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Learning your lines
DISSECTING ROOM
Learning your lines
T
808
Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich/ Photo Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus München/ DACS 2002
he Swiss artist Paul Klee are gorgeous”, an elderly woman (1879–1940) was one of the declared as I meandered through the undisputed modern masters of Hayward’s cavernous galleries. These the 20th century. For the past 20 years crinkly improvisations are like sprawling I have entertained a fascination and maps of the subconscious—the highdialogue with Klee’s eccentric universe. ways and byways of the soul. Klee is I last saw a major showing of his both our navigator and shaman, his work in 1983 at Oxford’s Museum of paintings are playthings made visible by Modern Art. Now he has returned to the caprice of his equilibrium. “I let you the limelight, and the Hayward Gallery play with them, and if you break these brings together 90 of his drawings, toys to see how they are made, you paintings, and watercolours in an invigorating and refreshing showcase. What better way to quell those niggling winter blues than with a dose of colour therapy? Beyond the sea of bobbing heads and quizzical glances, the paintings sing to us in their own secret visual language. They are lullabies in an arcane tongue, horticultural hymns, haptic icons, wistful as soft rain in a watercolour box. Klee’s quirky menageries of hybrids are made familiar to us through his calligraphic and experimental approach to image making. In Veil Dance (1920) he combines drawing with printmaking in oils and translucent washes of watercolour. Taking the line Acquarell (1914) for a walk, Klee embarks on an excursion into a childlike world of pure wonderment, doodling his way through luscious colour fields and harmonies of the spectrum. Leading our eyes to a kind of cosmic illumination in works such as Crystal Gradation (1921) with its cool, oscillating, and angular forms. The zoomorphic quality inherent in Klee’s ink drawings—for example, She-Equilibrist Over the Swamp veers towards the bizarre: vegetal mutations cohabit with caricatures of warthogs in an apparently automatic, linear development presided over by a leering Mother Earth. People cling to Klee’s embracing enigmas with rapture, as if seeing images from another world for the first time. “I don’t know what they mean but they Rosengarten (1920)
have my approval”, he writes in one of his diaries. A lexicon of signs and symbols permeate his talismanic imagery: spirals, chevrons, arrows, zigzags, dots, and crosses—the filigree script is reminiscent of ancient Egyptian papyri, Celtic runes, and musical notation. In Klee’s adaptation of cubist, constructivist, and pointillist aesthetics, and through the diversity of his technique, we encounter a rigorous theoretical intellect. Between 1921 and 1931, Klee was an influential member of the great cultural think tank the Bauhaus, and rubbed shoulders with fellow contemporaries Wassily Kandinsky, Walter Gropius, and Lionel Feininger. Picture of a City (1921) with its vibrant rythmns of red, green, and blue is an intricate architectural abstraction from this period. In Curtain (1924) and Pastorale (1927), Klee uses striped backgrounds for his spidery depictions of gardens, citadels, and roads—themes that preoccupied Klee after his many travels in Tunisia, Italy, and Egypt. For the last 5 years of his life Klee had severe scleroderma, and sensing that his time was short increased his artistic output to as many as 1300 works a year. The final images in the show are premonitions of death executed in a spare Zenlike shorthand of marks and gestures. Grey spooks (Pathos II, 1937) and burnt angels (Hold, 1939) also seem to adumbrate the horrors of World War II. These desolate characters peep at us from a stark, existential, netherworld and are punctuations in a new misshapen dialect articulated by driven necessity. It is heartening to think that before contemporary art became the fatuous conundrum of a flickering light bulb and ubiquitous turd in a jar, there were playful pioneers of great integrity, poets, like Klee, who really learned their lines. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Berggruen Klee Collection, 1984 (1984.315.6)/Photo 1984 The Metropolitan Museum of Art/ DACS 2002
Paul Klee: the Nature of Creation Works, 1914–1940 An exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, London, UK, showing until April 1, 2002.
Shaun Cato c/o The Lancet, London, UK
THE LANCET • Vol 359 • March 2, 2002 • www.thelancet.com
For personal use. Only reproduce with permission from The Lancet Publishing Group.
Learning your lines
T
808
Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich/ Photo Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus München/ DACS 2002
he Swiss artist Paul Klee are gorgeous”, an elderly woman (1879–1940) was one of the declared as I meandered through the undisputed modern masters of Hayward’s cavernous galleries. These the 20th century. For the past 20 years crinkly improvisations are like sprawling I have entertained a fascination and maps of the subconscious—the highdialogue with Klee’s eccentric universe. ways and byways of the soul. Klee is I last saw a major showing of his both our navigator and shaman, his work in 1983 at Oxford’s Museum of paintings are playthings made visible by Modern Art. Now he has returned to the caprice of his equilibrium. “I let you the limelight, and the Hayward Gallery play with them, and if you break these brings together 90 of his drawings, toys to see how they are made, you paintings, and watercolours in an invigorating and refreshing showcase. What better way to quell those niggling winter blues than with a dose of colour therapy? Beyond the sea of bobbing heads and quizzical glances, the paintings sing to us in their own secret visual language. They are lullabies in an arcane tongue, horticultural hymns, haptic icons, wistful as soft rain in a watercolour box. Klee’s quirky menageries of hybrids are made familiar to us through his calligraphic and experimental approach to image making. In Veil Dance (1920) he combines drawing with printmaking in oils and translucent washes of watercolour. Taking the line Acquarell (1914) for a walk, Klee embarks on an excursion into a childlike world of pure wonderment, doodling his way through luscious colour fields and harmonies of the spectrum. Leading our eyes to a kind of cosmic illumination in works such as Crystal Gradation (1921) with its cool, oscillating, and angular forms. The zoomorphic quality inherent in Klee’s ink drawings—for example, She-Equilibrist Over the Swamp veers towards the bizarre: vegetal mutations cohabit with caricatures of warthogs in an apparently automatic, linear development presided over by a leering Mother Earth. People cling to Klee’s embracing enigmas with rapture, as if seeing images from another world for the first time. “I don’t know what they mean but they Rosengarten (1920)
have my approval”, he writes in one of his diaries. A lexicon of signs and symbols permeate his talismanic imagery: spirals, chevrons, arrows, zigzags, dots, and crosses—the filigree script is reminiscent of ancient Egyptian papyri, Celtic runes, and musical notation. In Klee’s adaptation of cubist, constructivist, and pointillist aesthetics, and through the diversity of his technique, we encounter a rigorous theoretical intellect. Between 1921 and 1931, Klee was an influential member of the great cultural think tank the Bauhaus, and rubbed shoulders with fellow contemporaries Wassily Kandinsky, Walter Gropius, and Lionel Feininger. Picture of a City (1921) with its vibrant rythmns of red, green, and blue is an intricate architectural abstraction from this period. In Curtain (1924) and Pastorale (1927), Klee uses striped backgrounds for his spidery depictions of gardens, citadels, and roads—themes that preoccupied Klee after his many travels in Tunisia, Italy, and Egypt. For the last 5 years of his life Klee had severe scleroderma, and sensing that his time was short increased his artistic output to as many as 1300 works a year. The final images in the show are premonitions of death executed in a spare Zenlike shorthand of marks and gestures. Grey spooks (Pathos II, 1937) and burnt angels (Hold, 1939) also seem to adumbrate the horrors of World War II. These desolate characters peep at us from a stark, existential, netherworld and are punctuations in a new misshapen dialect articulated by driven necessity. It is heartening to think that before contemporary art became the fatuous conundrum of a flickering light bulb and ubiquitous turd in a jar, there were playful pioneers of great integrity, poets, like Klee, who really learned their lines. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Berggruen Klee Collection, 1984 (1984.315.6)/Photo 1984 The Metropolitan Museum of Art/ DACS 2002
Paul Klee: the Nature of Creation Works, 1914–1940 An exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, London, UK, showing until April 1, 2002.
Shaun Cato c/o The Lancet, London, UK
THE LANCET • Vol 359 • March 2, 2002 • www.thelancet.com
For personal use. Only reproduce with permission from The Lancet Publishing Group.