Sidney and Harriet Janis Collection Fund and gift of Suzy Prudden and Joan H. Meijer in memory of F.H. Hirschland
© 2006 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
Paul Klee’s 1928 Cat and Bird, 15” x 21.”
Paul Klee The Fearful Strength of Modesty, Economy, and Irony
By Jerry Tallmer
Paul Klee was, and is, a Ding an zich, a thing unto itself. Nobody before or since has created art exactly (or inexactly) like his, and the not least astonishing part of the matter is how quietly, how unassumingly, he did it, yet how everlastingly strong his presence – his heritage – is, just for that reason: its modesty of voice, scale, and tone.
I like to think of that legacy as a vast stained-glass window of thousands of muted but stinging pieces; indeed, Klee’s output adds up, we’re told, to “at least 8,926” works by the time of his death in Switzerland in 1940. (He had been born in Münchenbuchsee, Switzerland, in 1879, of German citizenship via his music-teacher father.)
Who did the adding I don’t know. That few if any artists of any era — maybe Picasso — have been linked to, i.e., claimed by, so many “schools” (Bauhaus, Expressionist, Cubist, Surrealist, Symbolist, Abstractionist …) goes without saying. No more subtle a colorist has ever lived, or not at least since the 15th century – mix-and-matches of gradations of color that filtered into his veins from trips to Tunisia, Italy, Egypt – even while, to this day, masters of black-on-white line like Al Hirschberg or Saul Steinberg are clearly in debt to the economy and irony of this draftsman who worked in and combined more media than you or William Blake could shake a paintbrush or an etching needle at. A brush or needle that, like the most sensitive of seismographs, time and again registers what might be defined -- in the lost dictionary of our dreams – as the Clarity of the Subconscious.
Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Fund © 2006 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
The Fish, 1926, 18 3/8” x 25 1/8.”
“I will show you fear in a handful of dust,” said Mr. Eliot. Well, take a look at Klee’s “Mask of Fear” (oil on burlap, 1932), an eraser-eyed, linear-nosed, semi-mustachioed walking billboard atop four tiny feet that has been spooking me at the Museum of Modern Art for 60 or more years. Eliot wrote his “Wasteland” in 1922, when the No Man’s Lands of World War I still stank of death and defeat. By 1932, Hitler was one year away from full power, and Klee, who as a member of the Imperial German Army had applied camouflage to Richthoven-type aircraft during World War I but now faced damnation in Goebbels’s loudly blatted “Degenerate Art” exhibit, was one year away from getting out of Germany forever.
If “Mask of Fear” doesn’t sufficiently scare you, then take a gander at Klee’s “Letter Ghost” of 1937, a hollow-eyed triangle-faced nameless ageless infantile something in the guise — thick-and-thin black outlines on a pale-salmon field — of an ordinary everyday envelope. Or, going all the way back to 1905, here’s a lesson in terror from two small, severe etchings of that distant date: a left-facing scarecrow-ish Don-Quixote-ish rooster-like cornhusk-like “Aged Phoenix” -- the bird that rises from the dead – vs. the more famous right-facing (our right) “The Hero With the Wing”; just one wing, that is, flapping uselessly opposite one shrunken, atrophied left arm and one post-amputation wooden leg, a prefigured Von Richthoven grounded for life; more yet, some shot-up airman out of Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22”; still more, and agelessly, what tumbles toward heedless earth in Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts”:
...In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance, how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
And this – Klee’s “Hero With the Wing” – was only two years after Kitty Hawk, well before someone had figured out that you could put a machine gun (even, maybe, a small bomb or two) up there with that chap, that winged hero, climbing high into the sun.
“Aged Phoenix” and “The Hero With the Wing” and “Mask of Fear” and “Letter Ghost” and 28 other variegated works by Paul Klee spanning the years 1903-1940 – prints, paintings, and drawings – are now (through March 5) rewardingly gathered together in my favorite hideaway room on the fifth floor of Grand Central Station – no, no, sorry, I mean the new, big, bigger than big, Museum of Modern Art on the old site on West 53rd Street. You can spend a couple of hours there soaking it in, and I did. It was in 1930, the second year of life of the old, old Museum of Modern Art, that Alfred Barr mounted there the first major Paul Klee survey in America. The current show, curated by Lilian Tone, is the first in a new MoMA series of “Focus” exhibits, bringing some individual artist into, well, focus, while simultaneously showcasing MoMA’s holdings of that artist. (The two next to follow are David Smith and Alexander Calder.)
Having said all that about Klee’s modesty, reserve, etc., one must add in the next breath that from the very beginning, the etchings of 1903-1906, when he was in his 20s, Klee could burst the balloon of human pomposity with the hypodermic of a Daumier or a Goya. In the first instance we have a work that I seem to have been posting on walls or bulletin boards as far back as college, the 1903 “Two Men Meet” – two naked, scrawny, asses in air, noses bent head-to-head toward each other and the ground – “Each Believing the Other of Higher Rank,” and the no less naked, scrawny, smug, hideously chaste “Jungfrau im Baum” (“Virgin in the Tree”) that same year. This tortured, tortuous lady relates to the no less grim but a lot more primly goody-goody 1920 “Christian Sectarian” – an oil transfer drawing with watercolor on paper on board – whose left thumb and right forefinger are pinched together in ice-hot repression of sexual tension. Basquiat and other “childlike” artists through the years – even perhaps a friend of mine, the late Gandy Brodie – must have looked pretty hard at this maiden of Klee’s more than once.
Putting all these images together in one small corner of MoMA brings up more than one possibility of relationships. For the nonce, as my MoMA-feasting mother used to say, I leave you with one ludicrous thought. We’ve all lived for years with the mysterious 1926 “Beyond the Fish” in which the emplattered pisces is surrounded in dark, free-floating space by a crescent moon, a full moon, a wine glass, a cross, a red flag, an exclamation mark, and so on. A little later (1928) we come to Klee’s “Cat and Bird” -- oil and ink on gessoed canvas mounted on wood -- in which the cat’s green eyes above its rosy-red cheeks seem to be staring at a bird perched on his (her?) nose. Has the cat already gobbled that fish? If not, why not?
We could ask the artist himself, except that the artist himself is depicted in his 1926 “Portrait of an Artist” -- oil and collage on cardboard over wood and plaster -- as a silent, stick-figure tightrope walker who somehow, in the manner of a Saul Steinberg drawing, dream-melts into a skinny, elongated number 4. And number 4 isn’t telling.
Speaking of Steinberg, he’s lavishly represented in this town these days in two shows, “Saul Streinberg: Illuminations,” at the Morgan Library and Museum, 225 Madison Avenue at 36th Street, (212) 685-0008, and “A City on Paper: Saul Steinberg’s New York,” through March 25 at the Museum of the City of New York, 1220 Fifth Avenue, at 103rd Street, (212) 534-1672.
Say Klee sent you.
