Paul Klee

This sheet, whose title means ‘Girl Possessed’, could be interpreted as the representation of an actress or singer whose ardent performance has unwittingly descended into the ridiculous. The notion of ‘possession’, admittedly, has a number of implications: it could also mean being transported by a mysterious ecstasy, during which the possessed person sees beyond the veil of everyday reality. Seen in this light, could this girl be an oracular Delphic priestess or a female shaman in a trance, baring her teeth in ‘animal’ fashion and uttering hidden secrets? Her remote gaze and solemn symmetry would fit such a notion. The question remains as to why the girl has no hair. Shorn for religious reasons? Shaved off in the psychiatric clinic? Whatever the case, we are made spectators of an utterance that opens the door to a reality beyond rational perception – something true of Klee’s art as a whole.

During the years 1930–33 Klee produced numerous works characterized by the use of small, regularly spaced dots of colour. He called these works ‘divisionist’, thus associating his technique with that of Seurat and Signac, who in the late nineteenth century had built up their pictures with small strokes of primary and complementary colours to achieve a systematic use of colour that reflected new optical theories. Unlike the Postimpressionists, however, Klee lays down his grid of dots on top of bright colour planes, thereby setting off an interplay of different colour membranes. In Aufgehender Stern (Rising Star), this grid appears in front of delicate clouds of colour and is complemented by small, detached planes and open arrangements of lines. The lines at the bottom of the picture mark horizons, for example, while at the top a zigzag trail charts the path travelled over time by a star rising in the firmament. The picture as a repository of time – a central idea of Klee’s art.

Having suffered from 1933 onwards under the political threat to his own work and to European culture as a whole, in 1935/36 Paul Klee was diagnosed with an incurable scleroderma. His late œuvre seems to have been profoundly influenced by these developments. Colourful planes (often left white in works on paper) engage in dialogue with heavy, chiefly black lines, which may emerge in all manner of shapes and combinations within one and the same picture, to make signs, figures and abstract grids. Working with just one basic artistic vocabulary, Klee was now able to switch freely between figure, sign and pure form, thereby fusing the central artistic idioms of Modernism into something new. The first recognizable instance of this style in the Fondation’s collection is found in nach der UeberSchwemmung (After the flood), one of the only 25 works that Klee produced in his year of crisis, 1936. In this picture, which probably makes reference to Klee’s earlier trip to Egypt in 1928, the lines resemble a script legible only as form, but one that gains in solidity as it moves upwards and injects rhythm into the still muddily muted colours.

The theme of the flood inspired by Klee’s 1928 trip to Egypt (cf. nach der UeberSchwemmung, 1936) is encountered again in boote in der Überflutung (Boats in the floodwaters) of 1937, which seems altogether reminiscent of Egyptian art. The individual lineaments are now distinctly separate from one another: bound together by the water, the elements of the landscape take shape in an upward progression from ancient symbols via plants to simple boats.

The female figure in ein Weib für Götter (A woman for gods) is of a singular kind. She looks as if she has been crammed into the rectangular picture by force. And even though – in contrast to the Wald-Hexen witches – she is drawn with an unbroken line, she too is fragmented: just one leg and one arm are visible, the latter, moreover, severed of its hand. Her figure furthermore possesses an eerie power to transform itself: if we rotate the image 90° clockwise, her breasts turn into the eyes of a monster and the red moon becomes a mouth. What precisely does this picture show? A disfigured, entombed goddess – or a human (female) sacrifice offered to the gods? Whatever the case, in the artist’s seemingly ironically distorted image of a ‘woman for gods’ her disquieting figure no longer matches our idea of a female chosen for such a destiny. Here the myth is hidden, disquieting and mutilated.

Although still just recognizable, the figure in this luminous watercolour seems to be on the point of disintegrating into its individual parts. It stands against the Passion field of the picture with its head tilted to one side, its trunk and legs detached from its shoulders. The isolated lineament on the left, resembling a K, might be read as the first letter of the artist’s surname – in which case we might view the small figure as an image of the artist, tormented by illness and the course of developments. Yet this is just one of the possibilities offered by this existential watercolour. At any rate, life in glüht nach – as the title suggests – is ‘still glowing’ and has not yet been extinguished for good.

Constructed of powerful black lines that affirm the graphic character of the lineaments of Klee’s late work, the drawing MUMOM sinkt trunken in den Sessel (MUMOM, drunk, collapses into an armchair) – dating from 1940 and thus from the final months of the artist’s life – seems positively burlesque. The small figure portrayed here in an otherworldly in-between realm possesses a certain majesty, humorously caricatured but nevertheless wise, as it addresses itself – with its glass raised – to the final earthly things in their Dionysian variety.

This work from Klee’s estate, left untitled at his death, holds great significance for the Fondation. Against an impressive background of blue, green and itinerant cloud-like areas of white, we see a figure described by thick black lines. The figure, which is lost in thought, looks as if it is part of a grill structure that is holding it fast, prompting Will Grohmann, Klee’s friend and an early authority on his art, to call the work Gefangen (‘Captive’). But the grating seems no longer fully intact and a release into the matrix of the background only a matter of time. Correspondingly, the painting could be seen as an image balanced on the threshold between life and death, which in turn led Ernst Beyeler to suggest his own title for the work, Diesseits – Jenseits: ‘This world – next world’.