BOOKS
423
of a painter with an
oeuvre
of nearly 9,000 items. The forty color re–
productions and the hundreds of line cuts of drawings have for the
most part not been hitherto reproduced. The halftone black and whites
are, of course, less satisfactory, particularly since Klee played about so
much with delicate gradations of tone and mixtures of medium. "The
Twittering Machine," for example, is poorly reproduced in black-and–
white, as are some others in the familiar oil-on-wash style of the 1920's.
Will Grohmann's voluminous text has been over-criticized for its dis–
organization and sentimentality. Though rambling and sprawling, it
contains more data than we have had in monographs before, and the
documentation (bibliographies, chronologies and a thematic catalogue)
looks to be excellent. The whole text, scattered among the plates and
line cuts the way it is, is considerably better than what one would ex–
pect from the usual critical-biographical study by a "lifelong friend."
Perhaps the most striking thing about the whole volume is the
way in which it enables us to see for ourselves Klee's stylistic develop–
ment, which even the largest exhibitions in this country have shown
to be a series of more or less tentative-looking commitments. The book's
chronological arrangement allows us to trace the course of the method,
from its beginnings in Expressionism, enriched by a variety of German
graphic sources from Durer and Urs Graf to Heinrich Kley and Wil–
helm Busch, through the more elegant influence of Klee's
Blaue Reiter
contacts in 1911, after which a recognizable manner starts to emerge.
The period of the 1920s, during which he was associated with the Bau–
haus and which produced the
Pedagogical Textbook
is well represented;
it is during this time that heuristic color and form studies begin to ap–
pear, eventually mixing in with the mock-didactic tone of his earlier
work. It is also during the '20s that Klee introduces the calligraphic
marks, that, growing bolder and more pronounced, dominate the
paintings of the later '30s.
What remains clear throughout is the fact that Klee never fell
victim to the ideologies of the aesthetic movements with which he was
associated. The European picture gallery since 1900 has been an ideo–
logical battleground, and Klee lived and worked through its most temp–
ting encounters. Yet he was hardly touched by the determinedly ex–
cremental treatment of the picture plane by the Expressionists around
him, or by the implicit "Let us redesign our lives" of the Bauhaus,
based on the hopeful assumption that aesthetic and social problems
are the function of as relatively few variables as those that face the de–
signer of a fairly bleak factory. His own private mythos of creation
need never be employed in rationalization of his work. Klee's concern
