Paul Klee 1879 - 1940

1. Paul Klee 1879 - 1940 Line Colour Humour

2. Line • “the original movement , the agent is a point (the point of the pencil) that sets itself in motion. A line comes into being. It goes out for a walk, so to speak, aimlessly for the sake of the walk”* • Where the line goes is only recognised en route – not pre-planned • *Quoted in Paul Klee The nature of creation p.53 Hayward Gallery 2002.

3. Line example • Example: 1930: Burdened children • http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/klee-burdened-children-t06796 • The line is almost unbroken forming a series of rounded box-like shapes which overlap. The eyes and stick legs, themselves lines, provide the human features.

4. Line in oil-colour drawings 1 • Examples: • 1919 They’re biting • http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/klee-theyre-biting-n05658 • The lines of the anglers’ rods lead down to the fish, themselves lines, but with individual expressions. The work is held together by the outer lines which lead back to the anglers. • The preliminary drawing was transferred to a sheet of tracing paper. A thin sheet of paper was coated with black oil paint , placed on another piece of paper and the drawing traced through with a metal needle. Watercolour could then be used on top when the print was dry.

5. Line in oil-colour drawing 2 • 1922: Ghost of a genius • http://www.nationalgalleries.org/collection/artists-a-z/K/3785/artist_name/Paul%20Klee/record_id/2087 • Is this a portrait of the artist himself? Or a comment on the way people see the artist as a puppet serving their own ideas of what art should be?

6. Colour • “Colour possesses me always. I know it. Colour and I are one. I am a painter” * • “To paint well is simply this: to put the right colour in the right place” ** • Influenced by a visit to Tunisia and Egypt and the quality of light at dawn and dusk. • Watercolours of squares of colour exploring the relationship of colours

7. Colour • Example: • 1929: Fire in the evening • http://www.moma.org • The red rectangle stands out rather as a campfire in the desert at dusk might. The bands of muted colour may have been inspired by the way light is reflected off the cultivated fields of the Nile valley

8. Colour theory • 1923: Static-dynamic gradation • www.metmuseum.org • Klee explored colour relationships while teaching at the Bauhaus between 1919 and 1932. The outer darkish brown squares are here “static” and progress to the more luminous clear-coloured central ones which he called “dynamic”

9. Humour • Student life at the Bauhaus had its lighter moments and there were parties and theatrical performances in which comic and mechanical elements played a major part. Klee took great delight in these. • Example: • 1921: Comedy • http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/klee-comedy-n05657

10. Humour and magic • Paul Klee had an aquarium in his house and was fascinated by the movement of his fish in three dimensions. He would discuss this with his students and it became the subject for several paintings through the 1920s.

11. Fish! • Example: • Fish Magic • http://www.philamuseum.org/collections/permanent/51027.html • In FishMagic, the presence of the creatures seems to cast a spell. Curious people appear at the margins as if mesmerised by this entrancing world. Klee painted a layer of black paint over a number of different coloured layers and then scratched back to reveal the colours he wanted for the different figures.

12. Artists as interpreters of the world • In January 1924, Paul Klee delivered a carefully prepared lecture at the Kunstverein – the public art gallery – in Jena, a city in central Germany. He made a case for the artist’s need for freedom of the imagination. Using the tree as a symbol for the artist he said: • “From the root the sap flows through him, flows to his eye. He stands as the trunk of the tree. Battered and stirred by the strength of the flow he moulds his vision into his work. . • As in full view of the world , the crown of the tree unfolds and spreads in time and space, so with his work. Nobody would affirm that the tree grows its crown in the image of its root… it is obvious that different functions expanding in different elements must produce vital differences. But it is just the artist who at times is denied those departures from nature which his art demands…And yet , standing at his appointed place, the trunk of the tree, he does nothing other than gather and pass on what comes to him from the depths. He neither serves nor rules -he transmits.”

13. The later years: 1933 - 1940 • In 1930s Germany, the National Socialists fixed on what they perceived as a corruption of culture in the Weimar Republic as a target for attack. It was an excuse for anti-Semitism, anti-Communist, repression. On Hitler becoming Chancellor on 30 January 1933, the assault on the plurality of German culture was devastating. • As a modernist, Paul Klee was dismissed from his teaching post at the Dusseldorf Academy. His works were removed from public galleries, his collectors were hounded and his dealer AlfredFlechtheimforced out of business as a modernist and a Jew. More fortunate than many colleagues, Klee could return to Bern where he settled in late 1933, as the cultural world in which he had lived was systematically destroyed. •  As a German Klee found himself applying for Swiss citizenship on his return to the city of his childhood in 1933. The rules required a five-year residency before nationality could be considered and conferred. Klee’s application in January 1940 was being processed as his health declined and notification of its success arrived shortly after his death in June that year.