil and watercolor, as well as different backgrounds. Besides using the
canvas that he usually painted on he used paper, jute, cotton, and wrapping paper. A
turning point in Klee's career was his visit to Tunisia with Macke and Louis Molliet in
1914. 
He was so overwhelmed by the intense light there that he wrote: 
Color has taken possession of me; no longer do I have to chase after it, I know that it
has hold of me forever. That is the significance of this blessed moment. Color and I are
one. I am a painter. 
He now built up compositions of colored squares that have the radiance of the mosaics he
saw on his Italian sojourn. The watercolor Red and White Domes (1914; Collection of
Clifford Odets, New York City) is distinctive of this period. 
His paintings and watercolors for the next 20 years showed a mastery of delicate,
dreamlike color harmonies, which he usually used to create flat, semiabstract
compositions or even effects resembling mosaic, as in Pastoral. Klee was also a master
draftsman, and many of his works are elaborated line drawings with subject matter that
grew out of fantasy or dream imagery; he described his technique in these drawings as
taking a line for a walk.
After 1935, afflicted by a progressive skin and muscular disease, Klee adopted a broad,
flat style characterized by thick, crayon like lines and large areas of subdued color.
His subject matter during this period grew increasingly brooding and gloomy, as in the
nightmarish Death and Fire. Klee died in Muralto, Switzerland, on June 29, 1940. His work
influenced all later 20th-century surrealist and nonobjective artists and was a prime
source for the budding abstract expressionist movement.
If Klee was not one of the great form givers, he was still ambitious. Like a miniaturist,
he wanted to render nature permeable, in the most exact way, to the language of style -
and this meant not only close but ecstatic observation of the natural world, embracing
the Romantic extremes of the near and the far, the close-up detail and the cosmic
landscape. At one end, the moon and mountains, the stand of jagged dark pines, the flat
mirroring seas laid in a mosaic of washes; at the other, a swarm of little graphic
inventions, crystalline or squirming, that could only have been made in the age of
high-resolution microscopy and the close-up photograph. There was a clear link between
some of Klee's plant motifs and the images of plankton, diatoms, seeds, and
microorganisms that German scientific photographers were making at the same time. In such
paintings, Klee tried to give back to art a symbol that must have seemed lost forever in
the nightmarish violence of World War I and the social unrest that followed. This was the
Paradise-Garden, one of the central images of religious romanticism - the metaphor of
Creation itself, with all species growing peaceably together under the eye of natural (or
divine) order. 
Pail Klee's Dancing Girl is a painting that he did in 1940 that stood out from all the
rest on our visit to the Art Institute. Dancing Girl is a painting made up of simple
short bold line strokes and a couple of circles to high light her head and hands. Done in
1940 Klee used a far-fetched medium for this piece. Dancing girl was composed on oil on
linen and then glued on to a panel. As strange as it must seem it still has a strong
appeal to it. Dancing Girl follows the pattern of man of Klee's past work. His work at
times seems hard to explain but understanding to the mind. There are certain suttle
objects in the painting that make it obvious that this is a girl dancing. One is the
distinguishing fact that this is a young woman. This is shown by the 3 main lines that
make up her body. Halfway down the middle line there is a curve that forms the shape of a
triangle as well as her other leg. Under the triangle on the background is a shade of red
that gives the triangle and you the visual effect of her wearing a dress. The painting
itself is simple yet dramatic as most of Paul Klee's works were. The Background was a
tealish green color with highlights of yellow around the circles to distinguish her hands
and feet. What makes the main object stand out at the viewer more is the white highlight
around the girl. This effect draws your eye to the center of the piece and then lets you
wonder around the rest of the painting. It appears as if he (Paul Klee) used watercolors
and inks for this and implemented small pictures and childlike symbols to give it appeal.
Klee valued the primitive look especially art of children. I believe that he envied their
freedom and respected their innocence. . As the art historian Robert Rosenblum has said,
'Klee's particular genius [was] to be able to take any number of the principal Romantic
motifs and ambitions that, by the early twentieth century, had often swollen into
grotesquely Wagnerian dimensions, and translate them into a language appropriate to the
diminutive scale of a child's enchanted world.'
. "Formerly we used to represent things visible on earth,' he wrote in 1920, 'things we
either liked to look at or would have liked to see. Today we reveal the reality that is
behind visible things, thus expressing the belief that the visible world is merely an
isolated case in relation to the universe and that there are many more other, latent
realities"