Zentrum Paul Klee EN Zentrum Paul Klee

At the time around 1919, after his experiences in the 1st World War and his first successes in the art market, Paul Klee took up the theme of personal awareness and self-reflection in numerous self-portraits. The best known of these is the pencil drawing «Absorbtion». Klee’s theme here was less the reflection on the role of the artist and more a self depiction of an inwardly looking meditator. The artist no longer looks outwards but looks within himself. The eyes are tight shut, the ears are missing. No external disturbances and influences can distract him from his meditation. This drawing he also transformed into a lithograph, printing it in large numbers. The prints were partly coloured by hand. In 1919 Paul Klee had the lithographic version of «Absorbtion» published in the Munich Folios for Poetry and Graphics and thus presented himself as an ascetic mystic. This image was imposed upon himself and stated by him in the preface of his first biography «At this moment I am not tangible …».

You would not want to meet Paul Klee’s "hungry girl" from 1939 in a dark alley at night. It shows a girl as a tooth-baring beast with glaring eyes. Nothing remains of a human being, let alone a sweet little girl. Its whole appearance is animal-like, even down to the little lines that Klee uses for the depiction of the pupils. Particularly in his late work Klee devoted himself extensively to everything human. He was especially interested in the very different characteristics, desires and instincts from childhood to old age. In this representation, for example, Klee is not showing an unusually ugly girl. The girl only becomes an ugly, animal creature because she is hungry. Nothing can calm the girl except the satisfaction of that desire. Klee is giving expression to the hidden psyche.He painted this picture in his favourite technique from the last years of his work: coloured paste. He produced his own paste and mixed it with pigment. In the "hungry girl" Klee uses only a small amount of pigment. As a result the paint remains transparent to a certain extent, and fine blisters are produced, which are still visible today. He restricts himself to the colours blue, red, green and black, applied flatly in strong brushstrokes. The under-drawing remains visible through the transparency of the paint. At some points in the lower part of the painting and teeth, Klee uses the white of the paper as a compositional device. It is clearly apparent that in the finished version Klee did not stick completely to the model of the under-drawing. Another pair of eyes and nostrils on the left are clearly visible next to the finished left eye. Beside the right eye an ear has also been drawn, which Klee also abandons.

The doll with purple ribbons appears strange. The androgynous mixed being seems to float in space as though directed by an invisible hand. For the first time in Klees work a humanlike figure is shown as a marionette, a motive which in his later work gained great importance. The doll behaves according to her own rules of play. Completely weightless she floats between the violet ribbons. The feet no longer function and since she no longer has any use for them, in their place two hands have grown. Glass painting was widely spread in central Europe from the sixteenth century; Votive paintings, biblical displays and peasant scenes were produced in their thousands as a winter occupation for large farming families and bought by peddlers. Klee bought several pictures at the Auer Dult market in Munich. Also Franz Marc and Wassily Kandinski were preoccupied with this technique, although unlike Klee not for the sculptural experimental characters, but more for the study of peasant traditions. From Klee there are 64 glass paintings known today. These actually pose a conservational challenge since their colour layers stick very badly to the smooth glass surface.

Like Picasso, Klee was also seeking for simple, modern means of expression. But unlike Picasso, who was impressed by the magical charm of «primitive» sculpture, Klee discovered the original sources of art in his own childrens drawings. Initially he approached a reduction of form cautiously. In later years he developed an intentional naivety into his specific form of expression. In the water colour «Puppet theatre» the theatre becomes the imaginary stage of childhood. The sheet hides depths which are unexpected at first sight: The stripe-like structured brightly coloured figures stand out from the dark background like a shining negative but still remain as if written on. The puppet on the floor seems to have been left unnoticed, the small unicorn on the right, steps stubbornly forward. The duplicity of the picture’s message is in accord with the technical process of the painting: It is made up of two individual parts and Paul Klee touched up the gap with black water colour. The lower part is the fragment of the sheet «Still life {{with the Dice.}}», which Klee registered in his Work Catalogue under the next number 1923, 22. Seen in this way, the Puppet Theatre becomes a stage with a double floor and a vegetative «Underworld».

Paul Klee only rarely took an interest in perspectival constructions of spaces, architectures and places. Very early in his work, rather than traditional central perspective, he opted for free methods of construction which were inspired above all by Cubist ideas of composition, but which also took them further. Another source of inspiration lies in the metaphysical squares and architectures of the Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico. De Chirico’s works from the 1910s, with their empty, dream-like squares and rooms, had a great influence on a wide range of artists, particularly the Surrealists. In «Room Perspective with Inhabitants» the relationship with de Chirico’s works is clearly apparent. Klee constructs the view into a room in a simple way. It shows a few cubical pieces of furniture and the inhabitants. Klee «builds» the inhabitants into the perspective: three figures seem to lie on the floor, three more stick to the right-hand wall. They are not depicted as three-dimensional bodies, but as constructions of flat forms. They thus contradict the three-dimensionality of the perspectival construction by being simply flat. A pencil drawing and a 1921 version of the «Room perspective» have been preserved. A similar colour composition entitled «Room Perspective with Dark Door» was produced a short time before. Klee transferred the colour version to the picture support using an oil transfer. For that reason the pencil drawing reveals scoring marks that can be produced when scoring with a sharp object. Four years later Klee reworked both «Room Perspectives» and renamed them «The Other Ghost Chamber» and «Ghost Chamber with the High Door». Accordingly the two-dimensional human figures became ghosts from another realm.

Depictions of nature appear in Paul Klee’s work from his earliest drawings in the sketchbooks of his youth to the last year of his life. Nature, growth and plants in general are a core theme in Klee’s thought and artistic work. In his 1925 essay «Ways of Studying Nature» Klee sums up his thoughts about nature: «For the artist, dialogue with nature remains an indispensable condition. The artist is a man, himself nature and part of nature in natural space.» Accordingly, for Klee, engagement with nature is a foundation of all artistic creation. Nature and its phenomena are not only elementary as subjects in Klee’s work, but go much deeper into his artistic thought. Nature or parts of nature, as well as its growth and structuring, serve as models for his compositions. Just as a seed becomes first a stem, then leaves and a flower, so the movement of a point becomes a line and finally a form. In his essay Klee writes: «The object grows beyond its appearance through our knowledge of its inner being, through the knowledge that the thing is more than its outward aspect suggests.» According to Klee the inside of an object defines its outward form.Essential thoughts of this kind flow into Klee’s work. Here in Cosmic flora from 1923, however, he is varying the theme freely, openly and in a many-faceted way. He paints a kind of garden with different flower-beds which have been overgrown in the lower part of the picture with curious plants. They look like carnivorous plants, and are entirely reduced to stem and flower. The upper part of the watercolour is even more abstract. Geometrical forms and signs predominate here, and only a few plants are discernible. The plants are «botanical actors» on a garden stage. Klee has made the picture with various different kinds of cross-hatching, in elaborately detailed close work.As he notes on the cardboard, Klee gave this work to his wife in October 1928, and at the same time assigned it to the special class.