The Fairy-Tale Hour

“Paul Klee: Other Possible Worlds” at the Jewish Museum is one of the rare art events that can literally be called revelatory. As we learn from its accompanying catalog, it is the first survey the artist has had in a New York museum in decades. Almost as significant, it is the first in this country to focus primarily on his late work. These are pictures done in the later 1930s when Klee, living in his native Switzerland after a professional life spent largely in Germany and gravely ill with the then-incurable disease scleroderma—he would die in 1940 at sixty—developed a new and bolder approach to making images.

While his works from the 1920s, when he created his best-known pictures, were small in size and populated with diminutive and delicately drawn figures and forms, and often gave viewers a sense that they were peering into enchanted and flickeringly lit other worlds, his later works, although showing the same enclosed, almost park-like realms, could be large (for him) in size and much punchier in their forms. Klee appeared to be testing himself, wanting to open out his experience. He was also surely, as a painter might say, working more with his arm than his wrist. These later works are not unknown; many were part of the Museum of Modern Art’s 1987 Klee retrospective. But the current show seemed an opportunity for viewers to finally get a real sense of their strengths.

Yet this look at Klee’s work in general and its concentration on his later years are both at the service of, and left shortchanged by, the Jewish Museum’s largest aim, which is to show his involvement with the totalitarianism that overwhelmed Germany in the 1930s. As such the exhibition is riveting, and it seems as much about the current moment as the past. It presents someone responding, albeit indirectly, to a threatening new government bent on imposing uniformity in all things and transforming as many aspects of life as possible.

The show, organized by Mason Klein, who is the principal author of its catalog, gives the American audience for the first time a look at many of the drawings that the artist did in 1933, specifically in response to the takeover of German life by the Nazis. For most viewers with a sense of Paul Klee the artist and person—a sense that although he was one of the dozen or so signal figures in twentieth-century art, he was more the creator of, as it were, works for soloists than for orchestras—the idea that he made a great number of pictures that concern the National Socialist revolution, which is how he titled the pencil drawings, will be, I believe, highly unexpected, even startling. Their existence was touched on, it is true, by O.K. Werckmeister in the catalog of the Modern’s survey. But Werckmeister, as with the Modern’s presentation of Klee altogether, gave no sense of the spirit animating the current show. It is that of an artist who on and off in his work in the later 1930s was engaged with issues and crises coursing through the news of the day. Absorbing this is a little like learning that, say, Picasso in his later years had become a Presbyterian.

That the Nazis had their eye on Klee and that his last years were difficult in personal and professional ways has been known. In the 1920s he had been one of the “Masters” at the Bauhaus, but as the decade wore on and the school moved from one city to another, and its mission became more about craft and industrial technologies than artistic expression, Klee grew restive. He was glad in 1931 to get a teaching position at the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts. Yet not long after the National Socialists became the largest party in the Reichstag in the 1932 elections, Klee, along with other teachers at the academy, was being vilified in a new social and cultural climate that was hostile to any evidence of free thinking and programmatically antisemitic. He was labeled a “Galician Jew” in a newspaper early in 1933 (he was not Jewish), and shortly thereafter his and his wife Lily’s house on the Bauhaus campus in Dessau, where they still lived, was broken into by the Gestapo. Papers crucial to his identity were removed though later returned.

In September of that year, word came that for artists to work in Germany, they would need to apply for membership in the Reich Chamber of Culture, and this ultimatum—Klee already knew he was losing the Düsseldorf job—is apparently what drove him and Lily to move to Switzerland. Yet even there they must have felt insecure. Their one child, Felix, remained in Germany, and although Klee, from his perch in Bern, managed to sell works in Paris and New York, he was also witnessing the vengeful destruction of the museum and gallery worlds for progressive modern art in Germany that had believed in and nurtured his talent.

His dealer in Düsseldorf and Berlin, Alfred Flechtheim, fled to Paris. Klee had to see, too, many of his works included in the slanderous “Degenerate Art” exhibition organized by the Nazis in 1937. On top of this, and in addition to his wasting disease, his initial effort to obtain Swiss citizenship was denied, and he was kept in limbo for years. The papers granting it would arrive days after his death.

Yet that Klee directly responded to the Nazi menace has not generally been part of his biography or the accounts of his art. His friend and biographer Will Grohmann, who worked with him in putting together Paul Klee (1955), long a standard volume on the artist, knew firsthand how dangerous the Hitler government had made life in Germany. Grohmann also lost his job, and a book he did on Klee’s drawings was pulled from circulation and destroyed by the Nazis in 1934. But he was not sounding an odd note when he went on to write in his large study that the artist “held aloof from the conflicts and controversies raging around him…. The fact that the Nazi government proscribed his work must be viewed on a strictly political plane and need not detain us here.”

Klee’s aloofness even from conflicts among fellow artists, and certainly from the politics of academic life, emerges as one of his defining characteristics in the highly detailed portrait of him in Nicholas Fox Weber’s The Bauhaus Group (2009). His distance was such that it led students, in one incident, to giggle at the idea of Klee’s possibly breaking his work routine to participate in an administrative meeting. For some of them, perhaps most notably Anni Albers, his removed demeanor gave him at times an exalted, Buddha-like aura.

Klee’s pronounced personal detachment need not preclude, of course, his being outraged and frightened by the ferocious edicts that almost immediately began falling from the new, ideology-driven government. He kept his concerns, however, to himself. He seems to have shown the drawings about the Nazi takeover only to his wife and to two colleagues, and they were noticed as a distinct body of work only in the 1980s. They were put on public view in 2003 in Germany and Switzerland, and they ultimately became, Klein writes, “the foundation of an exhibition.” It “inevitably led to a broader, and timely, reconsideration” of Klee’s work—a reconsideration, Klein acknowledges, that sets the artist in part on a “sociopolitical terrain not commonly associated” with him.

Seen in number at the show, the drawings are feathery and airy, and impromptu in spirit. Mostly representational, they give us figures who have been drawn with lengthy, curving, and overlapping, though sometimes short and jabbing, pencil strokes. Having the weight of sketched notes, they need their titles to make an impact, and it is understandable why Klee made little of them. But coming to them as we do now, in a climate all too similar to that of Germany in 1933, when Germans first learned the degree to which the Nazis sought to put into practice their ruthless rhetoric, the drawings grip our attention. We cannot help but want to register what Klee caught, however sketchily or elliptically, about the atmosphere of violence, intimidation, and strife suffusing everyday life. The exhibition, in which Hitler’s name appears frequently on the wall texts—we see him in a drawing done in 1931, before he became Reich chancellor—conveys a tingling, uncanny sense of being about us now.

The drawings take such subjects, to use their titles, as Child Murder (adults striking or possibly protecting infants) and Emigrating (a man and woman in tattered clothes go forth). Crawling Man, which shows a distraught man on his knees, seems to be about humiliation. Difficult Children shows children being literally stepped on. Accusation in the Street, with a tall figure ordering small ones, concisely suggests the vulnerability of people in public places. There is almost no need to see a drawing titled Revival of Manly Discipline, a translation of Erneuerung der Mannszucht. There is so much mannszucht going around in American life now that a viewer wants to salute Klee for being precisely on the right track in noting this accompaniment of a dictator’s amalgamation of power.

For Klein and presumably for other current commentators on the artist, the drawings of 1933 have paved the way for seeing allusions to the Third Reich and its laws and attitudes elsewhere in Klee’s art of the 1930s. An often-reproduced painting entitled Revolution of the Viaduct, which is in the show and presents the viaduct’s arches in different colors, clumping out toward the viewer, certainly can be seen (once we are given some prompts) as alluding to the Hitler years. The image caused even Grohmann to wonder if Klee had Nazi strongmen on his mind (he noted that the marchers lacked heads). Klein, thinking about Klee’s political awarenesses in another way, speculates that the artist, in presenting the arches in different colors, with each advancing on its own, was making a case for self-determination and nonconformism in a time when this was forbidden.

Some of the allusions in other works may be almost astounding to viewers familiar with Klee. In an oil of a loutish and crazed face, Voice from the Ether: “And you will eat your fill!,” he is said to show the kind of impressionable young man of the 1930s who could be attracted to Hitler on the radio. The picture’s wall label tells us that the two similar curvy marks near the man’s ear, which look like the letter S, stand for the SS. In a painting called Scarecrow, the patch of brown that the stick figure wears refers, we learn, to Hitler’s Brownshirts. Paintings of pieces of fruit whose shapes are perhaps odd are said to be comments on Nazi ideology, embracing as it did eugenics and the notion of superior and inferior versions of people.

Yet while Revolution of the Viaduct is a sturdy and witty work (and can absorb, but does not have to absorb, a sociopolitical interpretation), many of the other pictures from the time on view, certainly including the images of odd fruit and the likely SS recruit, are very second-rate Klees. The exhibition as a whole, moreover, which includes works from 1903 onward, when Klee was in his twenties, feels, given that it calls itself a “sweeping presentation of the artist and his work,” insufficient. His pictures from the 1920s, which in another sweep might constitute the core of the presentation, are weakly represented. Limited in number, they seem to stand as preamble to the real story.

The Paul Klee we are given is an artist who was often attuned to the ominous and to the edgily uncertain in all aspects of life. This is not wide of the mark, and it is a strand in Klee’s makeup that is perhaps lost sight of. It often can be felt when he handled figures and faces. When, as an artist, he thought about people, he seemingly could not help being caricatural or ironically distant. His first mature works—etchings of vaguely mythological nude figures, which are at the start of the exhibition—form a cast of grotesques, as do many of the big-eyed (and rather cartoonish) characters, identified often as jesters, angels, or circus tightrope walkers, who can take center stage in his watercolors. The many hand puppets he made between 1916 and 1925—they were created, along with a puppet theater, for the entertainment of his son and are not in the show—almost all have scary, ghoulish faces, and in self-portraits from different times he can present himself as demonic or wizened. Thinking of this side of Klee makes more understandable his wanting to say something about the goons and malevolent clowns who took over Germany in the 1930s. Perhaps he recognized an aspect of himself in them.

Mason Klein wants us to see that for Klee the totalitarian clampdown of the time was an attack on the nature of his art, which was a demonstration of “freedom.” This is a good word for what Klee gives his audience. Suggesting, in their small dimensions, objects that could be created at a desk, his pictures are about the making of art out of whatever flits through one’s mind, set in place with whatever materials are on hand. Klee himself used at different times gesso, burlap, paste, watercolor, newspaper, oil, pastel, ink, gouache, wrapping paper, canvas, cloth, and more—all employed, as Ann Temkin wrote in the Modern’s catalog, in “homemade combinations.”

Connoting privacy, solitariness, and communion with oneself, his work has surely made many people who are not artists feel inspired to try something themselves. Your first exposure to Klee—and it can go on for a long time and encompass the first ten, even twenty, of his pictures that you encounter—is a joyride. Whether in exhibitions or books, new kinds of Klees keep appearing, and at first you seemingly cannot make distinctions among them. You do not want to. It is the flow of different facets of his imagination that seems to constitute his work. His pictures might be geometric in spirit, or he might take off from children’s blocky drawings of houses, flowers, or people. Silhouette shapes or stick-figure versions of trees, ships, fish, sliver moons, full moons, even letters of the alphabet, even commas and exclamation points—each can appear as a spot decoration or can become, depending on its size and where it is placed, a work’s protagonist. Organic or straight-edged forms are sometimes repeated, overlapping one another and in different tones, suggesting all at once curtains going up or down on a stage, growth in itself, and the passage of time.

Over years of looking, however, I have found that some kinds of Klees especially call out. I have come to feel that his art was at its most lovable and extraordinary in the period toward the end of World War I (in which he served) and then after, especially around 1919 to 1922. Leading up to this time, he worked largely as a graphic artist, but now, around the age of forty, he began painting consistently in oil for the first time, and the results are ecstatic works (they are barely present in the current show). In paintings that usually have no one central point, we often see round forms suggesting flowers or lollipops, which are placed left and right and up and down with a rhythm all their own. Punctuating these centerless realms now and then with tree or house forms—or with doorways or steps or mountain peaks or the occasional little person—Klee handled his oil medium with a lustrousness and a vibrancy he would hardly match again.

Unlike much of his work, these paintings seem to take place in an actual somewhere. They are frequently dark (as opposed to bright) in tone, with luxuriant browns and purples and reds suffusing the backdrops. Even when the images recall checkerboards or Cubist pictures, the scenes, we eventually realize, are landscapes of a sort, and with or without Klee’s moon shapes it often feels like night is coming on. We look, in effect, at what might be called the fairy-tale hour, when everything could be transformed into something else. But we are left as much with the intuitive, inexplicable way the pictures, which can evoke simultaneously gardens, walls, forests, and cupboards, have been constructed.

I have come to feel, too, that Klee’s work succeeds most when his drawer’s hand—his thin black line—takes a backseat to his color and sense of texture. On its own, his line, for all the brilliance of the tricky terrains he can create with it, often leaves his pictures seeming arch or illustrational. He famously said that in embarking on a work, he was “taking a line for a walk.” You can almost see it happening in one picture or another: how he was excited by the possibilities of a particular kind of mark or stroke or shape and then let it proliferate on its own. That is, his line goes for a “walk.”

But the walk is not only the growth of more lines. It is the color or the texture that the line engenders on its way somewhere. The walk is how the work is completed. It is where Klee’s instinctual feeling for combining materials has taken him. As Weber tells it in The Bauhaus Group, Klee, who was in charge of most meals for his family, cooked in the same improvisatory way, bringing together whatever was at hand and measuring only as it seemed right at the moment.

The Jewish Museum’s show wants us to understand that Klee in his late work addressed the crises of his time. Although this enlarges him as a person in our eyes, it did not, from the evidence, enhance his art. Yet in some ways his art did expand. This can be seen at the exhibition, though the examples could be bettered. In his final years, Klee evolved a new role for his line. In his paintings, it lost its thinness. It lost its role as the wiry definer of shapes, and now, curvy or straight, and sometimes no more than a dash or a dot—and black or another distinct color—it became more of a player with the surrounding areas of color. The shapes and forms it was placed among became broader and less finely textured, too.

And while his earlier pictures were usually two feet or so on a side (and often smaller), and large paintings were rare, he became increasingly comfortable in the late 1930s with canvases or boards that were three or more feet on a side, and, unbelievably (in works not in the show), he doubled that dimension on occasion. Unlike much of what he had done before, his late pictures can make their mark from across a room. Here are works that almost ask to hang alongside, and that might complement, those of such younger contemporaries of Klee’s as Miró and Calder and even Stuart Davis.

In the writing about Klee’s late work, much is made of his increasing interest in angels as subjects. The topic has understandably been seen in light of his own predicament, living as he did in those years with his end in sight. Some of his late paintings have a fuzzy, grayed, almost charred appearance, and, accompanied by titles that refer to angels or death or fire, they can be taken as visions of transcendent states. But the liveliest late paintings in the exhibition, a still life entitled The Vase and a nearly abstract picture entitled Glance out of Red (see illustration on page 13), which seems to show a face or a torso, are the opposite of otherworldly in spirit. In their color and form, they are bright and sharp.

Maybe the formal changes in Klee’s late work are not as significant as his response to the barbarity of his time. Certainly they are not as moving to think about as his making images about mortality. But at moments Klee himself might have had another idea. He might simply have thought, like some viewers now, that in the transformations of his art in those years his line had taken quite a walk.