Francesco Mazzaferro
The Diaries of Paul Klee
Part Two: The Four Main Themes: Music, Poetry, Eroticism and Abstraction
 |
| Fig. 7) A page of the Diaries, with paragraphs 926l and 926m from the Diary III (Journey to Tunisia) |
Go back to Part One
It is natural to
imagine a volume of memoirs as a linear sequence of events that start from
childhood and are interrupted only by death. Of course, even in the case of the
Diaries of Klee, a matter of
chronological linearity exists: the four notebooks cover twenty years of his
life (1819-1918). But it would be really wrong to consider the text as a simple
biographical chronicle of a painter’s life, written without a joint framework,
without a set of leitmotifs or a commonality of themes that would emerge everywhere
as a common watermark. The Diaries actually
have their own internal rigor which is based on (i) the metrical, musical use
of language, (ii) the rhythmic role of poetry as a refrain supporting the
musicality of the text, (iii) a pervasive eroticism, as a common original
element and (iv) an atmosphere of rigorous intellectual abstraction, where
every fact of life must always be related to fundamental, originating and
transcendental issues. You may well consider the Diaries in the same way
as one would observe the pictorial images of Klee, where the alternation of
signs (points, lines, spaces and surfaces) and colours in a compositional
framework creates a compelling balance between shapes and tone combinations.
These are the visual elements of the composition. Similarly, in my opinion four
driving elements emerge from the Diaries:
music, poetry, eroticism and abstraction.
Music
Musician, son of
musicians and married to a musician, Klee cannot live without his violin. He
even manages to play it during the war years, even in difficult times when he
says "a great fear keeps me from painting”, because of the tension of the
events [25]. Along all the years covered by the diary, he is always a member,
as a violinist, of quartets or quinquets, some created to perform public
concerts and other consisting of friends who simply want to enjoy playing, for
example in Munich; he is a permanent member of symphony orchestras in Bern, and
with them goes on tour in other Swiss cities; wherever he travels, he
visits concerts and opera, noting
accurate impressions and giving us his personal account on the value of
conductors, orchestras, singers and soloists (really very funny are the pages
in which he describes how Pablo Casals, perhaps the greatest cellist of all
time, is actually forced to take over as a conductor of Klee’s orchestra during
a concert with music by Haydn in Bern, given that the real conductor was unable
to set the tempo from the podium [26]).
But the simple
biographical factor is not sufficient to qualify the role of music for Klee.
Everything is music in the Diaries of
Klee. First of all, the writing style. Giulio Carlo Argan recognizes it
immediately, when he refers to the "rhythm" of the Diaries. [27] It is worth remembering -
from this point of view – that a musician not only reads and sees the music,
but that music becomes for him a language dominating the written word. And there is no
doubt that time, duration and rhythm are for Klee concepts that apply not only
to music, but also to the prose, poetry and painting.
In the author of the Diaries, music dominates the
text. In the first place, from a structural point of view: the pages of the
four notebooks that make up the text are divided into about one thousand
paragraphs with a continuous numbering. This is a deliberate choice. The
scansion of the text in paragraphs should be read as a structural and founding
element of the Diaries, in the logic
of a music score, where the musical writing is divided into beats.
But the text
itself of the Diaries has its own
rhythmic musicality, with passages that cannot but recall the different tempos
of a score. Often, entire paragraphs appear like if we were reading poetry in
prose: they are based on a homogeneous rhythmic structure, made up of units of
the same length. A music lover of that time would have spoken of Sprachgesang, today we would be talking
of rap. What varies is the extension of these basic units of the period and
their speed. There are accelerated pages, in which the basic units are short,
and linked among each other linearly, without any subordination. Everything,
from punctuation to the rhythm, is reminiscent of the tempo of a prestissimo. There are other pages in
which the basic units are longer, exactly by one third, their sequencing is
more tranquil, and whose tempo looks like an andante. Here are two examples: paragraph 279 on the arrival of
Klee and his traveling companion Haller in Genoa is a prestissimo, paragraph 389 on Klee’s arrival in Naples is an andante.
GENOA
"Genoa,
arrival by night. The sea under the moon. Wonderful breeze from the sea.
Serious mood.
Exhausted
like a beast of burden by a thousand impressions. Saw the sea by night from a
hill, for the first time. The great harbour, the gigantic ships, the emigrants
and the longshoremen. The large Southern city.
I had
had a rough idea of the sea, but not of the harbour life. Railway cars,
threatening cranes, warehouses, and people; walking along reinforced piers,
stepping over ropes. Fleeing from people who try to rent us boats: “The city,
the harbor,” “The American warships,” “The lighthouses!” “The sea!” The iron
bollards as seats. The unfamiliar climate. Steamers from Liverpool, Marseilles,
Bremen, Spain, Greece, America. Respect for the wide globe. Certainly several
hundred steamers, not to speak of countless sailboats, small steamers,
tugboats. And then the people. Over there, the most outlandish figures with
fezzes. Here on the dam, a crowd of emigrants from the South of Italy, piled up
(like snails) in the sun, gestures as supple as an ape’s, mothers giving the
breast. The bigger children playing and quarrelling. A purveyor opens a path
for himself through the mob with a fuming plate (frutti
di mare) brought from floating kitchens.
Where does the striking smell of oil come from? Then the coal-bearers,
well-built figures, lightfooted and swift, coming down from the coal ship half
naked with loads on their backs (hair protected by a rag), climbing up to the
pier along a long plank, over to the warehouse to have their load weighed.
Then, unburdened, along a second plank into the ship, where a freshly-filled
basket is waiting for them. Thus people in an unbroken circle, tanned by the
sun, blackened by the coal, wild, contemptuous. Over there, a fisherman. The
disgusting water can’t contain anything good. As everywhere else, nothing is
ever caught. Fishing gear: a thick string, a stone tied to it, a chicken foot,
a shellfish.
On
the piers stand houses and warehouses. A world in itself. This time we are the
loafers in its midst. And still we are working, at least with our legs.”
NAPLES
"Next
to Genoa, Naples is indolent, dirty and sick. Next to Naples, Genoa is onesided.
Naples displays the greatest pomp besides the greatest misery-harbour life,
rides along the Corso, sophisticated opera, even a touch of Rome: the Museo
Nazionale. In addition, the matchless, paradisiacal scenery. The sea is more
powerful in Genoa, but also more monotonous. Here, a real bay surrounded by
singular coastal mountains and locked in by colourful islands. And I can see
all this from the balcony of my room. It lies at my feet, a giant hemisphere,
the magnificent city with its roaring voice. On the left, the old town with the
harbors and old Vesuvius; on the right, the modern Villa Nazionale and the
Posilipo. Around the house and behind it, gardens with fresh greenery,
fantastic shapes and a thousand blossoms. This splendid lookout is called Salita
del Petrajo, Villa de Rosa 48, Pensione Haase, Napoli. The sea is gorgeously
blue and quit. The city, an animated mixture of patches, blocks of houses in
sunlight and shadow, white streets, dark green parks. The prospect is a
reminder of Christ’s temptation. Sheer joy gives me wings, suspends me at the
center of spheric splendour, at the world’s navel.
But
there is work too, it is not always like the hour of rest. Below at the harbor,
you try to make your way through an incredible world that sounds quite different
from what it is in the song of “Santa Lucia.” What people they are down there!
Ugly and poor, they lie about in the sun, sick, lousy, tattered, half naked. I
am neutral-attracted to them without pity, with a kind of knowledge-hungry
aversion. One delight of the artist is to let himself be thoroughly infected
like this. I smile as I rebel against it, I know my art needs this as a basis.
Its blossoms will wilt easily until the great strengthening. May the day of
proof come. To be able to reconcile the opposites! To express the great
manifold in a single word!”
Music, art and literature. The analysis of
the Diaries reveals an impressive
table of concordance between stylistic similarities. The critical edition of
1988 contains a unique index of the music pieces which Klee plays and mentions
in the Diaries, both performing them for
pure fun (this is where one really reveals personal preferences) and as part of
his professional concert career (with passages often annotated in self-critical
tone), so that it is possible to draw a comprehensive picture of his musical
universe and compare it with the pictorial one. Let us look at it together.
First, to his clear distaste for any
monumentality in painting corresponds his annoyance at any dilated form of
symphonic composition of the previous decades. Klee clearly rejects Mahler and
Bruckner ("Music mustn’t go that
way, in any case only for a moment") [28]; he certainly appreciates
Wagner’s operas, but he does not write on them with the fanatical enthusiasm
which was usual in his time; finally, he adds that he dislikes the way in which
the last movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony is performed, notoriously the
one which is amplified by Schiller’s Ode
to Joy, and says he can only enjoy it if he reads the music score and
imagines the sound ("I don’t like to
hear the last movement, I prefer to imagine it. Really, something always goes
wrong with the intonation"
[29]). Similarly, he is not delighted by Michelangelo
as painter or by St. Peter's Basilica. Thus, art is above all composure, order
and measure.
Reflecting on his youth and on the
uncertainty about the future of choice, Klee writes in November 1897: "As time passes I become more and more afraid
of my growing love of music. I don’t understand myself. I play solo sonatas by
Bach: next to them, what is Böcklin? It makes me smile". [30] And,
many years later, at the height of the Great War: "My awareness has again deepened by repeatedly playing Bach. Never yet
have I experienced Bach with such intensity, never yet felt so at one with him.
What concentration, what a solitary peak of achievement!" [31]
There is an intrinsic connection between
the discovery of the central role of the architectural structure inherently
present in every image (and thus in each picture and painting), the love for
the geometry of counterpoint in a music score and abstraction in visual art. “In Italy I understood the architectonic
element in the plastic arts – at which point I was groping toward abstract art
– today, I would say the constructivist element.” [32] And vice versa, there is a complete
correspondence between a score of Bach, in its architectural coherence and in
its economy of tonal instruments, on the one hand, and - on the other hand -
the idea of an economy in the use of lexical and pictorial tools, as part of
coherent and universal art codes. Again: art as structural economy of
instruments. Art as identification of the essential. Once more, Klee writes:
"Pictures
have their skeleton, muscles, and skin like human beings. One may speak of the
specific anatomy of the picture. A picture representing ‘a naked person’ must
not be created by the laws of human anatomy, but only by those of compositional
anatomy. First one builds an armature on which the picture is to be
constructed. How far one goes beyond this armature is a matter of choice; an
artistic effect can proceed from the armature, a deeper one than from the
surface alone.
And
instead of books or hollow oaths, that is, instead of official lies, I cherish
a wakening, living word. Naturally people who can hear it are needed. The many
intervals must be present in it, at least latently. Books are made of split
words and letters, split until they are sufficient in number. Only the
professional journalist has time for this. A noble writer works to make his
words concise, not to multiply them.
Beyond
the constructive elements of the picture, I studied the tonalities of nature by
adding layer of diluted black watercolour paint. Each layer must dry well. In
this way, a mathematically correct scale of light and dark values is the
result. Squinting facilitates our perception of this phenomenon in nature." [33]
Third, the preference in visual art for an
incisive and nervous habitus (see the passages in the Diaries on the San Sebastiano di Donatello, interpreted as a gothic
work, almost as if he were a Grünewald of the Italian Renaissance [34]) and his
disappointment for Raphael [35] (whom he considered, as well Emil Nolde did in
the pages of his memoirs, as the antithetical type to a painter of Northern
Europe) are the same feelings that justify his preference for the string music
of Beethoven, and the latter’s ability to achieve tonal effects close
dissonance, and perhaps even his scepticism towards the Deutsches Requiem by
Brahms ("Still, I can’t share the
predilection of so many musical amateurs for this work" [36]).
For Klee, music is an ancient and universal
language, and in many ways a cosmic one, which must not be inflated and
distorted, but revealed in his comprehensive order. In the same years in which
German culture pursues the total art goal of Nietzsche and Wagner, i.e. the Gesamtkunst (think, in those years, of the sculptural work of Max Klinger, all aimed at an heroic celebration of
German musical romanticism), Klee seems to go a parallel but different road:
the encounter between arts does not happen by way of emotional excitement,
through a romantic explosion, but is marked by a common return to the origins
of artistic language, by an intimate reflection on the basic elements and the
unifying aspects of the various expressions of the human soul. Below I am
displaying one of the fundamental passages of the Diaries, in July 1917, during the war:
"Thoughts
at the open window of the payroll department [editor’s note: of a military
barrack]. That everything is transitory is merely a simile. Everything we see
is a proposal, a possibility, an expedient. The real truth, to begin with,
remains invisible beneath the surface. The colors that captivate us are not
lighting, but light. The graphic universe consists of light and shadow. The
diffused clarity of slightly overcast weather is richer in phenomena than a
sunny day. A thin stratum of cloud just before the stars break through. It is
difficult to catch and represent this, because the moment is so fleeting. It
has to penetrate into our soul. The formal has to fuse with the Weltanschauung.
Simple
motion strikes us as banal. The time element must be eliminated. Yesterday and
tomorrow as simultaneous. In music, polyphony helped to some extent to satisfy
this need. A quintet as in Don Giovanni is closer to us than the epic motion in Tristan. Mozart and Bach are more modern than the
nineteenth century. If, in music, the
time element could be overcome by a retrograde motion than would penetrate
consciousness, then a renaissance might still be thinkable." [39]
If, therefore, the attempt is to cancel every
time dependence from music, painting offers a better tool: what Klee calls
'polyphonic painting'. "Polyphonic
painting is superior to music in that, here, the time element becomes a special
element. The notion of simultaneity stands out even more richly." [40]
These are already the elements that will be the focus of his reflection at the
Bauhaus.
Poetry
If the prose of the Diaries is dominated by music and its metric, it is no coincidence
that they host about one hundred poems, i.e. the core of his poetry, which his
son Felix collects and publishes with the publisher Arche Zurich in 1960. Since
then, ten reprints are published in German, with the latest in 2013 [41]. In
Italian, the poems are translated in 1979 by Guanda Publishing, thanks to a
writer of great depth like Giorgio Manacorda, and then republished by Nuova
Guanda Publishing in 1995 and finally by Abscondita in 2000, with the
additional contribution of Ursula Bavaj. [42] There are, at least to my
knowledge, no other full translations of poems by Klee. In the Anglo-Saxon
world is worth remembering, however, the studies on Klee's poetry by the
eminent Russian-American linguist Roman Jakobson [43] and an extensive
monograph on Paul Klee as a poet / painter by Kathryn Porter Aichele. [44]
 |
| Fig. 8) The 2000 Italian edition of the Poems by Klee, with an afterword by Giorgio Manacorda |
The Diaries
document how Klee, since he is young, is indifferently aiming at music,
painting, writing, poetry, philosophy, drawing (and even sculpture), and
basically see all of them as complementary aspects of a unique art. Here are
some passages that document his considerations.
"Music,
for me, is a love bewitched.
Fame as a painter?
Writer, modern poet? Bad joke.
So I have no calling, and loaf.” [45]
Fame as a painter?
Writer, modern poet? Bad joke.
So I have no calling, and loaf.” [45]
"The
conviction that painting is the right profession grows stronger and stronger in
me. Writing is the only other thing I still feel attracted to. Perhaps when I
am mature I shall go back to it." [46]
"Twenty-one
years old! I never doubted my vital force. But how is it to fare with my chosen
art? The recognition that at bottom I am a poet, after all, should be no hindrance
in the plastic arts! And should I really have to be a poet, Lord knows what
else I should desire. Certainly, a sea swells within me, for I feel. It is a
hopeless state, to feel in such a way that the storm rages on all sides at once
and that nowhere is a lord who commands the chaos." [47]
"In
the spring of 1901 I drew up the following program: First of all, the art of
life: then, as ideal profession, poetry and philosophy; as real profession, the
plastic arts; and finally, for lack of an income, drawing illustrations.”
[48]
 |
| Fig. 9) The monograph on Paul Klee as a poet/painter by Kathryn Porter Aichele (2006) |
In her monograph, Ms Porter-Aichele
stresses that Klee - compared to the other poets-painters (in German, Dichtermaler) of his generation (such as
the expressionist Kandinsky or the surrealists Breton and Arp, or the Italian
Futurists) tends to make a more traditional use of poetry, at least in the
years of the Diaries (he will become
much more experimental, even as a poet, in the years of the Bauhaus, composing
the so-called Schriftbilder, images
composed of scripture, that fuse painting and poetry). Manacorda compares his
lyrics to those of the damned expressionist poet Georg Trakl (1887-1914), one
of the masters of German-language literature, famous for the continued use of
violent colour contrasts: nothing similar happens in Klee.
Manacorda writes: "If in the Diaries his attention is paid to
the mechanisms and not to the colours that play them, even more so in his poetry
colours do not appear. Yet a painter-poet of expressionist circles would let you
think that the colour could find a wide use in the time of writing. In
expressionist poets the use of colour in metaphoric function is continuous and
even, in some cases, dominant. [...] With the exception of the green, (...) the
chromaticity of the poems of Klee is limited to shades of chiaroscuro: 'hell' [clear], 'klar' [clear], 'blass'
[pale],' schwarz '[black]. The penumbra and the sharp contrasts between light
and dark refer to the inner worlds where dark, light and twilight mean
something more than space lighting. These are not chromatic but metaphorical
symbols: they describe (inner) abstract landscapes rather than (external) real
landscapes. One has the feeling that, in the poems, Klee tends to the abstract
precision, the legendary immateriality and the 'automatic' spontaneity to which
he tends in the drawing. All his work as a painter is marked by this tendency
to mythical and archetypal abstraction." [50]
Referring to a famous article by the US art
critic Clement Greenberg of 1941 [51] and his definition of Klee’s drawing as
"temporal or musical",
Manacorda identifies the "rhythmic
values" ("time space music") as the central elements of the
poem by Klee. [52]
In sum, for Klee poetry is an instrument of
intimate understanding of the true essence of nature, and that understanding
comes through overcoming differences between space art (fine arts) and temporal
arts (music), but also between earthly existence and metaphysical existence.
Poetry is an intermediate form between different worlds, for its ability to
evoke - in rarefied form – thoughts, images and sounds.
- I -
I am
God.
So much
of the divine
is heaped in me
that I cannot die.
is heaped in me
that I cannot die.
My
head burns to the point of bursting.
One
of the worlds
hidden in it
wants to be born.
But now I must suffer
to bring it forth. [53]
hidden in it
wants to be born.
But now I must suffer
to bring it forth. [53]
- II -
What
does the artist create?
Forms and spaces!
How does he create them?
In certain chosen proportions ...
Forms and spaces!
How does he create them?
In certain chosen proportions ...
O
satire,
you plague of intellectuals. [54]
you plague of intellectuals. [54]
- III -
Am I
God?
I have accumulated so many great things in me!
My head aches to the point of bursting.
It has to hold
an overview of power.
May you want (are you worthy of it?)
that it be born to you.
I have accumulated so many great things in me!
My head aches to the point of bursting.
It has to hold
an overview of power.
May you want (are you worthy of it?)
that it be born to you.
(Aside:) They also were not worthy
of Him they crucified.
of Him they crucified.
More
realistically: Genius
sits in a glass house - but
in an unbreakable one – conceiving ideas.
After giving birth, it falls into madness.
Stretches out its hand through the window
toward the first person happening by.
The demon’s claw rip,
the iron first grips.
sits in a glass house - but
in an unbreakable one – conceiving ideas.
After giving birth, it falls into madness.
Stretches out its hand through the window
toward the first person happening by.
The demon’s claw rip,
the iron first grips.
Before,
you were a model,
mocks the ironic voice between serrated sparse, for me,
you are raw material to work on.
I throw you against the glass wall,
so that you remain stuck there,
projected and stuck ...
mocks the ironic voice between serrated sparse, for me,
you are raw material to work on.
I throw you against the glass wall,
so that you remain stuck there,
projected and stuck ...
(Then
come the lovers of art
and contemplate the bleeding work from outside.
Then come the photographers.
“New art,” it says in the newspaper the following day.
The learned journals
give it a name that ends in “ism”). [55]
and contemplate the bleeding work from outside.
Then come the photographers.
“New art,” it says in the newspaper the following day.
The learned journals
give it a name that ends in “ism”). [55]
- IV -
I am
armed, I am not here,
I am in the depths, am far away ...
I am far away ...
I glow amidst dead [56]
I am in the depths, am far away ...
I am far away ...
I glow amidst dead [56]
The just cited four poems on art creation
encompass chronologically, in the Diaries,
a period between March 1901 (paragraph 155) and April 1914 (paragraph 931).
However, these are central themes in the theoretical thinking of Klee on art.
Probably, these are in reality lyrical compositions of the early
1920s, included in the text of the Diaries
to mark a cadencing for the reader, as if it were the choir in a Greek tragedy
or in an oratorium.
On the role of poetry for Klee, Andrea
Galgano concludes, in a recent essay on "Poetic language of Paul
Klee": "The word acquires a
descriptive power that has the task of completing and sharpening impressions;
the constant oscillation between poetry and visual art and music determine the
powerful and fragile motif of a closeness that can formalize experience and
unspeakable mystery. [...] Not only the deep relationship between the painted
page and the written one implies the establishment of a space, but the
suspension of the object determines by itself the loss of any existential
depth. [...] The acute thoughtfulness, adding chiaroscuro depth to verbal
miniature and grammatical concept to geometry of vision, allows the
organization of creative activity in logical relationships, setting up the deep
and complex meaning of visible and in-visible, of question and mystery: “I
cannot be grasped in the here and now. For I reside just as much with the dead
as with the unborn. Somewhat closer to the heart of creation than usual. But
not nearly close enough.’ The end has met the beginning" [57] The final lines, which Klee writes for
the monograph that Leopold Zahn publishes on him in 1920, are those that have
been applied as an inscription on his grave in 1940.
Eroticism
If Klee aspires - in his creative activity
- to rise above the world of men, and indeed pays the price of a substantial
emotional inability to feel any kind of empathy for the rest of the human race,
the natural power of sexuality holds him to the ground, and therefore must be
won. But it is a difficult battle, which only marriage will overcome.
While the Diaries are often analysed by art historians, the reflection on
what they tell us on the emotional world of Klee remains limited. Art critics
regard as a curiosity what the artist narrates on himself as a child, teenager
and young adult, reducing everything to episodic aspects. In fact, the artist
has indeed a complex personality, and our reader of the Diaries must accept it, for the good and for the bad, if she or he
does not want to ignore some dark aspects.
Here is what Klee writes on his own lack of
empathy, which he puts in comparison with the art and the exceptionally warm
personality of Franz Marc.
"Franz
Marc (…) is more human, he loves more warmly, is more demonstrative. (...) I only
try to relate myself to God, and if I am in harmony with God, I don’t fancy
that my brothers are not also in harmony with me; but that is their business.
(...) My fire is more like that of the dead or the unborn. No wonder that he
found more love. His noble sensuousness with its warmth attracted many people
to him. He was still a real member of the human race, not a creature neutral. I
recall his smile when my eye overlooked some elements of earth.
Art
is like Creation: it holds good on the last days as on the first.
What
my art probably lacks, is a kind of passionate humanity. I don’t love animals
and every sort of creature with an earthly warmth. I don’t descend to them or
raise them to myself. I tend rather to dissolve into the whole of creation and
am then on a footing of brotherliness to my neighbour, to all things earthly. I
possess. The earth-idea gives way to the world-idea. My love is distant and
religious.
[...]
Do I
radiate warmth? Coolness?? There is no talk of such things when you have got
beyond white heat. And since not too many people reach that state, few will be
touched by me. There is no sensuous relationship, not even the noblest, between
myself and the many. In my work I do not belong to the species, but am a cosmic
point of reference. My earthly eye is too far-sighted and sees through and
beyond the most beautiful things. “Why, he doesn’t even see the most beautiful
things. “Why, he doesn’t even see the most beautiful things,” people then say
about me.
Art imitates
creation. And neither did God especially bother about current contingencies." [58]
To this difficulty of interpersonal
relations corresponds however a strong orientation to eroticism, since the
childhood memories, an eroticism which he then sublimates - in the age of
maturity - in his interest in art form.
"My
first impressions of the beauty of little girls were very precocious yet
extremely intense. I was sorry I was not a girl myself so I could wear
ravishing, lace-trimmed white panties (three to four years).” [59]
"In
a dream I saw the maid’s sexual organs; they consisted of four male (infantile)
parts and looked something like a cow’s udder (two to three years)." [60]
"By
a stroke of bad luck some pornographic drawings fell into my mother’s hands. A
woman with a belly full of children, another extremely décolleté. My mother was
unjust enough to take a moral view of this and scold me. The décolleté was the consequence of
a ballet performance at the theatre. A rather plump elf bent over to pluck a
strawberry, and you could gaze into the deep valley pinched between swelling
hills. I was scared to death (eleven to twelve years)." [61]
"I
imagined face and genitals to be the corresponding poles of the female sex,
when girls wept I thought of pudenda weeping in unison." [62]
Sensuality
is the malleability of the flesh
when is submitted to higher pressure. [Note of the editor: the German term is Zwang, which means coercion, compulsion, not simply higher pressure]
is the malleability of the flesh
when is submitted to higher pressure. [Note of the editor: the German term is Zwang, which means coercion, compulsion, not simply higher pressure]
Eyes blinded by colors.
Ears drenched in sound.
Noses in odors.
The same is true for the organs of love. [63]
Ears drenched in sound.
Noses in odors.
The same is true for the organs of love. [63]
Of the years immediately following the
journey to Italy are a few etchings with a clear erotic reference (Virgin in
the tree; Woman and animal).
"The
beast in man pursues the woman, who is not entirely insensible to it.
Affinities of the lady with the bestial. Unveiling a bit the feminine psyche.
Recognition of a truth one likes to mask.” [65]
"In
earlier versions of ‘Woman and Beast’the woman suffered too much. Later I gave
her that not altogether disgusted expression. Dissertations could be written
about the significance of the ‘ugliness’ of my figures.“ [66]
While feeling the force of sexuality as
earthly energy, which impedes him to achieve full creative capacity, Klee
finally feels the need to sublimate it. Here, the ‘absolute form’ becomes the
instrument for him to rise above earthly needs. He writes on 1901, when he is
still very young: "The very fact that the whole man at times fell very low
in the course of these three years made him eager for and capable of
purification. Many projects are witness to this. In the end, the need for
absolute is not lacking either. Herewith equilibrium begins to establish
itself. That my betrothal should coincide in time with this state is perfectly
logical.” [67]
Abstraction
All that has
been said leads to the idea of abstraction: however, not in the form of an
escape from reality, but rather as the only form to grasp the underlying
reality - consisting of a universal system, a comprehensive law – to make it
visible.
"Thoughts
about the art of portraiture. Some will not recognize the truthfulness of my
mirror. Let them remember that I am not here to reflect the surface (this can
be done by the photographic plate), but must penetrate inside. My mirror probes
down to the heart. I write words on the forehead and around the corners of the
mouth. My human faces are truer than the real ones.” [68]
"Our
initial perplexity before nature is explained by our seeing at first the small
outer branches and not penetrating to the main branches or the trunk. But once
this is realized, one will perceive a repetition of the whole law even in the
outermost leaf and turn it to good use.” [69]
"The law
that supports space - this should be the title appropriate to one of my future pictures!” [70]
End of Part Two
Go to Part Three
NOTES
[25] All quotations of the Diaries are
drawn from the English edition of 1964, published by University of California
Press. The translation is a collective effort by Pierre B. Schneider, R. Y.
Zachary and Max Knight. The quotation is at paragraph 982.
[26] Paragraph 597
[27] Klee, Paul – Diari 1898-1918, Il
Saggiatore Publishers, 1960. Quote at page ix. “There is, above all, a rhythm,
often punctuated by the non-random insertion of short poems, although left the
state of sketch, like sketches in the margins”.
[28] Paragraph 817
[29] Paragraph 804
[30] Paragraph 52
[31] Paragraph 1124
[32] Paragraph 429. Clearly,
this is a comment much after 1902, the year to which the paragraph refers. We
know that the Diary III was completed in 1920-1921.
[33] Paragraph 840
[34] Paragraph 406 “Donatello was the
main point of attraction. The stylistic perfection of his Saint John the
Baptist. I did not yet realize very clearly that it was the Gothic that stirred
me so much more intensively than the Ancient and the Baroque.”
[35] Paragraph 285: “Raphael’s
frescoes stood up under the test, but not without my indenting them to do so.”
Paragraph 293: “Raphael is more difficult to do justice to. Snatched away right
in the middle of an overwhelming effort. The possibilities indisputable, the
actual production too much that of a disciple.” Paragrafi 645/49: “Raphael
leaves me very cool”.
[36] Paragraph 499
[37] Paragraph 916
[38] Paragraph 847
[39] Paragraph 1081
[40] Paragraph 1081
[41] Klee, Paul – Gedichte [Poems]. A cura di Felix Klee,
Zurich-Hamburg, Arche Paradies, 2013, p. 139
[42] Klee, Paul –
Poesie. Edited by Giorgio Manacorda. Translation by Ursula Bavaj and Giorgio
Manacorda, Milan, Abscondita, 2000, 241 pages.
[43] Jakobson, Roman – On the Verbal
Art of William Blake and Other Poet-Painters, in Lingustic Inquiry, 1970. Jakobson, Roman - Hölderlin, Klee, Brecht. Zur
Wortkunst dreier Gedichte [On the lexical richness of three poems]. Foreword by Elmar Holenstein, Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 1976,
127 pages.
[44] Aichele, Kathryn Porter – Paul
Klee, poet/painter, Rochestery, Camden House, 225 pages
[45] Paragraph 67
[46] Paragraph 93
[47] Paragraph 121
[48] Paragraph 137
[49] Paragraph 175
[50] Klee, Paul – Poesie (quoted),
pages 197 and 200.
[51] Greenberg, Clement - Art
Chronicle. On Paul Klee, in Clement Greenberg, The Collected Essays and
Criticism, Vol. 1, 1988, 1941, The University of Chicago Press, pages 65-73
[52] Klee, Paul – Poesie (quoted), page 201.
[53] Paragraph 155
[54] Paragraph 599
[55] Paragraph 690
[56] Paragraph 931
[58]
Paragraph 1008
[59]
Paragraph 6
[60] Paragraph
8
[61] Paragragh
34
[62] Paragraph
35
[63] Paragraph
96
[64] Paragraph
323
[65] Paragraph
513
[66] Paragraph
618
[67] Paragraph
170
[68] Paragraph 136
[69] Paragraph 536
[70] Paragraph 681
Nessun commento:
Posta un commento