Art Chronicle
K
On
Paul Klee {1879-1940)
LEE BEGAN WITH
one very important personal asset, and his early
career seems to have been in many ways a struggle to place himself in
the position to exploit it. This asset was the fact that he had been born
and brought up in German Switzerland in the presence of a provincial–
almost folk-art with its own local and particular traits, which had some·
thing relatively new to contribute to the main stream of Western painting,
something at any rate that had not re-entered it since the
sixteent~
cen·
tury. Klee did not draw upon provincial art in any very conscious or
formal sense, but it was there in the neighborhood of his youth, he
allowed himself to be open to it, and its manifestations are unmistakable
in his work. There is the presence of something of which the antecedents
lie beyond all the familiar formal traditions, even those of modernist
painting. Klee's art deals with the minuscule and miniature, with linear
details and complications, restless surfaces, carefully contrived and
worked-out schemes, and with color keyed higher than is usual in our
post-Renaissance painting. In their combination these are much closer to
the traditional art of southern Germany and of German Switzerland than
Flemish and Dutch painting is to the autochthonous art of its own region.
Klee's way of life may have been cosmopolitan, but his art belongs
to the provinces in more than one respect. Its world is a closed one–
capable of being divided infinitely, but limited in its expansion. It grew
by intensification, not by extension. It is not big-city, cosmopolitan art in
the way in which Picasso's is, although it depends upon and reinforces
the advanced, international movement in painting. In spite of Klee's own
aspirations it pretends to no statements in the grand style; it concentrates
itself within a relatively small area, which it refines and elaborates. It
moves in an intimate atmosphere, among friends and acquaintances. It
belongs to Berne, Basel, Zurich, old-fashioned Munich, a region of bright,
alert small cities, where the provincial situated at the intersection of two
different national cultures has been modernized
an~
brought up to date,
but still remains provincial, a place comparatively remote from the ner–
vousness and personal uncertainty of the metropolis, a place where it is
still possible to be a bourgeois and to have a strong personality. Kler
himself reminds one of a personage in one of those stories by E. T. A.
Hoffmann about the small-town Germany of the eighteenth century: com·
fortable, musical, modest and fantastic. He welcomes influences and hints
from places far off in space and time, but they are thoroughly worked
over and assimilated to his own domestic decor. In contrast to Picasso
for whom the primitive and archaic retain their character as such, Klee
makes these homely and familiar, much less remote and severe. And for
all the shocks with which it provides us, Klee's imagination is not as
audacious as one has been led to think; its unconventionality is really
that of an eccentric but respectable bourgeois, and its whimsicality and
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