|
The exhibition, finely curated and presented
comprises over 130 oil paintings, watercolours and prints from all
stages of Klee's career. The Bürgi collection is the most splendid
collection of Klee's work; the collection has not been exhibited
as a whole and will only be shown in Edinburgh in the UK. It is
accompanied by a meticulously researched and handsome catalogue.
Still intact as a private collection, the Bürgi collection
was assembled by one of Klee's earliest collectors, Hannah Bürgi-Bigler,
over a period of some 25 years. It was in fact the second biggest
collection of Klee's work in the world. A short time after her death
in 1938, Lily Klee wrote, "She was Klee's first collector and she
has left a very beautiful, full collection of his works, which reflects
the whole of his development as an artist".(1) Marguerite-Frey
Surbek wrote in 1938:
"While Hanni Bürgi became something of
a patron of the arts through her Klee collection, the real driving
force sweeping her along was her burning interest in what was
going on in the arts in general ... Unaffected by the weight of
refined tradition, for her family was part country folk part bourgeoisie,
Hanni Bürgi's unique instinct led her to reject anything
shallow, her naive directness drew her to the true and the genuine
in any art form - whatever proved to be so, became part of her
inner being".(2)
The essay by Stephen Frey, "Hanni Bürgi-Bigler,
Collector and Patron of Paul Klee: The History of the Collection",
traces the close and interesting friendship between the Klee and
Bürgi families, especially the loyal acquisition of the fine
collection.(3)
Following Hanni Bürgi's death, her son
Rolf was committed to ensuring that Klee's reputation was firmly
established. He was, for example instrumental in bringing a large
number of works from Swiss collections to the National Gallery in
London in 1945. On a personal level, the close friendship which
focused on Paul Klee's life-enhancing works of art, sustained Hanni
Bürgi through the loss of her husband who died suddenly in
his early forties and then the tragic death of her son Fredi in
1926, a talented young architect who had studied with Le Corbusier
in Paris.(4) Created during a period in history when
the overwhelming concerns related to Hitler, to the horrors of the
Nazi threat in Europe, to the very basest aspects of humanity, Paul
Klee chose not to mirror reality but to create an alternative to
reality with an independence of vision which made him one of the
most important artists of the twentieth century.
Paul Klee was born in Münchenbuchsee (near
Bern) in 1879. His father was a teacher of music and his mother
was Swiss. He attended school in Bern from 1886. He chose to study
art and moved to Munich where he studied under Franz Stuck. After
three years of study in Munich he travelled in Italy for a year,
mostly in Rome. In order to develop authentically independent work
he returned home to his parents in Bern where he drew and made some
fifteen etchings, ten of which are in the Bürgi collection.
"Klee's etchings represented the most direct expression of his insight
into the world during those early years. They also reveal an astonishing
command of anatomical detail".(5) In 1906 he moved to
Munich where he married Lily Stumpf; they lived there until 1920,
returning to Bern for the summers. Their only child, Felix, was
born in 1907. Lily provided for their small family by giving music
lessons.
"In spite of financial difficulties, Munich
was a paradise for Klee. He was in contact with people, music
and art. Poverty seemed more tolerable in a city which, at least
until 1914 was a cultural centre and where he soon acquired a
reputation as a serious artist. Munich offered good exhibitions
and concerts. Klee's daily life consisted of housework, painting,
shopping and occasionally visiting friends. Until 1910 Klee cooked
and looked after Felix while Lily was out giving music lessons.
To make things easier he did most of his painting in the kitchen".(6)
In 1920 Klee was appointed to the faculty of
the Bauhaus in Weimar where he taught until 1926 when he moved to
the new Bauhaus in Dessau. In 1930 he was appointed as principal
teaching in painting at the Prussian State Academy in Dusseldorf.
He stayed there from 1931-1933. Will Grohmann's study of Klee is
still perhaps the most interesting since he knew Klee well at the
Bauhaus.
"No matter whom he happened to be with, Klee
was always reserved; not deliberately, but because he could not
be otherwise. Although intensely perceptive, he seemed to live
in another world .....
Not even Klee's closest friends could tell
what manner he was, and this was as true in his childhood as in
his later years. Those who really understood his work knew most;
the others saw only integrity and the authenticity of his feelings.
Many pictures of Klee's blend cold and hot,
the arctic and the tropic, and the combination of opposites corresponds
to a fundamental trait in his character. The blend of hot and
cold within himself never produced a discrepancy; on the contrary,
it contributed to the richness of his talent. The mathematical
and the fantastic, the visual and the musical, the human and the
cosmic were reconciled within him, indeed, it was the interaction
of the opposing forces that made his personality so different
to grasp."(7)
1911 was a significant year for Klee when in
rapid succession he met Franz Marc, Heinrich Campendonk, Alexey
Jawlensky, Mariane von Werefkin, Gabriele Munter and soon after
Hans Arp. As Grohmann described:
"Klee found himself in a society of painters
who were his peers, who shared his views on the nature of art
and confirmed his belief that he was on the right path ..... now
at last he had friends who understood him, notably Kandinsky and
Marc".(8)
Klee spent a great deal of time talking about
art. In December 1911 Kandinsky and Marc founded the publication
Der Blaue Reiter, they simultaneously organised their first
exhibition at the Thannhauer Gallery. The second exhibition was
held in March 1912 which included a section on graphic working which
Klee was represented.
"The effect of these two exhibitions was revolutionary,
and Klee, who had hitherto been a solitary figure, found himself
involved in battles over modern art and a new conception of the
world. The leaders of the battle were Marc and Kandinsky, the
latter publishing The Art of Spiritual Harmony in 1912
(written in 1910). These volumes were the most discussed books
of modern artistic theory in Germany until the outbreak of war".(9)
From 1906 to 1914 and the outbreak of war, Klee's
work developed dramatically. He worked incessantly but became bored
with nature: "perspective makes me yawn".(10) His use
of line became freer and he produced many comic drawings and works
where formal artistic concerns were paramount. His confidence had
increased greatly from the close contact with Kandinsky and Marc,
"During the winter of 1912-1913, Klee ventured into the realms of
metaphysical conjunctions - man and his destiny, objects and their
universe - and independent forms ..... The divisions between different
categories of existence have been abolished; the universe has become
ambiguous and transparent".(11)
Early in 1914 Klee and Macke joined their friend
Louis Moilliet on a trip to Tunis. Klee wrote:
"The sun has a dark force. The colourful clarity
of the landscape is full of promise. Reality and dream at the
same time; and a third element - completely absorbed - myself.
It has to turn out well ..... Greenish - yellow, terracotta. The
colour harmonies penetrate and will remain with me whether or
not I paint them on the spot".(12)
The outbreak of war did not immediately affect
Klee's prodigious output although his group of friends was dispersed.
Kandinsky and Jawlenky as Russian subjects had to leave Germany,
Gabriele Munter left for Scandinavia for five years. Marc, Macke
and Campendonk were called up. On August 16 Macke was killed fighting
in France. Klee was overwhelmed by grief, as was Marc. Klee's response
was to retreat into his work. He could not bear to mirror the appalling
reality in his work:
"In order to work my way out of my dreams,
I had to learn how to fly. And so I flew. Now, I dally in that
shattered world only in occasional memories - the way one recollects
things now and again. Thus I deal abstractly with memories .....
The more horrifying this world becomes (as it is these days) the
more art becomes abstract; while a world at peace produced realistic
art".(14)
Klee's friend Franz Marc was killed in the Spring
of 1916, a week later he was himself called up. Klee wrote the Foreword
for the Franz Marc Exhibition while he was on leave in Munich.
His own army life was bearable and he continued to draw. In Cologne
he saw the Zeppelin flying over the cathedral at night which he
described as "a truly festive scene of evil".(15) In
the museum there he studied the works of Hieronymous Bosch and Pieter
Brueghel. Klee practised meditation in order to reconcile the predominance
of evil in the world and "became preoccupied with the conflict of
good and evil in his artistic creations; with the relationship of
forms to ideas, with the problem of time in the polyphony of painting
and music".(16)
At the end of the war Klee's work flowered:
the African trip and the Munich experience came together in his
work. He had achieved recognition and sold many works. In November
1920 he received an invitation from Walter Gropius to join the newly-founded
Bauhaus in Weimar. For thirteen years Klee had the certainty of
a living from teaching and he divided his time accordingly between
painting and teaching. It was extremely demanding, however, for
he was expected to clarify in his own mind, and be able to explain
to his students procedures that he had hitherto absorbed quite subconsciously,
"at the Bauhaus, he had to formulate a theory - consistent, communicable,
and intelligible - concerning the use of pictorial elements for
those who wanted 'to get their bearings on the formal plane'".(17)
The Bauhaus Masters' task was to formulate a
completely new system of instruction: in the end they wrote their
own textbooks. Klee's Pedagogical Sketchbooks (1924) was
his contribution to the revolutionary teaching methods and approach
to art at the Bauhaus.(18) From 1919 to 1923 Weimar was
the European centre of modern art. Kandinsky had joined the staff
in 1922; he and Klee became close friends. There was an unprecedented
interaction between the arts at the Bauhaus and Klee was involved
in all aspects of life there. The closing of the Bauhaus in Weimar
in December 1924 was therefore a sad time. When it reopened in Dessau
Klee and his family moved there. The "essential Bauhaus" suffered
from the resignation of Gropius in 1928 and with Moholy-Nagy, Marcel
Breuer and Herbert Bayer. The following year Oscar Schlemmer also
moved on. Of greater significance in Klee's career was his trip
to Egypt in 1928. It became in Grohmann's view "the greatest single
source of inspiration in his later years".(19) Where
Tunis fifteen years earlier had liberated his work, his trip to
Egypt gave him the confidence to simplify his work even further,
to break from a European vision.
By the time the Bauhaus closed in Dessau in
1932 and in Berlin in 1933, Klee was no longer teaching there. The
troubled atmosphere that had developed had proved disruptive to
his work. In April 1931 he was offered the chair at the Dusseldorf
Academy of Fine Arts. He was there for two years. Although teaching
was very demanding for Klee it was also a very productive time.
Indeed approximately half of his entire oeuvre was produced
during the years that he was employed as a teacher.
As early as 1933 Klee was criticised by the
Nazis who called him a Jew and a foreigner. Hitler was elected Chancellor
of the Reich in January 1933. The sale of modern art was banned
so that artists had no choice but to emigrate. In March 1933 Klee's
Dessau studio was searched by the Gestapo. Rolf Bürgi stepped
in to secure an exit permit for Paul and Lily Klee. Klee himself
underestimated the full gravity of the situation and only emigrated
to Switzerland in December, instead he focused on his work and had
a very productive period. Klee was denounced as a "degenerate artist"
and his work pilloried. He suffered terribly as a result of his
return to Bern - it was such a provincial town compared to the intellectual
milieu in Munich and at the Bauhaus. He had become recognised internationally
and, however safe a haven Bern provided, Klee suffered a crisis
in his art, and produced little compared to his halcyon days in
Germany. Book projects were abandoned. The economic crisis reduced
sales dramatically. In the Autumn of 1935 Klee became seriously
ill. Even when his health was restored in part in 1936 he produced
only 25 works compared to 482 in 1933.(20) During 1937
Klee's health stabilised. Remarkably he produced 264 works in 1937
and 489 in 1938. In 1939 just a year before he died, the total was
an amazing 1,253.(21) Hanni Bürgi was also living
in Bern and so the Bürgi collection is especially strong in
this later period as his German collectors were unable to buy his
work so easily. The criticisms made of Klee's work in Nazi Germany
are as shocking as the action taken by the Third Reich to cleanse
Germany of the "psychopathic" or "degenerate art". Although Klee's
life in Bern was isolated due to his poor health, he received visits
from Jawlensky (1935), Kandinsky (1937), Picasso (1937) and Braque
(1939). Klee died on 29 June 1940.
Several eminent historians have made fine appraisals
of Paul Klee's work. The sheer volume of works is remarkable as
is the intellectual breadth of Klee's writings and theories on art.
Klee was a dedicated and brilliant teacher.
"Conscious that art should be a means of human
communication, he saw in teaching, in the exactness of the didactic
method, a strict means of human communication. It is a matter
of teaching others how to walk along thin invisible lines, stretched
out in the darkness, trying to penetrate an unknown dimension.
There can be no other way than that of going forward together
along the uncertain road".(22)
In his Preface to The Thinking Eye, Giulio
Carlo Argan endows Paul Klee's theory of form production and pictorial
form with the same importance and the same meaning for modern art
as had Leonardo's writings which composed his theory of painting
for Renaissance art.(23)
"It is well-known that Klee, more than another
artist of our century, was consciously detached from the mainstream
of modern art and its theoretical assumptions. In the same way,
Leonardo, more than any other artist of the Renaissance, consciously
detached himself from the central features of the historical tradition.
In their creative thought both Leonardo and Klee are not so much
concerned with the art object, as with the manner in which it
is produced. They are concerned not with form as an immutable
value, but with formation as a process. Both are aware that the
artist's approach or creative manner is an independent and complete
way of existing in reality and of understanding it; and as they
are not unaware that thee are other speculative methods, they
are led to investigate that particular character which is the
distinctive feature of the artistic approach, always bearing in
mind however, that this must develop over the whole field of experience.
For this reason Leonardo's mode of thought, like that of Klee,
covers every aspect of being; it takes the entire universe".(24)
Although Paul Klee's time as a teacher formed
an essential aspect of his career, and although his influence on
twentieth century art was profound, Klee as an individual effectively
renunciated the world. He sacrificed involvement in many aspects
of life to concentrate on his art and in dong so created a self-contained
and harmonious world in visual terms. He was concerned above all,
with the essence of things, rather than with their surface appearance.
"His art mirrors almost every area of human
thought; he visualises the rise, evolution, and fate of human,
plant and animal life, as well as their transformation into primeval
and potential states. The world of art itself becomes his subject,
as do the world of music and poetry, the whole realm of the exact
sciences, physics and mathematics, geology and cosmology, the
vistas of history, and the intricacies of pure invention".(29)
<
The Private Klee on show in Edinburgh
this summer reveals that there was no end to Klee's power of invention
and his capacity to transport one to an intriguing and marvellous
world. His apparent naivety, in fact represents one of the purest
and most profound insights into nature, and the mysteries of life
and death with the very broadest philosophical and spiritual ramifications,
achieved in twentieth century art.
FOOTNOTES:
1 Stefan Frey "Hanni Bürgi-Bigler, Collector
and Patron of Paul Klee: the history of the collection", The
Private Klee. Works by Paul Klee from the Bürgi Collection,
(edited by Stefan Frey and Josef Helfenstein), National Galleries
of Scotland, Scottish National Gallery of Modern At, Edinburgh,
p.11.
2. Ibid, p.11.
3. Ibid, pp.11-31
4. Ibid, p.19.
5. Will Grohmann, Paul Klee, Lund
Humphries, London, 1954, p.45.
6. Ibid, p.48.
7. Ibid, pp.25-26.
8. Ibid, p.53.
9. Ibid, p.53.
10. Ibid, p.55.
11. Ibid, p.56.
12. Ibid, p.56.
13. Ibid, pp.57.
14. Ibid, p.57.
15. Ibid, p.59
16. Ibid, p.60.
17. Ibid, p.64.
18. Ibid, p.183. First translated
into English under the title Pedagogical Sketchbook, New
York, Nierendorf Gallery, 1944.
19. Ibid, p.76.
20. Josef Helfenstein, "Meeting Place: The
Bürgi Collection, Paul Klee's life and Work", The Private
Klee, op.cit., p.151.
21. Ibid, p.158.
22. Guilo Carlo Argan "Preface", Paul Klee,
The Thinking Eye, (ed. Jürg Spiller), Lund Humphries,
London, 1961, p.13.
23. Ibid, p.11.
24. Ibid, p.11.
25. Grohmann, op.cit., p.378.
|
