BEAT ARTIST: Klee's Kettledrummer (1940) is an enigmatic figure who seems to pound a mournful dirge
Yet after a brief period in which he was almost unable to work, the 57-year-old artist suddenly triumphed over malady and melancholy. Between 1937 and his death in 1940 — and between bouts of illness — he produced hundreds of paintings and drawings, including some of the most dramatic and luminous works of his career.
Paul Klee, Fulfillment in the Late Work, at Basel's Beyeler Foundation (through Nov. 9, then moving to Hanover) documents those last four years. This superb exhibit sums up the artist's lifelong research into line, color and form, and displays his often mystic face-off with fear, death and the unknown. Even the exhibit's 121 paintings and drawings — assembled from museums and private collections in Europe and the U.S. — represent only a minuscule portion of Klee's prodigious output in his final years. His meticulous studio register records 148 works for 1935, and only 25 for 1936, the first year of his illness; in 1937 there were 264, the next year 489, and the following year an astonishing 1,253. "I can hardly keep up with these children of mine," he wrote in December 1939. "They run away with me."
Almost a decade earlier, Klee had accepted the Düsseldorf job with great expectations, happy to be free of the dissension breaking up the Bauhaus, the influential German Arts and Crafts school, where he had been a professor and artist-in-residence. The Basel show opens with a prologue from those brighter days, including the miraculous gem Ad Marginem, reminiscent of a medieval miniature, with a fiery red sphere aglow on a pale green ground, surrounded by feathery plants and fairy-tale creatures that seem to grow out from all four sides of the frame. Steamboat and Sailboats, Toward Evening and the abstract Polyphony are exercises in Klee's dreamlike version of pointillism, with light and shadow played out in multicolored dots.
But 1933 brings an abrupt, definitive change in subject matter and style. The pale, thickly painted watercolor-and- plaster Head of a Martyr fills its small frame with downcast eyes and a battered, gap-toothed mouth. The circular face of Marked Man (1935), painted in scratchy russets and browns, is a target scarred with black crosshairs. In 1936, Klee returned to his Bauhaus preoccupation with constructing colored forms, but with a more foreboding turn: In the small The Gate to the Depth, blocks of distressed color lead to a central black void.
By 1937, Klee's late style had evolved into patterns of heavy black lines and hieroglyphs on vivid colored grounds. Sometimes the lines form discernible figures, as in the sexy Forest Witches, or the powerful Kettledrummer, with one stick-like arm raised high, the other down, as if beating the slow, ceremonial dirge of a funeral march. In the big Rich Harbor only a few identifiable objects — steamboats, an ace of spades — can be identified amid a welter of enigmatic markings.
Meanwhile Klee also expanded his experiments with an astonishing variety of materials, achieving exceptional nuances of texture, translucence and sheen. In addition to oil and watercolor, he worked with chalk, charcoal, pastels, colored pencils, wax color, tempera, varnishes, gypsum, poster paints and colored paste. He used them, in varying combinations and often in several layers, on coarse paper, parchment, newsprint, cotton, linen, gauze, burlap, cardboard, plaster and plywood. Ever the master colorist, he conjured up an eerie, otherworldly radiance, as in Masks at Twilight, by combining black, milky blue and muddy reddish-brown. The spellbinding A Gate shimmers with silvery moonlight, created with white and gray tempera washes on black-painted paper.
Despite the gravity of his condition, Klee never lost his magical powers of enchantment or playful sense of humor. In Bacchanale With Red Wine, unsteady hieroglyphs seem woozily afloat on their grape-purple burlap background. In Animals Meet, the body of a cat with a long, thick tail also forms an elephant heading in the opposite direction. A horizontal black brush stroke with two pairs of stick legs turns out to be A Canoe Walking Across Country.
There's more than a little humor in Klee's angels too. About 35 of the late works, mostly pencil drawings, are devoted to his unique celestial hierarchy. His are not stereotypic seraphim but more fragile, bemusing creatures who weep and clap for joy. According to art historian Werner Haftmann, Klee was long bedeviled by a childlike couplet of his own invention that kept running through his head: Einst werd ich liegen im Nirgend, bei einem Engel irgend, a rhyming play on words which roughly translates as, "One of these days I shall lie in nothingness, beside an angel of some kind."
Indeed, there is so much visual wordplay going on in Klee's pictorial poetry that the show almost demands a detective-like second tour. Can you discover the hidden word TOD (death) in Death and Fire? Or decode the mysteries of three of the works left untitled in the artist's studio when he died? In the corner of one, an atypical jewel-colored still life, there is a smiling angel of the most welcoming kind. For a man whose last years were plagued by persecution and disease, it is a final note of grace and hope.