Zentrum Paul Klee EN

At the time around 1919, after his experiences in the 1st World War and his first successes in the art market, Paul Klee took up the theme of personal awareness and self-reflection in numerous self-portraits. The best known of these is the pencil drawing «Absorbtion». Klee’s theme here was less the reflection on the role of the artist and more a self depiction of an inwardly looking meditator. The artist no longer looks outwards but looks within himself. The eyes are tight shut, the ears are missing. No external disturbances and influences can distract him from his meditation. This drawing he also transformed into a lithograph, printing it in large numbers. The prints were partly coloured by hand. In 1919 Paul Klee had the lithographic version of «Absorbtion» published in the Munich Folios for Poetry and Graphics and thus presented himself as an ascetic mystic. This image was imposed upon himself and stated by him in the preface of his first biography «At this moment I am not tangible …».

You would not want to meet Paul Klee’s "hungry girl" from 1939 in a dark alley at night. It shows a girl as a tooth-baring beast with glaring eyes. Nothing remains of a human being, let alone a sweet little girl. Its whole appearance is animal-like, even down to the little lines that Klee uses for the depiction of the pupils. Particularly in his late work Klee devoted himself extensively to everything human. He was especially interested in the very different characteristics, desires and instincts from childhood to old age. In this representation, for example, Klee is not showing an unusually ugly girl. The girl only becomes an ugly, animal creature because she is hungry. Nothing can calm the girl except the satisfaction of that desire. Klee is giving expression to the hidden psyche.He painted this picture in his favourite technique from the last years of his work: coloured paste. He produced his own paste and mixed it with pigment. In the "hungry girl" Klee uses only a small amount of pigment. As a result the paint remains transparent to a certain extent, and fine blisters are produced, which are still visible today. He restricts himself to the colours blue, red, green and black, applied flatly in strong brushstrokes. The under-drawing remains visible through the transparency of the paint. At some points in the lower part of the painting and teeth, Klee uses the white of the paper as a compositional device. It is clearly apparent that in the finished version Klee did not stick completely to the model of the under-drawing. Another pair of eyes and nostrils on the left are clearly visible next to the finished left eye. Beside the right eye an ear has also been drawn, which Klee also abandons.

The doll with purple ribbons appears strange. The androgynous mixed being seems to float in space as though directed by an invisible hand. For the first time in Klees work a humanlike figure is shown as a marionette, a motive which in his later work gained great importance. The doll behaves according to her own rules of play. Completely weightless she floats between the violet ribbons. The feet no longer function and since she no longer has any use for them, in their place two hands have grown. Glass painting was widely spread in central Europe from the sixteenth century; Votive paintings, biblical displays and peasant scenes were produced in their thousands as a winter occupation for large farming families and bought by peddlers. Klee bought several pictures at the Auer Dult market in Munich. Also Franz Marc and Wassily Kandinski were preoccupied with this technique, although unlike Klee not for the sculptural experimental characters, but more for the study of peasant traditions. From Klee there are 64 glass paintings known today. These actually pose a conservational challenge since their colour layers stick very badly to the smooth glass surface.

Like Picasso, Klee was also seeking for simple, modern means of expression. But unlike Picasso, who was impressed by the magical charm of «primitive» sculpture, Klee discovered the original sources of art in his own childrens drawings. Initially he approached a reduction of form cautiously. In later years he developed an intentional naivety into his specific form of expression. In the water colour «Puppet theatre» the theatre becomes the imaginary stage of childhood. The sheet hides depths which are unexpected at first sight: The stripe-like structured brightly coloured figures stand out from the dark background like a shining negative but still remain as if written on. The puppet on the floor seems to have been left unnoticed, the small unicorn on the right, steps stubbornly forward. The duplicity of the picture’s message is in accord with the technical process of the painting: It is made up of two individual parts and Paul Klee touched up the gap with black water colour. The lower part is the fragment of the sheet «Still life {{with the Dice.}}», which Klee registered in his Work Catalogue under the next number 1923, 22. Seen in this way, the Puppet Theatre becomes a stage with a double floor and a vegetative «Underworld».

Paul Klee only rarely took an interest in perspectival constructions of spaces, architectures and places. Very early in his work, rather than traditional central perspective, he opted for free methods of construction which were inspired above all by Cubist ideas of composition, but which also took them further. Another source of inspiration lies in the metaphysical squares and architectures of the Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico. De Chirico’s works from the 1910s, with their empty, dream-like squares and rooms, had a great influence on a wide range of artists, particularly the Surrealists. In «Room Perspective with Inhabitants» the relationship with de Chirico’s works is clearly apparent. Klee constructs the view into a room in a simple way. It shows a few cubical pieces of furniture and the inhabitants. Klee «builds» the inhabitants into the perspective: three figures seem to lie on the floor, three more stick to the right-hand wall. They are not depicted as three-dimensional bodies, but as constructions of flat forms. They thus contradict the three-dimensionality of the perspectival construction by being simply flat. A pencil drawing and a 1921 version of the «Room perspective» have been preserved. A similar colour composition entitled «Room Perspective with Dark Door» was produced a short time before. Klee transferred the colour version to the picture support using an oil transfer. For that reason the pencil drawing reveals scoring marks that can be produced when scoring with a sharp object. Four years later Klee reworked both «Room Perspectives» and renamed them «The Other Ghost Chamber» and «Ghost Chamber with the High Door». Accordingly the two-dimensional human figures became ghosts from another realm.

Depictions of nature appear in Paul Klee’s work from his earliest drawings in the sketchbooks of his youth to the last year of his life. Nature, growth and plants in general are a core theme in Klee’s thought and artistic work. In his 1925 essay «Ways of Studying Nature» Klee sums up his thoughts about nature: «For the artist, dialogue with nature remains an indispensable condition. The artist is a man, himself nature and part of nature in natural space.» Accordingly, for Klee, engagement with nature is a foundation of all artistic creation. Nature and its phenomena are not only elementary as subjects in Klee’s work, but go much deeper into his artistic thought. Nature or parts of nature, as well as its growth and structuring, serve as models for his compositions. Just as a seed becomes first a stem, then leaves and a flower, so the movement of a point becomes a line and finally a form. In his essay Klee writes: «The object grows beyond its appearance through our knowledge of its inner being, through the knowledge that the thing is more than its outward aspect suggests.» According to Klee the inside of an object defines its outward form.Essential thoughts of this kind flow into Klee’s work. Here in Cosmic flora from 1923, however, he is varying the theme freely, openly and in a many-faceted way. He paints a kind of garden with different flower-beds which have been overgrown in the lower part of the picture with curious plants. They look like carnivorous plants, and are entirely reduced to stem and flower. The upper part of the watercolour is even more abstract. Geometrical forms and signs predominate here, and only a few plants are discernible. The plants are «botanical actors» on a garden stage. Klee has made the picture with various different kinds of cross-hatching, in elaborately detailed close work.As he notes on the cardboard, Klee gave this work to his wife in October 1928, and at the same time assigned it to the special class.

Paul Klee drew this «Forgetful angel» in 1939 with very few pencil lines. It is one of over 35 depictions of angels from the last years of the artist’s life and work. In their appearance they correspond entirely to our traditional ideas of gentle, winged creatures, even though Klee reduces the wings to shapes narrowing to points and also sometimes makes the creatures ugly. But Klee’s angels are not figures of light or heavenly Christian creatures like those known to art history for hundreds if not thousands of years. His angels are rather more with us than in a heavenly sphere, somewhere in an intermediate world. They have become human and Klee tends to use them to refer to all the human moods, characteristics and qualities. Klee addresses our good sides every bit as much as our shortcomings. Often the angels have something childish and innocent about them, they are not quite complete or are still in training. Klee does not resolve the question of where that training and development might lead. In his «Compositional Theory» Klee says at one point: «Man is not complete. One must continue to develop, be open, be an elevated child in life too, a child of creation, of the creator.»The «Forgetful angel» is one of the most expressive and magical angels in Klee’s work. He draws the angel’s face with three lines: its eyes, closed or downcast, and its small mouth. Klee needs nothing more to give the angel a gentle, tender expression. Its hands are folded, as if it were rubbing them together slightly embarrassed.

This large-format drawing on packing paper is one of the last works that Paul Klee produced. Klee’s health deteriorated in early 1940. In May he went for a spa cure in Ascona, from which he did not return. Some of his works remained incomplete, or at least untitled and unnumbered, in his studio. The work posthumously entitled «Composition with Fruits» is one of these. With brush and a mixture of pigment and glue Klee draws a chaotic collection of shapes that look like fruits – apples, cherries – and also leaves, twigs, plants or seeds. At the bottom and both the left and right edges of the picture the shapes are outlined in white chalk. Below this there is a structure of lines in reddish-brown, which holds the whole composition together. And below that we see a further level with a confusion of lines. Klee had been interested in creating a composition by overlaying several different strata since the 1920s. This gives his works a complexity in spite of the simplicity of their choice of motifs, and at the same time Klee was able to combine the representational with the abstract, the linear with the planar, drawing and painting. At the end of his life Klee turned to themes of nature, which he related to his life: origin and birth, growth and change, maturity and death. The fruits and plants depicted here embody these ideas. They are signs of nature’s apparently eternal cycle of evolution and decay. In view of his illness, and perhaps his approaching death, Klee recalls his childhood and his life and already looks forward to the afterlife. In the top middle of the picture Klee writes in pencil: «Should all then be known? oh, I don’t think so!» At the end of his life Klee reached the conclusion that the first and last questions of existence with which he had engaged so often could be left unanswered.

In 1938, two years before his death, Klee worked intensively with writing, characters and generally sign-like pictorial elements. He produced several works with the title «Alphabet», in which a pile of letters is scattered apparently at random over the picture surface. Klee even painted one of the alphabet paintings on newspaper. In «Beginning of a poem» Klee again distributes letters over the picture space. Towards the lower edge of the picture they seem to be more crowded, and more loosely distributed towards the top. Most of them are consonants. With five numbers Klee identifies words at the edge of the forest of letters. Read in sequence they produce the phrase: «Then begin it secretly.» Together with the title of the work, «Beginning of a Poem», Klee seems to be putting precisely this beginning of a poem in front of our eyes. The rest of the text of the poem is still hidden in the forest of letters, it is yet to be shaped. The phrase «Then begin it secretly» refers to Johann Sebastian Bach’s aria «Would you share your heart with me», the first verse of which reads as follows:Would you share your heart with meThen begin it secretlySo that none can guessOur thoughts.Our love must alwaysBe discreet,So close your greatest joysWithin your heart.Alongside the numbered words and among them several shapes emerge, as if Klee did not only want to show the act of making a poem, but as if a picture, a landscape perhaps, could be depicted at its beginning in exactly the same way. Once again Klee places the artist’s act of creation in relation with growth and change in nature. In the 1920 essay «Creative Confession» Klee writes: «The genesis of writing is a very good analogy for movement. The art-work too is primarily a genesis, it is never experienced as a product.» And in his Bauhaus teaching notes he says: «Writing and image, that is writing and image-making are one at root.» This adds a further level: on the one hand Klee shows a poem coming into being, and apparently growing like a plant. At the same time, during the evolution of the poem an image is formed, image and writing have become one.

This picture is the largest painting Paul Klee ever completed with the remarkable length of 176 cms. As is typical for this period Klee used newspaper which he glued onto jute. With colour paste he painted thick black stripes directly onto the paper. Only afterwards did he apply the white grounding and painted the background of pastel colours with colour paste. Also typical for the late works, the basic structure is defined by massive broad beam-like shapes. Nevertheless these still allow enough space for the different bright colour shades to assert their independent pictorial accents. The partly optically shortened figure-like elements, partially appearing like signs of a secret writing in their graphic black forms, generate a conspicuous relationship to the coloured areas. These pictorial signs are characteristic of Klee’s late works. The influence of scripts, hieroglyphics and symbols is recognisable, the signs appearing as Klee said himself, automatically, without reflection and without bearing any particular meaning. The signs were a new and now frequently used possibility for the formal structuring of the painting. Partially they remain rudimentary, abstract shapes or else they are grouped into the outlines of figures. The original title of the painting «Island of Kalypso» appears at first glance to indicate a thematisation of Odysseus’ stay on the island of the nymph Kalypso. During the work process Klee expanded the reference to the Greek mythological content to a more open visual statement leading to the recognition of personal factors and an interpretation of his difficult situation in the painting. Certainly the painting can and must be seen as also autobiografic, although it must not be forgetten that Klee made no statement on the content of the picture.The centre of the picture is dominated by a black contoured faded face. In numerous drawings and paintings Klee was involved with faces and masks – rather as a reflection on his present situation. Klee was aware that his death was approaching but worked only with indirect suggestion and not in autobiografical images. The picture awakens exotic associations and points toward the opposites of sweet and bitter. The gentle colourfulness and the white scull-like face underline this. Klee is also making a reference to medicine. Solanum dulcamara is the Latin name for the highly poisonous deadly nightshade plant Bittersweet, used as an anti-inflammatory herbal cure and for rheumatic symptoms. It is possible that it also brought relief for Klee’s illness, Sclerodermie. The scarlet red fruits in the picture and the few brown leaves directly indicate Bittersweet in its ripe condition.

The picture «la belle jardinière», also known as «a bourgeois ghost», is a staging of surreal amusement. The schematic figure made up of red and blue lines, ironically titled by Paul Klee, the beautiful gardener in crinoline, holds in her raised left hand a bunch of flowers.The bourgeois ghost appears as a magic shining phantom, which avoids every attempt at interpretation. The lines, which give the ghost its form, appear like fluorescent red and blue light tubes, whose coloured light shines on the brownish ground. The brown background is completely structured with lively drawings, amongst them stencil drawings.Klee achieved with the contrast of the full, intensely coloured lines of the «belle jardinière» and the brightly coloured background, a pronounced spatial effect with colour. The colours shine fluorescently over the irregularly white grounded jute material.Klee developed this figure on the basis of his pencil drawing «With flowers», and raised the flower woman with only a few strokes into an uncanny gardener. The simplicity in the use of sculptural means is also in the late works always an expression of the greatest creative concentration. The beautiful gardener appears as a ghost of the bourgeois. Perhaps the title contains a side reference to the art appreciation of the National Socialists, who idealised the artistic concept of the 19th century for ideological reasons and contrasted it with the modern art they defamed as degenerate.

Even though the picture «Individualized Altimetry of Layers» was only created in 1930, it nevertheless indicates a direct relationship in its formal structure to the Egyptian water colours. The composition is divided into twelve horizontal strips, called layers by Klee, which are cut through by five vertical bars. With each step, the layers are either divided or joined back together again. The rhythm of the self-doubling layers derives from the right hand edge of the picture. This is not a water colour but a painting with paste colours which draws the picture closer to the square pictures. The regular repetition of a colour trio is then replaced by an entirely individual colouring. The centre is dominated by a red square and held in equilibrium by different strips of colour. Out of the bright green arises from below the intense movement over the red to a bright blue stripe, which at the top of the picture is underlayed with pale pink. In between repeated dark and light shades are freely arranged, so that despite the strong contrasts the impression of a closed but in itself harmonic movement of colours is created.

The picture was painted in 1939, when Paul Klee was driven from his position at the Düsseldorf Academy and living again in Berne. It is not unlikely, that Klee in this picture of the high-spirited was alluding to the National Socialists in Germany. Precisely the drummer’s arms refer to Hitler, who was called the "eternal drummer".

The period in which the painting „Pomona, overripe“ was created can also be seen as a specially fertile time: As a result of his illness with progressive scleroderma Klee was only able to execute 25 works in 1936, and yet the following year was the beginning of a phase of extraordinary creative strength until his death.In the final working years fruits were amongst the most important motifs for his pictures. Klee related these concentrations of content into his own work during these years and understood this as the „fruit“ of a long artistic maturing process. In the painting „Pomona, overripe“, this theme links the sensuous experience to its mythological source.

Paul Klee entered the painting "The creator", in his oeuvre catalogue in 1934 under number 213. Next to the entry, he wrote: "not touched for several years". Klee frequently left paintings sitting in his studio for long periods, only to pull them out at the right time, rework them, or paint them over. He probably began this painting in his Dessau Bauhaus period and did not work on it again until he had left Germany for good to live in Switzerland.

Paul Klee returned to Berne, the city of his childhood and youth, on the 23rd December 1933. This was not done willingly, but was the enforced reaction to the accession to power by the National Socialists in Germany. From the beginning Paul and Lily Klee had observed the developments in Germany with unease. In Weimar and Dessau they were forced to experience the ugliest attacks on the Bauhaus by the National Socialists.

Until December 1918 Klee is in wartime service in Gersthofen and is not released until February 1919. During the last three war years Klee experiences a productive work phase, which stands in crass antithesis to the circumstances all around. The numerous aquarelle paintings from this time are dominated by radiant colours, which are not yet subordinate to a strict colour order. Rather they stem from sensitivity and expression.

They were made of plaster and were called "Mr. Death", "Kasperl", "Gretl, his wife", "Sepperl, his best friend", "the Devil", and "the Policeman2. With one exception, they were all destroyed in bombing in Würzburg in 1945.

The view of the city turns into a play of simple square shaped areas and shades of colour casually laid upon each other. From this point it was just a small step to the water colours of pure coloured squares which were created on his return and in memory of Kairuan. In the evening Klee noted in his diary: „Colour has caught me. I do not need to search for it. It has me for ever, I know it. That is the happy meaning of this moment: I and colour are united. I am a painter. “

In his black watercolours he laid layer after layer of black, almost transparent paint on the paper and in the superimposition of the layers he achieved a nuanced gradation of light and ark. In "Bucket and watering can", 1910, he continued this process in gentle watercolour tones. Here too he placed almost transparent layers of colours side by side and above all over one another. In the process the motif gradually disappears in the flatness of the application of paint. The outlines become vague, as they often flow together with the surroundings. There is a complete lack of drawn detail. The fleeting nature of the composition and its high level of abstraction recall Japanese ink-wash painting.

As architecture follows certain patterns, structures and rules, mostly in geometrical forms, the structure of a painting should do the same. At first glance the motif breaks down into many coloured planes. A particular pattern slowly appears, stripes seem to run through the painting horizontally and vertically. The primary colours red, yellow and blue accentuate the composition, to which the title alludes.

Klee painted the first version in 1914, after the beginning of the First World War and the sudden death of August Macke. Until its completion in 1921 Klee reworked the picture repeatedly.

The water colour was done at the beginning of 1918, at a time when Klee, as he noted in his diary, was reading a great many poems to escape from the depressing everyday existence of his wartime service. The origin of this poem is unknown. Probably it can even be attributed to Paul Klee.

The E is interpreted partly as an abbreviation for the Bavarian town of Ebenhausen, but in Klee’s work such a pictorial element need not necessarily assume a particular meaning. By incorporating individual letters Klee complements his pictorial trove of motifs: arrows, crescent moons, individual wheels and hieroglyphics. In this way Klee was trying to prevent a single unambiguous interpretation of his work, and instead challenging the viewer with an openness and diversity of meanings.

Let yourself get closer to our works of Paul Klee in an informative and entertaining way. The content of the podcasts offer listeners the classic work descriptions and background information on selected exhibits of Paul Klee.

The oil painting »Bildarchitectur rot gelb blau«, 1923, [Pictorial architecture red, yellow, blue] is one of the »square pictures« that Paul Klee worked on during his time at the Bauhaus in Weimar, and which he systematised in his Dessau Bauhaus period (1927-1930). More than ten years earlier, Klee had composed his first watercolours out of coloured geometric shapes, and he had later transferred the principle into poetic variations. The »square pictures« of the Bauhaus period are among the few completely non-representational compositions in Klee?s oeuvre, and they bear witness to his systematic work on the theory of colour.

In the summer of 1905, Klee started using a new medium: blackened sheets of glass, which he worked on with a needle. Using the resistance of this unusual medium, he discovered a new form of artistic expression - the scratched drawing. In his diary, he described his discovery thus: »The medium is no longer the black line, it is the white. The light energy on a midnight background fits very well with the expression "let there be light". And so I glide gently over into the new world of tonalities.«

Lady Demon was created in 1935 during a period of artistic helplessness and the search for new means of expression. Klee was caught in a creative crisis due to his exile in Berne, the unhealthy political developments in Germany and above all, also due to the constantly deteriorating state of his health. This work is a typical example of the transition phase to his late style which commenced after 1936. In falling back onto earlier subjects and forms which Klee by enlarging the scale and with the help of a new title filled with new content, he was on the way to a new more concentrated pictorial language.

In »der Graue und die Küste«, 1938, [The grey man and the coast], a line beginning at the top edge swings back and forth, dividing the painting into horizontal segments. The »grey man« appears to observe this course, which the title describes as a coast. We too look down on a landscape of fjords far below us, reading the blue surface as sea, the bow-shaped lines as boats, the horizontal bar with three dots in the middle of the painting as a ship.

During his time as a teacher at the Bauhaus, Paul Klee made an intense study of motion in the static, gravity-bound world and in that of the dynamic. The possibilities of movement open to birds and fish interested him particularly, as did their elements - air and water. Klee called water an »in-between realm«, in which the law of gravity does not apply and freedom of movement becomes possible. Kleeís collected works include more than sixty on the subject of fish, and about the same number of titles that contain the concept of water.

Even four years after the end of the war, references to war themes and Paul Klee's experiences are still to be found in his work: For instance the picture "The Dart House". Only the indication of the weapon in the title and the exact depiction of such a bullet, is reminding Paul Klee of the First World War. The picture itself emanates nothing warlike. Apparently Klee was interested in combining the contrasts of movement, statics and gravity. The massive building, constructed of coloured areas, which strangely appears to hover in the space, lends the seemingly delicate and vertically downward plunging arrow, a sudden weight. The arrow apparently not only keeps the house in the picture, preventing it from floating away, but pulls it forcibly downwards.

But no other subject is so intensely dealt with in the »Inventionen« as the comedian, which comes up in three different versions. All of them show the head of a man in profile, hidden behind a mask. While the faces of the two first versions are recognisable as self-portraits, the third image focuses on a more fundamental reflection by Klee on his existence as an artist. Here, the discrepancy in the earlier pictures between what the artist is and what he does gives way to a duality of artistic form and artistic personality.

The picture "Park near Lu" lives from a strong contrast between the black symbols showing the trees, branches and paths of a park, and then the surrounding colour zones like colourful foliage. It seems to have been a specific landscape which inspired Paul Klee to paint this picture. Klee's wife Lily travelled several times in the late 1930's to Lucerne for health reasons and she spent time in a sanatorium. Paul Klee had visited her there, when his own physical condition permitted and strolled with her through the park around the sanatorium.

Klee explored the subject of weightlessness in paintings with a three-dimensional construction that appear to drift in space. They are based on precise constructive principles, yet are frequently irrational in their spatial logic. In »Schwebendes«, 1930, [Hovering], the corners of the overlapping four-sided figures are only partly »rational«, that is, linked by two corresponding corners. Other links are »irrational«, or randomly created. This gives an impression of a three-dimensional structure with a disturbing perspective. Its surfaces appear to belong to different spatial levels, and to change in the perception of the observer.

It was clear to Renzo Piano from the very outset that Klee had too much depth as an artist to ever be contained within an ordinary building. Renzo Piano felt that the Centre planned should be dedicated to the work of a "poet of stillness", so Piano's ideas revolved around an essentially tranquil type of museum. But Renzo Piano also drew inspiration from the identity of the location, the gently rolling profile of the terrain itself, for the vision of the structure he wanted to create. The fact that a motorway cut a deep and abrupt swathe along the plot's outer perimeter did not trouble him. Rather he felt it should be incorporated into the project as a pulsing artery of our civilisation, and be reflected both aesthetically and functionally.

Paul Klee's »Zwei Männer, einander in höherer Stellung vermutend, begegnen sich«, 1903,[Two men meet, each believing the other to be of higher rank] is part of a group of works known as the »Inventionen« [Inventions], eleven etchings from the years 1903 to 1905, whose meticulous technique and detailed, relief-like composition is reminiscent of drawings by the Old Masters. In his diary, Klee described the »Inventionen« as »opus I« and called them the first fully valid examples of his individual artistic production. Inspired by artists such as Francisco de Goya and Honoré Daumier, Klee used his »Inventionen« to explore man?s domination by his physical urges and how it becomes twisted by bourgeois sexual morals. »Zwei Männer, einander in höherer Stellung vermutend, begegnen sich«, 1903, [Two men meet, each believing the other to be of higher rank] is kind of a political and socio-critical nature.