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From Hermit of Schwabing to Avant-Garde Star

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From Hermit of Schwabing to Avant-Garde Star 60 FROM HERMIT OF SCHWA BING TO AVANT- GARDE STAR Hommage à Picasso (Homage to Picasso), Klee painted this picture after being inspired by Picasso’s Cubist works; its main allusions to Cubism can be found in the oval format. It is the only work by Klee whose title contains a homage to another artist. August Macke and Paul Klee with their guide in Kairouan, April (from August Macke’s photo album) Just a few hours after this photograph was taken, Klee wrote in his diary with a sense of fulfillment: “Color and I are one. I am a painter.” 61 THE TENTATIVE ILLUSTRATOR That same year, Klee made a somewhat cautious entry in his diary, saying that he wanted to “tentatively” try his hand at literary illustrations. An avid reader, Klee had already chosen a book to illustrate, one that had excited him unlike any other: the philosophical novel Candide by Voltaire (1694–1778), which pre- sented the world as a most dubious creation. Nevertheless, he did not begin work on the project until 1911, and it would keep him occupied until the following year. The resulting drawings featured strangely thin and stylized figures of unusual proportions, drawn with a nervous but loose line (see p. 54). Writing in his diary, Klee describes what this work triggered within him: “…perhaps I have found my true self again—although I am still swinging back and forth between differing opinions.” As professed at an earlier date, Klee aimed for more than merely illustrating a literary motif: “…I created images and rejoiced only when a poetic and a pictorial thought coincided seemingly ‘by chance’.” Despite extensive efforts at quickly bringing the book to print, it was not until after the war that Klee could find a publisher for the Candide illustrations. They finally appeared in 1920. Robert Delaunay: Fenetre sur la ville (Window on the City), This picture is one of the “window paintings” that Klee was able to admire in Delaunay’s studio in . The pictures from this series are composed of bright color, removed as far as possible from representation. 62 FROM HERMIT OF SCHWA BING TO AVANT- GARDE STAR “A pill-dung-whirligig beetle does his work before me. This is how I will work as well: testing again and again whether it rolls; reducing, re-measuring. And at some point it will work. But will I also march backwards with my ball, I mean backwards to the goal?” Paul Klee, 1914 garten in der tunesischen Europäer Kolonie St. Germain (Garden in St. Germain, the European Quarter of Tunis), Klee liked this watercolor so much that he labeled it “special class” (which Klee marked as “S Kl” until ; afterwards as “S Cl”), an honor bestowed only on works that Klee reserved for his own posthumous estate and thus did not sell. 63 Hammamet mit der Moschee (Hammamet with the Mosque), Following their stay in St. Germain near Tunis, the painter friends traveled to Hammamet, where Klee painted this watercolor. In the upper half of the painting, we can still clearly identify the mosque, a tower, walls, and gardens, but the lower half is painted in overwhelmingly abstract color fields showing the influence of Delaunay. After completing the watercolor, Klee further emphasized the work’s clear division into a more representational and more abstract half by cutting off a small strip from the lower red border, turning it by degrees, and placing it on the picture’s upper edge. 64 FROM HERMIT OF SCHWA BING TO AVANT- GARDE STAR Motiv aus Hamammet (Motif from Hammamet), This watercolor was not painted directly from the urban landscape of Hammamet, but—as indicated by Klee’s notes in his catalogue of works—is based on Klee’s partially abstract picture Hammamet with the Mosque (opposite). Armed with this knowledge, we can identify the blue surface at the top left as part of the roof; the red area (top middle) with the adjacent smaller yellow area as the tower with the two windows; and the adjoining dots as plants. The first painting helped Klee take another step towards nearly complete abstraction—pure color and form. 65 Badestrand St. Germain bei Tunis (Bathing Beach of St. Germain near Tunis), Here, Klee painted horizontal bands (making use of the white of the paper as well) on to wet paper, a process requiring rapid work. The vertical white stripe is where the rubber band was affixed that held the sheet of paper on to the backboard. 66 FROM HERMIT OF SCHWA BING TO AVANT- GARDE STAR THE ENTHUSIASTIC BENEFACTOR KUBIN Klee’s recognition and success as an artist developed slowly and steadily. In 1909, he sold two illustrations that he had sent to the Berlin Secession. After many years in anonymity, in 1910 Klee held his first solo exhibition, showing fifty-six of his works in Switzerland. This traveling exhibition first opened in his hometown of Berne, and then moved on to Zurich, Winterthur, and Basel. At the time, the Bernese building contractor Alfred Bürgi became the first to Kairuan vor dem Thor (Kairouan, before the Gate), This predominantly abstract watercolor—whose loose color fields randomly overlap and blend into one another—was not painted until after Klee’s return from Tunisia. It is not the only works created in Munich in which Klee dealt with the sights and impressions from this journey. The vertical lines and the curved line divide the picture into several parts. The only objects hinted at in this painting are several fragments of figures, a camel, and a cart—the frame containing these objects stands out almost as if Klee had cut it out of another watercolor. 67 purchase some of Klee’s works. After Bürgi’s death, his art-minded wife Hanni, who went on to become a good friend to Lily and Klee, invested a large share of her inheritance in paintings, which over the years grew into one of the larg- est and most important private collections containing Klee’s works. Soon, well- known artists took note of Klee’s work. In January 1911, for instance, Klee met the Austrian illustrator and author Alfred Kubin (1877–1959), who had recently purchased one of his works. Relishing the unaccustomed attention, Klee wrote of this encounter, which would grow into a life-long artists’ friendship: “Kubin the benefactor has arrived. He made such an enthusiastic impression that he held me spellbound. We sat in front of my paintings, truly excited! Truly enormously excited! Utterly excited!” KLEE’S CATALOGUE OF WORKS Perhaps in response to his first exhibitions and sales, Klee now decided to compile a list of his works. As a young boy, Klee had used consecutive numbers in his sketchbooks, but he had quit this practice shortly before heading off to the academy. In February 1911, he wrote in his diary: “I am starting a catalogue of all my works still in my possession.” Quickly, however, this project turned into an even larger undertaking, with Klee recording nearly all his previously created works in a catalogue. After all, this index represented Klee’s own acknowledgment of his accomplishments and an account of all his previous artistic efforts. mit d. mauve Dreieck (With the Mauve Triangle), After his return from Tunisia, Klee created a series of abstract watercolors in which he worked with contrast-rich, colorful, geometric shapes, delineated and subdivided by lines. 68 FROM HERMIT OF SCHWA BING TO AVANT- GARDE STAR Föhn im Marc’schen Garten (Föhn Wind, in Franz Marc’s garden), Klee used colorful rectangles to paint the Marcs’ house in the Bavarian town of Ried; the landscape, on the other hand, consists of colorful triangles. Only the red rectangle would appear to not truly belong to this landscape. Perhaps Klee saw this rectangle as representing Marc’s future studio, which he wanted to build on the meadow in front his house, purchased only recently in . 69 Klee was a highly meticulous person in private life and recorded even the smallest expense in his household accounting, but he apparently felt that such a painstakingly kept catalogue did not exactly fit the image of an artist. As a result, his diary entry from this time sounds like an attempt at justifying some- thing he felt to be both necessary and embarrassing: “All the things an artist must be: poet, naturalist, philosopher. And now that I have written an ex- tensive and precise index of all my artistic products … I have also become a bureaucrat.” Klee started with the works from his childhood, but included only those that he considered to be successful and complete works of art. The catalogue, which he maintained until his death, represents a handwritten record of around 9,000 of the almost 10,000 works that Klee produced in his Trauerblumen (Mourning Flowers), For Klee, the human world and the plant world were closely connected; so much so that during the terrible war years, during which he created this piece, even the flowers were in mourning. Zerstörung und Hoffnung (Destruction and Hope), Klee created this lithograph, whose test print he had called Ruinen und Hoffnung (Ruins and Hope) during his wartime military service. 70 FROM HERMIT OF SCHWA BING TO AVANT- GARDE STAR lifetime, all carefully itemized in loose-leaf folders, notebooks, and lined school binders. In addition to the year of creation, he also assigned every piece a serial number, starting each year with the number 1. Later, his Munich art dealer Hans Goltz complained that it was highly disadvantageous for business that anyone could discover how many paintings Klee had created in one year—if people saw that he was making a large number of paintings, his works would not be worth as much.
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