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Uploaded 17/5/02
Paul Klee: The Nature of Creation
Hayward Gallery, 17 January–1 April 2002
Hajo Düchting. Paul Klee: Painting Music.Munich, London,
New York: Prestel Verlag, 2002, £6.95
In vast contrast to Tate Modern’s Warhol exhibition earlier
this year, the Picasso Matisse which is about to open and other
blockbuster museum exhibitions, ‘Paul Klee: The Nature of Creation’
at the Hayward Gallery was not only a beautifully curated exhibition
of intimate, whimsical work, it was also a great success. Long queues
formed to enter the Hayward to see the work of an artist, who for
art students and lovers of painting and the drawn image, is worthy
of a certain dedication. For, although Klee was never a major figure,
he remains a central one in the modern movement. Before his death
in 1940 he produced in excess of 10,000 works of art. Klee’s
work is pure pleasure, analytically subtle and exacting.
The Hayward exhibition was jointly curated by Professor Robert
Kudielka and British artist Bridget Riley. It was a superb installation
– intelligent and subtle relationships were established between
works, a poetic dialogue was made possible between the works and
the viewer. This was an exhibition where space was established around
works for contemplation, rather like the space created around characters
in 19th century literature, an idea put forward by George Steiner,
enabling the characters to have privacy. Hence one comes away from
the show experiencing a sense of quiet enrichment.
Klee’s greatest influence on other artists was as a teacher
at the Bauhaus in Weimar between 1921–31. During this period
Klee’s output was extraordinary. ‘The Garden’, a
metaphor for continual growth and change, was used to parallel the
spiritual preoccupations of the period. Music was always a central
interest for Klee who had to make the decision between pursuing
a career in music as a violinist or becoming a painter.
Paul Klee: Painting Music has been launched in paperback
(it was first published in hardback by Prestel Verlag in 1997) as
a delightful, small, reasonably priced book. As the author points
out, ‘There is hardly a twentieth-century artist who dealt
so intensively with music as did Paul Klee, making explicit reference
to it in both his art and his writings’.1 Klee’s mother
was a trained singer, his father a music teacher. Later, he married
pianist Lily Stumpf who supported them as a young family in Munich
with the proceeds of her teaching. Klee continued to make music
for pleasure and sometimes performed. Part of his decision to pursue
a career in the visual arts and not music was that he believed that
the Golden Age of music was over, and that contemporary music was
‘too academic, dictated too much by educational theory to serve
as a model and source of inspiration as Schönberg’s twelve-tone
music had done for Kandinsky’.2 Klee’s greatest admiration
was reserved for Mozart whom he thought of as the ‘ultimate
pinnacle of art’. ‘In Klee’s eyes, Mozart achieved
almost superhuman dimensions as his music heralded the fusion of
the heavenly with the earthly (or the infernal) an ideal that Klee
himself sought to attain as an artist.’ Music in his day was,
in Klee’s view, largely reproductive and would not have provided
the creative freedom or challenge that it had in the time of Bach
or Mozart. Klee often wrote about the relationship between art and
music: ‘I am continually being made aware of parallels between
music and the fine arts. As yet they defy analysis. It is certain
that both art forms are defined by time. That can easily be proved’.3
It was the innovative possibilities in painting that were so
tempting to Klee, those of music having already passed their prime.
The desire to do ground-breaking work in painting – to discover
a new foundation from which painting could powerfully rise –
is reminiscent of the demand for a ‘thorough-bass of painting’,
an objective postulated by Goethe in his ‘Theory of Colour’
(1810).4
As early as 1915 an admirer of Klee, Theodor Däubler wrote:
Paul Klee is an extremely distinguished musician, a fact also
revealed quite clearly in his painting. In all his drawings there
are animated configurations which, once induced by music, are
enticed to the most extreme eccentricities. The essential quality
of his art becomes reality, created by the finest nervous sensibility,
which even without the tones of the cello would be inconceivable…
Every corner is filled: his colourful inventions, in their most
subtly coloured outlines, radiate like waves of music.5
Klee disliked the simplification of Däubler’s review
and other biographers who used imprecise, comparisons between his
music and his art:
Paul Klee was by no means the only artist whose work was vaguely
described as ‘musical’. Studies on the relationship
between music and painting can be traced back to ancient history
and are closely linked to the comparison between musical keys
and shades of colour. The development of this analogy gained impetus
from the Romantic movement, which saw in music the other-worldly
ideal of spiritual purity, as yet unattained by painting…
It was to take almost another century before painters were able
to free themselves from purely naturalistic reproductions and
to seek new, non-representational techniques of depiction. By
the beginning of the twentieth century, the idea of incorporating
musical elements into painting had become widespread and was often
mentioned in an attempt to explain various approaches to abstract
painting.6
Artists of the same generation such as Wasily Kandinsky were also
interested in the relationship between art and music. Klee was interested
and influenced by various artists including Robert Delaunay, and
Johannes Itten. Unlike the Romantics, Klee singled out rhythm as
the essence of music to seek an analogy between music and art. Based
primarily on his own appreciation of music he believed that ‘the
special quality of musical expression lay in both the clearly articulated
structure and the refined variation of themes, something which he
noticed above all in the polyphonic fugue’.7 In his Diaries
Klee wrote:
Simple movement seems banal to us. The element of time must be
eliminated. Yesterday and today as simultaneous events, polyphony
in music met this demand to some extent. A quintet like the one
in Don Giovanni is more accessible to us than the epic movement
in Tristan. Mozart and Bach are more modern than the nineteenth
century. If the temporal element in music could be overcome by
a consciously retrograde movement, a late flowering would be conceivable.8
The titles of Paul Klee’s paintings in the early period reveal
his quest: ‘Dogmatic Composition’, 1918,
‘In Bach’s Style’, 1919, ‘Fugue in Red’,
1921, ‘Pastoral (Rhythms)’, 1927, ‘Nocturne
for Horn’, 1921. From this early period Klee laid the
foundation for his artistic career. The early works saw the creation
of rhythmical linear structures from motifs from nature. The remarkable
sense of rhythm in visual terms is the distillation of his knowledge
of the rudiments of music. When, in 1914 Klee travelled to Tunis
he experienced the liberating effect of colour: ‘Colour possesses
me. I don't have to pursue it. It will possess me always, I know
it. That is the meaning of this happy hour: colour and I are one.
I am a painter’.9 Klee embarked from that point to transform
an optical experience of reality into abstract images. He was extremely
prolific. Perhaps his greatest contribution was as a great teacher
and writer of Diaries and theory of teaching drawing and
the elements of visual imagery. The very fine, small book by Düchting,
Paul Klee: Painting Music, is just one of numerous recent
publications on the work of this brilliant and inspiring artist.
References
- Düchting, Hajo. Paul Klee: Paining Music. Munich,
London, New York: Prestel Verlag, 2002: 7.
- Ibid, p8.
- Ibid, p8–9.
- Ibid, p10.
- Ibid, p11–12.
- Ibid, pp 12-13.
- Ibid, p 14.
- Ibid, p 14.
- Ibid, p 26.
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