60
PARTISAN REVIEW
(I shall come back to this) more often his work is identified with the
imperial or sacred
arts.
If
we stick to the reassuring game of affinities,
we are more likely to get our bearings at the sarcophagus at Memphis,
in the ancient Peruvian fabrics, or in those, more congenial, of the
Copts. The world of Klee had to be charged with a past-a very
remote past-as if it felt itself unable to cope with the greenness and
massivity of the present, unable to precede the wear of the centuries,
to wear itself out before.... For a moment it would be tempting to
see here too the elegance of Brummel, who put his ties into a file
be–
fore he wore them. But this would be losing ourselves in romance.
Rather, we ought to
try
to define
his
conception of space.
Henri Michaux, not without humor, writes about the paintings of
a school, up to now considered the most emancipated in respect to
visual servitude, that "It is well known, that we can't see there for
more than a couple of yards." On the contrary, what Klee sought was
the boundless.
As
early as 1912, uniting in his style the longing for the
infinite of the Chinese and certain romantics of the North, from
whom he descended, he wanted to check the too rational horizon.
The beetle's graceful antenna would be enough to measure the
desert, and the pollen's wake could humble the Milky Way.... Just
as each one of us knows that the body of a chosen woman is, for
him alone, the map of heaven; so we have, too, Renoir's nymphs
who are, completely, the landscape.
Paul Klee admired Henri Matisse and it is understandable; the
violences of early fauvism were necessary. Thanks to Matisse, we
have won a more profound liberty. We can glimpse a transmutation,
that of proportions, to which an open space corresponds, and a new
ideography, perhaps a desperate movement, but doubtless the only
one possible for the Western painter. For we have to go to the
evidence; we cannot go on like the old masters. Nothing can bridge
. the gap. The phrase attributed to Cezanne, acknowledging
himself
the primitive in the discovery of a new way, is almost incredible;
such lucidity is astonishing! A recent occurrence is another excessive
witness: the speculators counterfeited
La Source
1
with such perfection
that it was questioned, and finally suspicion covered both works. We
have the proof also (but do we need it?) that Vermeer's art today is
only rivaled (apparently) by forgers.
Paul Klee turned then to his own means, to an alchemy all his
own, or used the means of his time to express this liberated space. He
1.
Painting
by
Ingres-Translator.
