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Book Review: Feats of Klee

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Since art brings into being, albeit only through what is termed the visible, a cosmic awareness of reality, there is no moment or aspect of being which can be considered foreign or irrelevant to the experience which is acquired in artistic creation. [p.11]

Klee fully embraced this relationship with Being. His work deconstructs, re-aligns, does stuff that Picasso succeeds with in his cubist dimensions but brings what he knows from music and its mathematical roots.

The left-handed Klee (an orientation often "corrected") was encouraged to remain that way by his grandmother, with whom he lived for a while as a toddler, and who was the first to see his lefty childish doodles as potential gifts from God in the making. Klee had an arch view of the world even then, drawing clocks with all the numbers scrunched up on one side or stick figures that had attitude. Maybe the best example of his twistful thinking during the early years was his "Girl with Doll" (1905) [below] whose energy erupts from below. In this reverse-glass drawing, the authors tell us, "Klee shows children not as ideals of bourgeois propriety but as small untamed beasts." Damn, reminds me of what one of the Google execs said to Julian Assange when they visited under house arrest at the beginning of his now 10-year ordeal at the hands of the State.

Klee's musical training and instincts drew him to Bach's fugues and the sense of cascading being, frames of reference pouring out of itself, like clones slightly varied, or replicants, or viruses. The "Fugue in Red" above is one example among many that depict this sense of released energy, if you can only crack the surface with a good whack of reverse engineering logic and perception. His work with concentricity and flow, color and shade, led probably quite naturally to what he came to refer to as "perspectival distortions." Even before we've looked at an example of Klee's work in this area, most of us can "see" such distortion when we look at an image that has color separation corrected by wearing 3D glasses. Maybe that's what Klee expects with his watercolor, "Dream City" (1921), a synthesizing gaze from the viewer.

Jeff Dube's relief of 'Dream City' by Paul Klee
Jeff Dube's relief of 'Dream City' by Paul Klee
(Image by umseas from flickr)
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A representation of Paul Klee, "Dream City" (1921)

Klee's play with lines and mechanics and expressionism and surrealism seem to come together in his famous early avant garde watercolor, "The Twittering Machine" (1922). One thinks Duchamp, Picasso, mechanical design. The work comes from his period at the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany. Looking to support a wife, Lily, and the time and space required to pursue his art, Klee accepted an offer to teach at the Bauhaus. Though he worried that teaching would take time away from his real work, he longed, as artists do, for the economic and domestic stability that would make his pursuit sustainable (many an English teacher has gone into the profession believing it would buy them time to be a writer, LOL). It worked out well for Klee though, as it helped him delve into theory, which went into his teaching and resulted in the aforementioned 'genius' notebook, The Thinking Eye.

Die Zwitscher-Maschine %28Twittering Machine%29.
Die Zwitscher-Maschine %28Twittering Machine%29.
(Image by Wikipedia (commons.wikimedia.org), Author: Author Not Given)
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Paul Klee, "The Twittering Machine" (1922)

And Klee took the teaching seriously, even if it wasn't his first passion. The authors tells us that

Characteristic of Klee's teaching was its grounding within a cosmic, holistic system and its connection to considerations of worldview, science, and philosophy. Also typical was the fact that Klee was never dogmatic, but instead sought to foster independent judgment on the part of the students.

That's probably the first thing anyone would say about Klee's work: "There's a wholesomeness under that surreality that wants to jump from the pot onto your sipping spoon. Soupà §on!" Ja?

But, what's more, the authors invite us to believe that students were wont to see Klee as almost a Zen master, at time, in his standing deliveries:

One of his lessons was entitled "Drawing from Leaves after Nature with Consideration of the Articulating Energies of the Veins." Klee's students consistently described his teaching as factual and thorough, but also as "a work of art in itself."

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John Kendall Hawkins is an American ex-pat freelance journalist and poet currently residing in Oceania.

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