Inward Perspectives

By ROBERT HUGHES

He was a monkish illuminator on the brain's vellum, a contemplative who shunned the world of action and became one of the very few 20th century painters who could work small without implying some degree of frustration. Paul Klee's natural space was a scrap of paper ten inches wide, and all its perspectives faced inward. "I have never," said his friend Jankel Adler, "seen a man who had such creative quiet. His face was that of a man who knows about day and night, sky and sea and air. I have often seen Klee's window from the street, with his pale oval face like a large egg, and his open eyes pressed to the windowpane." Yet his output was huge. Between Klee's birth in 1879 and his death from a wasting disease in a Swiss sanatorium 60 years later, he produced over 9,000 works. Perhaps one could no more put on a "definitive" Klee show than fix the shape of a swarm of bees. But the one at the Haus der Kunst in Munich has made a valiant attempt, mustering 537 paintings, sculptures, drawings and prints to memorialize the 30th anniversary of his death.

Tidy Man. There are no novels about Klee, as there are about Gauguin, Modigliani and Picasso. For nothing ever happened to him. Even when the Nazis in 1933 began their suppression of cultural freedom in Germany, where Klee had been teaching for twelve years, he quietly moved back to Switzerland for refuge without fuss or rancor. Politics did not interest him, and his life-style scarcely changed. With his tabby cats, his violin, and his watercolors hung out to dry like dish towels on a clothesline in his studio, Klee had always seemed like the Caspar Milquetoast of the avantgarde. From boyhood, he had managed to ignore or bypass every emotional crisis that might have distracted him from his art. He shrugged off the end of one love affair with Teutonic priggishness. "Since only a few weak poems in the popular vein remained of that adventure," the young artist noted in his diary in 1901, "I was once again completely available for the higher sort of love." He found it a few years later in Lily Stumpf, a pianist of irreproachable virtue, married her, and never looked back.

It may be an exaggeration, but not much of one, to say that Klee's development was a long struggle to transcend his innate tepidity. But the transcendence became real, and through it Klee reached a pitch of self-awareness such as few modern artists have achieved. "What my art probably lacks," he wrote, "is a kind of passionate humanity. I don't love animals and every sort of creature with an earthly warmth. I don't descend to them or raise them to myself. Do I radiate warmth? Coolness? There is no talk of such things when you have got beyond white heat. There is no sensuous relationship, not even the noblest, between myself and the many."

That was indeed the crux of Klee's art. His work sprang from a peculiarly aseptic meditative center, neither "emotional" nor "intellectual," but simply withdrawn. His reputation as a great teacher seems to rest more on his published theories in the Pedagogical Sketchbook than on the results he got from his pupils. Though he was one of the ornaments of the Bauhaus during his years in Germany, working there did not affect his style, nor did his idiosyncratic style affect the Bauhaus theorists. It was just another monastery to him.

Maker of Ideograms. What made him so influential was the look of his paintings, their sign language and visual shorthand. His imagination was fenced with ironies and ambiguities. The grand manner had no place in it. An early etching, Hero with a Wing, 1905, is typical. It belongs to the sardonic world of absurd theater--a parody of a classical statue, failed Icarus with a broken arm and a wooden leg, brandishing his one frayed wing like a plucked and grumpy rooster. Other artists of Klee's time, a Bonnard or a Matisse, could and did summon up with a few brush strokes a whole universe of specific experiences--the golden, fuzzy weight of a peach, the glaze of china, the density and pink warmth of an odalisque's leg. Klee was not interested; he abstracted, and made ideograms. Botanical Theater, 1924-34, is aptly named, for the ceremonious dance of leaf and bloom, formal as an Islamic tile, stands to real plants as puppets do to real people. Yet the plants are alive, and their vitality is in the probing, inquisitive line that flowed from Klee's pen. He was an astounding draftsman, one of the virtuosos of the century. Whether tracing into cubist patterns the squares and towers of a Renaissance town (Italian City, 1928), or making a gay arabesque out of the contents of a moon-washed room (Still-Life: Plant and Window, 1927) or simply, in Klee's words, taking a walk by itself, the line fizzes with exuberance.

Syntax of Fantasy. What connects Klee's inner vision to present experience is not his power to transmit "reality" but the enchanting spectacle of his language. His inventiveness was phenomenal and contained surprising propositions for, and anticipations of the future. Flower Myth, 1918--with its squiggled symbols for plants and trees and chirpy bird flying across the red landscape of an equivocal torso that might be Mother Earth--is the ancestor of the flattened, wrinkled landscape-nudes, scrawled with graffiti, that Jean Dubuffet was to paint thirty years later. It is a syntax of fantasy, the color swelling and glowing, all heaviness gone. There was probably never an artist with less fearsomeness than Klee; his conventional signs for sun, tree, body or fish are so unpretentious, epigrammatic and neat that one accepts them at once--it seems churlish not to. But he was not a mysterious artist, and the pathos of his last paintings, like The Angel of Death, 1940, is really a failed sense of foreboding--failed, because his signs could hardly accommodate real fear. The crusty paint on ragged burlap, the blurred and bulbous shapes, can only be made to look tragic within the context of Klee's earlier dexterities.

Klee may have been the last painter who felt that he could construct a universe--not just some parts of it--in his own head, in complete microscopic detail. It was not life at large, but a doll's theater of life, that played out its tiny and absorbing dramas within the frames of his paintings. He may not have been a major artist. But he was a stunningly complete one.

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