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PARTISAN REVIEW
tinguished by its ability to dispense with unifying faiths of this kind.
One may even hold that this is its most attractive feature. And if one
believes that a new integration is needed to replace the fading confi–
dence in liberal humanism, one may still think it likely that the new atti–
tude will emerge spontaneously before crystalizing in a system of thought;
its protagonists probably will for a long time look like dangerous radi–
cals to the defenders of what one scholar has called the "inherited con–
glomerate" of community beliefs.
1
The fact is that restorations are rarely
successful. The best hope for a wider acceptance of the "public phil–
osophy" lies not in the forcible imposition of private systems of belief,
however respectable, but in the removal of obstacles to human solidarity.
G. L.
Arnold
1 Of.
The Greeks and the Irrational.
By E. R.
Dodds. University of Cali–
fornia. 1951.
KLEE AND STEINBERG
PAUL KLEE. By Will Grohmann. Harry N. Abrams.
$12.50
THE PASSPORT. By Saul Steinberg. Harper and Brother5.
$5.00
Since his death in 1940, Paul Klee's direct influence has
shown itself in rather trivial ways. We saw the unmediated use of some
of his techniques in painters like Morris Graves and cartoonists like
William Steig (the expressionist scrawl and the accusing black arrow
in
The Agony in the Kindergarten).
The Canadian Norman McLaren
produced some effective animations of Klee-ish images in films such as
"Fiddle Dee Dee," and in a more general way, Klee's wit is not missing
from some of the U.P.A. cartoons. Now that the "abstract expression–
ism" of Pollock, deKooning, Baziotes, Stamos and others has come to
develop the authority (as well as the following) of an Academy, we
find Klee being invoked again. It would be his name, even more than
those of Braque and Rouault, from which Tradition-indicating arrows
would be drawn in a "Glossary of the New Abstractionism" that is
probably being prepared somewhere. One has only to visualize the
parenthetical descriptions after the name : "post-expressionist-surrealoid
-Swiss mystic (see Hesse)" to agree that a sober revaluation of Klee's
work and influence has been long overdue.
One can have better hopes that such a reconsideration will be ac–
complished now that Harry Abrams has produced a wonderful volume
with as good a claim to being representative as is possible in the case
