Paul Klee: A Traveler Possessed by Light

Southern Coast in the Evening, 1925

Part of the game of art nowadays is for artists, whatever their influences and orientation, to avoid classification. Once this happens a kind of rigor mortis sets in as they are comfortably pigeon-holed, potted, or packaged, and, like a muzaked Beatles tune, become something of a well-worn cultural cliché.

This merciless process has put something of a plastic patina on most of the great dead artists, but one who seems to have largely escaped this process is Paul Klee (1879-1940), whose work remains as hard to pin down now as it was when first painted more than 60 years ago. "Paul Klee and his Travels," a major touring exhibition that recently opened at MOMA Kamakura, is also due to visit Morioka, Tsu, and Matsumoto in the coming months, reinforcing his considerable popularity in Japan.

The 170 works on display tease us with touches of cubism, primitivism, surrealism, and children's art, tempting us to lump him in with any of the various artistic movements of the early 20th century with which he collaborated, such as the Blue Rider expressionist group or the Bauhaus movement, but the truth is that Klee was perhaps the most personal of the great painters of the 20th century.

It is this sense of intimacy that chief curator, Toshio Yamanashi, informs me is the key to his particular appeal in Japan. "Klee also has a special appeal here because his work was introduced very early," he adds. "Not only painters but also Japanese writers and poets were influenced by him." He cites the Japanese novelist, Junnosuke Yoshiyuki, whose 1963 novel, Vegetable Kingdom on the Sand, was inspired by an eponymous Klee work, as well as the poet, Shuntaro Tanigawa, whose books are typically illustrated with Klee pictures.

Klee's images may work as visual BGM for someone else's poems; and children's book illustrators have possibly mined out the seam of charming naivete he explored in works like Southern Coast in the Evening (1925) and Fishes in Circles (1926). Klee's paintings, however, still manage to exist on their own terms, perhaps because they continue to reverberate with the painter's own deep psychology of creation.

The Japanese artist and eccentric Taro Okamoto once famously said that art was an explosion. While this is true of a great part of 20th century art from Picasso to the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock, Klee represents a more introverted aesthetic whereby images are deeply processed inside the artist's mind.

The travel theme of the exhibition is particularly useful in giving us insight into how he created his art. His trips to Tunisia and Egypt had a major effect on him. His early works were mainly pen-and-ink drawings or etchings like the grotesque satire, Winged Hero (1905), but in 1914 when he visited Tunisia, he was immediately struck by the intense light and color: "Color has taken possession of me," he wrote at the time. "No longer do I have to chase after it, I know that it has a hold of me forever."

But this sudden revelation didn't lead to an outpouring of local scenes as with William Turner's famous visit to Italy almost a century before. Although making some sketches and studies like his geometric Study of an Aged Dromedary (1914), Klee's impressions typically took longer to emerge in his work. Perhaps inspired by the block-shaped buildings of North African cities he started using compositions of colored squares and other simple shapes, as seen in his radiant Small Vignette to Egypt (1918), a country he finally visited in 1928.

Also influential were his frequent trips to Italy where he was particularly struck by Byzantine mosaics. The accumulated impact of these impressions can be marked in such works as the luminous Cathedral (1932), but this is no mere travel snapshot, but a work that has completed its own voyage through Klee's psyche, reflecting his declared view that "Art does not reproduce the visible, it makes the visible."

Although other artists, like his contemporary and close friend Wassily Kandinsky, moved completely away from figurative art towards the abstract, Klee retained identifiable motifs. This has worked to his benefit by making his works more accessible, but the focus of his painting was seldom on the motif, but rather in the process or the elements of making a painting, such as line or color. In Catastrophe of the Sphinx (1937), the great icon of the ages is a victim of this approach as Klee's sensuous love of line turns it into an oddly affecting caricature. In works like this we can almost feel the hand of the artist painting as we watch. It is this quality which has helped Klee to, so far, escape the noose of art history.

C.B.Liddell
The Japan Times
23rd Feb 2002