Mapping Klee

Klee and his friend Hermann Haller stayed in Italy for about seven months. They visited renowned cultural sites in Pisa, Rome, Naples, Pompei, and Florence. The Renaissance paintings impressed the budding artist. However, he considered their religious and mythological subject matter to be outdated, feeling that they lacked any connection to the issues of his own time.

Klee was more sympathetic to Renaissance architecture than painting. Its clearly organised structures were based on mathematical principles. Rhythm and proportion not only determined the structure, but were also made visible in the design of the façades.

For Klee, inner structure was the very essence of the buildings. Instead of depicting the surface, the new task of art could be to make elementary order and underlying structure visible.

Nevertheless, Klee was only able to find suitable forms of artistic expression for this knowledge years later. In the drawing “Santa A. in B.” he attempted to capture the order of a city panorama using a basic abstract structure that connected individual elements.

Klee discovered the principles of fundamental structure not only in architecture, but also in nature itself. On March 23, 1902, he arrived in Naples. There, he visited the public aquarium Stazione Zoologica di Napoli, which had been founded by the German zoologist Anton Dohrn in 1872 in order to promote marine research, and which still exists today. For Klee, the underwater world was to become the epitome of both the origins and diversity of life.

The drawing on the front cover of the guide to the aquarium depicts the diversity of the underwater world including snails, crabs, octopuses, and fishes. Years later, Klee further developed this experience in his art, in a depiction of an aquarium. Fish and human faces can hardly be distinguished from each other.

Like many modern artists, Klee was seeking forms of expression for the elementary, the “building blocks of life.” His objective was not a depiction of nature – as he had learned at the academy – but to, just like nature, create something new himself. He found inspiration for his search for universal principles in nature in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

After more than six months in Italy, Klee retreated to his hometown of Bern, once again living in his parents’ house for four years. He attempted, teaching himself, to continue his studies and was now also studying anatomy – the basic internal structure of the human body.

Following his marriage to Lily Stumpf, Klee returned to Munich in 1906. At the time, the city enjoyed the reputation of being a capital of the arts. Important artists like Gabriele Münter, Marianne von Werefkin, Alfred Kubin, and Alexej von Jawlensky who were based there were seeking new directions beyond academic art.

In 1911 Klee became acquainted with the Blaue Reiter’s two spokesmen, Franz Marc and Wassily Kandinsky, and thus became part of the Munich art scene. At the same time, he encountered works by French avant-garde artists in galleries in Munich.

For centuries, Rome had been the capital of the arts. At the beginning of the 20th century, artists from all over Europe began making the pilgrimage to Paris. The French metropolis became the hub for an international avant-garde. A network of artists and gallery owners created a nurturing environment for the emergence of new movements in Modern Art, which were presented in striking exhibitions.

In his diary, Klee recorded the places he visited on his journey, including a trip on the Seine as well as visits to the Louvre, Notre Dame and various galleries. Bernheim-Jeune was one of the first galleries to exhibit and sell Modern Art. There, Klee was able to see works by Henri Matisse.

Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler opened his first gallery in Paris in 1907 and became the most important dealer in Modern Art. Klee saw paintings by André Derain, Pablo Picasso, and Maurice de Vlaminck in Kahnweiler’s “store.”

Advances in Modern Art generated a dynamic momentum: Der Blaue Reiter, Futurism, Expressionism, Fauvism … The era of “isms” had begun. New art movements were emerging everywhere. In Paris at the time, this was mainly in the form of Cubism. Visiting galleries, Klee was able to encounter the works of Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso. On Kandinsky’s recommendation, Klee visited Henri Le Fauconnier and Robert Delaunay in their studios.

The Cubist paintings that Klee saw in Paris were a radical attempt to no longer think of the image in terms of the object to be represented, but to employ formal compositional elements in creating new spatial dynamics.

Klee was fascinated by the construction of the pictorial space, which was no longer bound to central perspective. He nevertheless remained critical of the extreme fragmentation of objects and figures. In addition, all this posed a crucial question for painting: is it still necessary to depict an object in painting?

On April 11, 1912, Paul Klee visited Robert Delaunay in his Paris studio, where he saw the latter’s window paintings, in which he was further advancing Cubism. In abstract fields of colour, Delaunay captured the view of the city through his window. He was attempting to represent the spectral composition of light through his use of colour.

Delaunay worked using exclusively colour and reductive forms. Klee valued such abstract colour field compositions more than purely Cubist works, which he considered inconsistent in their representation of objects.

Paul Klee was indebted to both Delaunay’s work and theories in his new approach to colour, light, and abstraction. It was, nevertheless, only later that he succeeded in translating impressions of city and light into non-representational imagery distinguished by great dynamism.

In 1914 Klee travelled with the painters Louis Moilliet and August Macke to Tunisia. They spent two weeks on the usual tourist trails – from Tunis via St. Germain and Hammamet to Kairouan. Moilliet had already been to Tunisia in both 1908 and 1909 and assumed the role of travel guide.

In contrast to his friends, Louis Moilliet painted only three watercolours during this period. Macke reported, after only a few days, that he felt a joy in working that he had never experienced before. He was an excellent watercolourist depicting street scenes in vivid, luminous colours. Klee was, during this period, still very tentative in using colour.

Klee recognised abstract structures in the geometric simplicity of the buildings. What he had already suspected 13 years earlier in Italy became a certainty here. He identified parallels between urban architecture and pictorial composition, that is, the structure of abstract composition. Klee ended the journey prematurely so that he could immediately put his new findings into practice in his Munich studio.

In North Africa, Klee arrived at the essence of his visual language, which he would continue to work on until the end of his life: abstract structures and grids cover the pictorial surface, while memories of figurative objects make repeated appearances.

For Klee, abstraction is not the opposite of figuration. In contrast to the most significant art movements of the time, he developed a style that combined both representational and abstract elements.

Klee was at the height of his career. The appointment to the Bauhaus not only meant material security for the artist, but it also contributed to him being regarded as one of the most important artists of his time.

The institution and its international artists became a nucleus of modern art and architecture, where fundamental questions of design were debated: to what extent can the interplay of colour, form, and structure be redefined to express the demands of modern life?

But despite all his enthusiasm for such an aesthetic exchange – the regimentation of teaching and the abundance of related tasks were also a great burden for Klee. He felt both fatigued and restricted. Klee’s artistic endeavours came off badly besides the time-consuming teaching duties.

He was able to relax on vacations in the south. In 1927 he stayed on the island of Porquerolles in the south of France. He drew only a little, above all enjoying the warm climate and good food.

During vacations at the Mediterranean, Klee observed the sailing ships on the water. Around 1927 they more often found their way into Klee’s own pictorial world. The motif fascinated him. In such paintings, contrasting angular and curved shapes confront each other. At the same time, lines and forms create an impression of the slightly rocking movement of the ships.

Klee recognised in the sailing ships the ideal motif to represent his notions of movement and rhythm. It is no coincidence that the patterns in the drawings could also be interpreted as the movements of a baton.

From December 17, 1928, until January 17, 1929, Klee travelled Egypt: to Cairo, Alexandria, and the more southerly destinations of Luxor, Karnak, and Aswan. Klee compared his impressions to those of his first journey to the Orient, experiencing the mosques in Cairo as too kitsch and baroque.

The onward journey to southern Egypt, however, began to reconcile him with the initial culture shock of Cairo. He started to become more accustomed and, in Luxor, Karnak, and Aswan, began to appreciate the African, which he described as “Nubian”, in people.

Klee perceived a rhythm in the landscape around the Nile, which he incorporated into his painting. The pictorial space was structured in horizontal layers, which he based around a simple numerical rhythm: the areas were divided into 2, 4, 8, or 16 elements, a device enabling him to represent musical rhythm pictorially.

Klee had been experimenting with letters and numbers as early as during the First World War. Inspired by Arabic characters, Egyptian hieroglyphics, and prehistoric drawings incised in stone, he developed his own characters and symbols in his late work.

The line held special significance for Klee, as mediator between visible and invisible worlds. He rendered people, animals, and plants into reductive strokes. Until his death in 1940, the line remained the central artistic element in his work.

Using the stroke, he created timeless universal symbols understandable to everybody, regardless of their cultural background or age. Those symbols inspire while leaving room for individual interpretations.

A point starts to move without a specific destination and in doing so forms a line – it was this phenomenon that Klee was interested in. Movement and process were more important to Klee than the result, which remained open until the end. It is precisely such openness that makes his art so relevant today, so interesting and unique. Klee indicates a path without specifying the destination.

Klee presented a striking role model for many post-war artists attempting to break away from the “isms” of Modern Art. He demonstrated ways in which momentums in culture and the natural sciences could be translated into an individual pictorial language – not as a style, but as an attitude.