Paul Klee - Cosmic Flora, 1923

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.