a degenerate artist
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Metropolitan Museum exhibit looks at late works
Friday, April 2, 2004 Posted: 12:16 PM EST (1716 GMT)
This 1940 Paul Klee painting, titled "The Hour Before One Night," is part of
an exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum in New York.
NEW YORK (AP) -- Like a star burst in the gathering gloom, modern artist
Paul Klee painted some of his most luminous works on the eve of World War
II, as Europe drifted into catastrophe and his death approached from a
crippling disease.
Whimsy and buoyancy in his Bauhaus pictures of the 1920s reflected Klee's
innovative theories of color and composition. His upbeat pointillist mosaics
followed in the early 1930s while he taught at the Duesseldorf Academy in
Germany.
Hounded by the Nazis, Klee took refuge in 1933 in Bern, Switzerland. His
works in German museums were confiscated, his livelihood disrupted and he
was diagnosed in 1936 with incurable scleroderma, a chronic autoimmune
disease.
Klee responded with an outpouring of creativity -- 1,253 works in 1939
alone -- that took his art in new directions before his death in 1940 at 61.
Those later creations shape "Klee: His Late Work," a concise new survey on
view through June 27 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, its only exhibit
stop.
The 24 oils, watercolors and drawings are from the Met's Berggruen
Collection, one of the largest Klee holdings in the United States. The works
spanning his career were donated by Heinz Berggruen, a former art dealer in
Paris who specialized in Klee.
"We're the only place in New York where Klees are always on display," said
curator Sabine Rewald, who has mounted various Klee shows since receiving
the gift in 1987.
Great innovator
A visitor looks at a 1939 gouache, ink and pencil drawing on paper called
"Angel Applicant."
Klee ranks among the greatest innovators of modern art -- with Picasso,
Matisse, Braque, his close friend Wassily Kandinsky and a few others. He
never became rich, although he achieved considerable fame in avant-garde
circles with exhibitions starting in New York in 1924, Paris in 1925 and
other art centers later on.
The Nazis paid him a backhanded compliment by including 17 of his
confiscated works in a show of "degenerate artists" in Munich in 1938.
"Right after the war, you could buy a Klee in Germany for a pack of
cigarettes," Rewald, a Berlin native, said. "Today? A million!"
Klee's early compositions were small format in a variety of mediums,
executed with delicate lines, eye-catching hues and rich in fantasy and
symbolism.
"Art does not reproduce the visible, it makes visible," Klee wrote, summing
up his intentions.
While artists' skills often diminish as they age, Klee's grew stronger. "In
a purely visual sense, he was still full of creativity" until the end of his
life, Rewald said.
As the scleroderma caused his body fluids to dry up, Klee's style changed.
"The formats are large, the lines stronger, the colors bolder," Rewald
explained.
The survey begins in 1925 and includes notable late works with weighty
themes: "Stricken City" (1936), featuring lacework lines in gypsum and oil
on canvas; "The Rhine at Duisburg" (1937), a pictogram with boats and
rippling waves in gypsum, oil and charcoal on cardboard; "Little Hope"
(1938), the outline of a girl's face in plaster and watercolor on burlap;
"Angel Applicant" (1939), a monstrous mask sketched in black ink, gouache
and pencil; and "The Hour Before One Night" (1940), an abstract watercolor
of heavy black lines in a grid over patches of red, blue and burnt sienna
gouache.
'Color has taken possession of me'
Born in Bern to a German father and Swiss mother, Klee held German
citizenship all his life, though he had applied for Swiss naturalization at
the time of his death at a sanatorium in Muralto-Locarno.
"People here don't want Klee to be German. They associate German artists
with heavy, gloomy, aggressive works," Rewald said. "People tell me he's
Swiss, not German. He doesn't fit their preconceptions."
An accomplished violinist, Klee developed theories about music's
relationship to painting and sought to portray sounds on canvas and paper.
His works have been compared to chamber music.
Klee used chessboard patterns to convey abstract landscapes, and linear
constructions to evoke urban life. In some works in the display, letters and
numerals are arrayed like hieroglyphics, and still life objects are rendered
in cubist style.
Klee laid out his artistic theories in books, and sketched his own
development in a famous diary. Encountering the brilliant light of the
desert in Tunisia in 1914, he wrote, "Color has taken possession of me. No
longer do I have to chase after it."
Klee moved to Munich in 1898 at age 19 to study art, and traveled to Italy,
France, Egypt and elsewhere to absorb art history. He married a Bavarian
pianist, Lily Stumpf, in 1906 and they had one son. His initial sales were
through galleries in Germany and Switzerland and book illustrations.
Early on, Klee devised a catalog for each work, listing the date and quality
for pricing. His output exceeded 9,000 works. The majority were drawings,
which now command tens of thousands of dollars at auction.
"He made all his own mediums, including the glue to mount his works on
cardboard. He didn't buy his colors as artists do today," Rewald said.
Klee spent World War I as an aircraft painter and pay clerk, after the
German army drafted him in 1916. In 1922, Walter Gropius, founder of the
Bauhaus school of art, architecture and crafts, lured him to Weimar. Klee
resigned in 1931 as political turmoil engulfed the Bauhaus.
Joel Olson
Great innovator
Timely notice. Thanks. Going back East for a week or two, but doubt if I'll
get that far north. But maybe. The pro-Golf instructor nephew has switched
careers the last couple years; now aims to be an art teacher. But he's totally
hung up on the generation before Klee.
Finished a nice bio by Barbara Haskell on Burgoyne Diller. More of a hard
edge geometric kind of guy, but he got an admin job with the WPA and kept
abstract art (mostly murals) alive (i.e. just barely fed) during that era. Sort
of a bridge between the varieties of European abstraction and Pollock.
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Eight feet of red is redder that two feet of red. - Rothko
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ball_93
"Joel Olson" <jeo...@webzone.net> wrote in message
news:_hZbc.14833$Dv2....@newsread2.news.pas.earthlink.net...
My old friend began his Washington career working at the National Gallery of
Art, being a MFA. When I visited him a few years ago, he took me on a
private tour. He can talk at length about each piece in the entire
collection, having catelogued it himself. He did such a good job at that,
he was taken up whole by other interested parties, and has been occult ever
since.
> ---------
> Eight feet of red is redder that two feet of red. - Rothko
> ---------
Absolutely!