Artist Paul Klee on painting, museums, children, and madness
A story from "The Will to Style," an unpublished book about 'radical' art students at the Weimar Bauhaus, 1919-24.
Theater instructor Lothar Schreyer was in his studio at the Bauhaus School in Weimar one afternoon when he heard a peculiar noise coming from overhead. Schreyer associated the sound with the footfalls of a large animal, pacing back and forth, and assumed the culprit was a cat. The animal he had in mind belonged to artist Paul Klee whose studio was upstairs, directly overhead from his own. “Fritzi,” Klee’s cat, was a very large beast, Schreyer recalled — “a cross between a housecat and a wildcat.”
Schreyer went upstairs and knocked on Klee’s door. Klee opened it, ushered Schreyer into his workshop, then closed the door, locking it. Klee put the key in the pocket of his smock, then hung a piece of cardboard on the doorknob in front of the keyhole, completely hiding his activities from prying eyes. Immediately, Schreyer noticed powerful smells emitting from different corners of Klee’s expansive room.
“It had a powerful and warming mix of coffee, tobacco, paste, oil paint, varnish, wood finish, turpentine, and strange mixtures,” Schreyer wrote.
While all of the Bauhaus School in Weimar was a laboratory, Klee’s studio was a genuine “magical kitchen,” Schreyer wrote in his 1956 memoir. Over here, by a washbasin, several tables held arrangements of tools and materials — paint boxes, palettes, tubes, paint cloths, flat bowls of laquer and varnish, liquid-fuel stoves, chalk mixes, odd pastes, long and short wooden handles for thick and thin brushes, a collection of small trowels, quill pens, etching needles and knives, tweezers, strips of linen, handmade paper, Japanese paper, cartons, pieces of canvas (some coated; others, not). And all of it, Schreyer said, seemed well-ordered, within easy reach of the master’s hand, “as demanded by his paintings.”
Klee’s dark and quiet eyes considered Schreyer from behind the cloud of bluish smoke that rose from his pipe. The artist’s smile expressed an ever-present sense of irony.
“Come in!” said Klee, as he guided his visitor to his work area. Several easels were arranged in the center of the room, each holding an unfinished work of art. A permanent prisoner to his labors, the painter moved back and forth among the different easels, sometimes turning to retrieve something from one of the tables, according to Schreyer. At some point, Schreyer realized that the painter’s dance was the source of the soft, creaking sound that he’d attributed to Fritzi, the cat.
“Klee liked painting several works simultaneously, alongside each other. He worked, going from one picture to the next, first touching on this, then another color elsewhere.”
“Are you making progress, Schreyer?” Klee asked.
“No!” came the answer. “Not a single step.”
“Me neither,” said Klee. “I’m finding too many boundries.”
Schreyer thought about this.
“I suspect there would be only one boundry,” he ventured.
The two men stared at each other thoughtfully.
“Perhaps you’re right,” said Klee. “But that puts an end to all art, I suppose. And perhaps it’s also immodest (unbescheiden) to focus on a single boundry.”
Likely feeling out of his depth with the bewildering abstract painter, Schreyer told Klee he was “probably right” on both accounts.
“For a long time, I’ve been determined to protect myself,” said Klee. “You see, I’ve just one small surface, the surface of the canvas. Naturally, I want to fill this framed surface with all my sensibility and power. But I cannot. And it may not even be possible.”
Klee went on to explain how he was forced to “reckon with borders” within the unyielding recapitulation of the rectangular frame.
“I go here and there among these surfaces, zig and zag across the diagonals, the vertical and horizontal parallels,” he told Schreyer. “My steps create a grid, a network, from top to bottom, from left to right, and back again.”
“I circle the surface with bends, spirals, ovals, and curves,” Klee went on. “Each moment, new borders are created in the movement of the line (and) the changing area within. Adding tiers of light and color, I continue to make new borders on the surface, boundaries that optically raise or lower that surface.”
Painting moment by moment, Klee created “new borders in the movement of each line, the changing area within,” working with light and color to create “new boundaries, optically raising or lowering the surface” of the canvas….
“On and on I go,” the artist said, “distancing myself from seeing the one boundary that you suppose and seek. I find the multitude to be infinite, without limit. You, Schreyer, want one design-entity that, in the end, is borderless.”
Klee apparently had Lothar Schreyer well-pegged. The new Bauhaus theater-arts teacher confessed his attraction to the texts of Christian mystics, most notably Jakob Böhme (1575-1624). Schreyer was more attentive to making “completed works,” as opposed to immersing himself in the creative process, as Klee did.
“We are concerned only with the process,” the longtime Bauhaus art teacher told his visitor. “Once completed, the work doesn’t belong to us anymore. We lose control of it to the degree that it becomes an object of trade, and finally an object of speculation. Heaven protect us from becoming apparitions in museums.”
“Heaven does protect us from it!” said Schreyer, launching into his own monolog about a sense “balance” and “peace” within one’s work or, perhaps, as “just another vessel in which to cook up turbulence?”
“And isn’t it all children’s art,” he finally asked Klee. “A child’s game?”
“Of course, it’s a child’s game!” Klee declared. “All the time, the critic-lords say my paintings resemble the scribbling and doodles of children. And I should hope they’re equal to them! The pictures painted by my little (son) Felix are better pictures than mine, which often drip through my brain, something I cannot completely prevent, unfortunately, as I sometimes work too much. …And that’s not everything. Our wise lord-scriveners say my paintings are actually related to mental illness.”