• U.S.

Art: Fish of the Heart

3 minute read
TIME

In Germany just before the outbreak of World War I, a promising young Swiss-born artist named Paul Klee threw over all the drawing lessons he had learned at Munich’s famed Akademie and took to making little childlike scrawls. Artist Klee was trying to capture on canvas the fleeting impressions of his own subconscious mind. To him and a few devoted admirers the childish, loony world of the subconscious was more interesting than the harsh, war-bound world outside.

Paul Klee’s artistic babbling and cooing was not unique. All over Europe artists had suddenly developed a subconscious itch. High priest of the cult was Viennese Psychologist Sigmund Freud, who had taken the human mind apart and discovered that a lot of its thinking was controlled by buried childhood memories. Surrealism was not yet fashionable. But writers like James Joyce and Gertrude Stein, “expressionist” painters like Max Ernst and Vassily Kandinsky were already scratching their nether brains, hypnotizing themselves into trances, trying to get their inchoate feelings into print and paint.

In this world of screwball art the most consistently screwy was Paul Klee’s. An absolute individualist, whose work resembled nobody else’s, Klee painted “animals of the soul, birds of the intellect, fish of the heart, plants of the dream.”

In 1920 Modernist Architect Walter Gropius invited Klee to teach drawing at his famous Bauhaus technical art school in Weimar. In the middle ’20s Parisian surrealists hailed him as a prophet. Frenchmen, usually supercilious toward German art, began collecting his infantile drawings. In 1931 Klee went on to be a professor at the Düsseldorf Academy. Meanwhile, U. S. modern-art connoisseurs bought his ectoplasmic scratchings at $750 a canvas.

Last week Manhattan’s Buchholz and Willard Galleries gathered together the largest Klee exhibition ever placed on view. The 100-odd drawings and canvases in the exhibition. ranged from mad, wire-worky diagrams to basket-textured abstractions. Some, like the Twittering Machine, had an odd, disembodied relation to mechanical objects. Some looked like primitive drawings by U. S. Indians. Many were painted on coarse burlap, resembled intricate tattered rugs and tablecloths. All had a look of quiet, pastel-shaded insanity. The show was posthumous: short, sharp-faced Artist Klee had died at his Swiss home four months before. It was also posthumous in another sense. To the red-cheeked, goose-stepping Nazis who after 1933 scrubbed individualism from Germany’s art galleries, Paul Klee had been the most degenerate of degenerate artists. Some day history will have to decide whether Hitler was right—about Artist Klee.

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