(The Twittering Machine, Paul Klee 1922, MoMA)
Last Thursday, on a beautiful, crisp autumn day in Houston, a friend and I visited the Menil Collection where some eighty of Paul Klee’s colorful, delicate and small sized paintings are currently on display. All the paintings are from American collections. Born in Switzerland in a musical family, Klee was set to become a violinist but changed his mind to pursue a career in art instead. A contemporary of Wassily Kandinsky on the faculty of the Bauhaus School in Germany, he made the following awe filled declaration after a trip to the sunny north African nation of Tunisia.
"Color possesses me; no longer do I have to chase after it, I know that it has taken hold of me forever. That is the significance of this blessed moment. Color and I are one. I am a painter."
And it shows. His paintings of school houses, masks, sun rise, sun set, circus, north African gardens and domes, country fairs, fish, birds, harlequins and clowns are splashed with color on varied surfaces. I had never seen so many of Klee’s works under one roof before. The exhibit is delightful and highlights a cross section of the vast output of a prolific artist who was also amazingly versatile. Surrealism, Dadaism, cubism, pointillism and straightforward portraits and still lifes were all part of Klee’s technique. It is very hard to imagine why this exuberant and sometimes childlike art would end up as part of Hitler’s infamous exhibition of "Degenerate Art", unless according to the Nazis, all creative work of Jewish artists qualified as such.
A write up of the Menil exhibition from the October 20, 2006 edition of Houston Chronicle.
"Color possesses me," 36-year-old Paul Klee declared in 1915. "I am a painter." He painted with a rainbow of watercolors and oils, then described geometric and imaginary figures mostly as line drawings in black against the luminous grounds.
Nearly 80 of his magical little paintings dated 1921-1939 make up the exhibit Klee and America at the Menil Collection. Curated by Menil director and Klee expert Josef Helfenstein, the exhibit — and its hefty catalog — trace the artist’s acceptance by collectors in the United States and his impact on other artists. Klee, Mexican artist Diego Rivera wrote, "is one of the wisest painters and one of the greatest child/poets of the world." In the 1920s, Paris celebrated Klee as one of the fathers of Dada and Surrealism; recognition was slower in America. Leading critics in the United States mostly dismissed him, though he had powerful supporters — among them Katherine Dreier, a founder of the Society of Independent Artists, and Alfred Barr of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).
By the early 1930s, however, when the Nazis declared his art degenerate, Klee’s reputation had spread in this country. The Klee Foundation in Bern, Switzerland, estimates some 1,150 works, about 10 percent of his total oeuvre, are in U.S. collections. An iconic example is the 1922 Twittering Machine owned by MoMA. The radiant background is an aqueous pale blue, transparent rose and violet. Black lines describe a gathering of four oddly mechanical insectlike creatures. Stick legs balance them on a wire and their oval heads point in different directions. One faces up, its black, daggerlike "tongue" protruding from its open mouth. (Did Picasso steal this for the screaming mother in Guernica, 15 years later?)
Man of Confusion was painted in 1939, the year before Klee’s death from scleroderma, a progressive disease that destroys tissue. The vibrantly colored composition describes a dismembered figure. Body parts float about in an indeterminate space of rich red to orange tones. The head, suspended near the upper right corner, is strawberry pink with an L for a nose somewhere in the middle but nostrils floating away closer to the cheekbone. One leg is a pink biomorph paralleling the lower edge, its disconnected red "shoe" pointing down. A red hand pins the left edge.
Color possessed Klee even in the saddest moments."
See some of Paul Klee’s paintings on the web here.
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