Paul Klee (German: [paʊ̯l ˈkleː]; 18 December 1879 – 29 June 1940) was a Swiss-born German artist. Even though we remember him as an art composer of gorgeously colored painting and well-arranged geometrical drawings. He is highly achieved in the field of literature and music, which accounts for the quintessential source of his artistic creation. However, hardly we mention his poetic thoughts that had a profound significance in the artworlds.
His publication “Writings on Form and Design Theory” (published in English as “Paul Klee Notebooks”), collecting most of his lectures in Bauhaus school is held to be as important for modern art as Leonardo de Vinci’s “A Treatise on Painting” for the Renaissance.
Klee’s poetic art ideas
Klee’s style was highly influenced by Expressionism, Cubism, and Surrealism. Klee is credited as an early adopter of abstraction, breaking from the established tradition of faithful representation in the early 1900s along with Picasso and other avant-garde artists, with the trauma of the First World War furthering his endeavor to use art to escape the material world.
Therefore, we see his paintings always tinged with a hue of existentialism, as if echoing the idea of “returning to the idyllic life of true humans”. The idea of idyllic life is revealed through the following painting as we perceive a circle of crimson rising on top of the picture, reminding us of the glorious sunset. There, in the middle of the glow comes a figure who has just returned from the field. He is approaching us from afar and looming large behind the clouds. Beneath him is a portray of a crane returning to the ethereal kingdom of the eastern world. Paul Klee’s poem is subtle as well as esoteric. Albeit we can grasp some ideas of his depictions. The true meaning seems always behind the wall. As he says himself that “one eye sees, the other feels.” A picture, resembling a poem, brings about not only rhymes but also feelings. Those feelings are symbolic so that we are not told directly about what they are, but rather they are reminders of the beautiful bygones we have ever truly experienced in life.
The lines threading people together
Those memories belonging to each individual has also a close link to our humans as a whole. Like the picture above, an exotic tone that betakes us suddenly to the eastern world. As if we are in the Taoist paradise. Therefore, his poems crossing different cultures bring together the whole universe as an integration.
This is why Paul Klee sees art as a means for communication. He uses lines to draw a “map” so that people might have something to refer to. As he says: “a drawing is simply a line going for a walk.” The “map” that he draws is not just a “dead picture”, confined in the shapes of its objects, but rather a “picture alive”. Every line is orienting a path of discovery. ”The painter should not paint what he sees, but what will be seen”. The exploration is always ongoing. As the lines crossing, overlapping, and weaving into each other, we are threading through many of his “living pictures” for a good discovery of life.
This idea is also applied to his teaching method. Conscious that art should be a means of human communication, he saw also teaching, in the exactness of the didactic method, a strict means of human communication. It is a matter of teaching others how to walk along thin invisible wires, stretched out in the darkness, trying to penetrate an unknown dimension. There can be no other way than that of going forward together along the uncertain road. There is the need not to be alone, to hold hands, to make a human chain: this is still the human basis, sentimental perhaps, of Klee's didactics.
Painting is a way to touch the unknown
Through this path, Klee walks along into the depth of human knowledge.
Klee desired to penetrate to the very depths of his knowledge of the universe; he speaks of space and time, of forces of gravity, of centrifugal and centripetal forces, of creation and destruction of the being, of the individual and the cosmos. Side by side with strangely happy intuitions, with parascientific propositions, with paradoxical postulates, and with a vast quantity of very valuable annotations relating to the daily routine of pictorial work, one finds recollections of readings, passages revealing knowledge (which is neither superficial nor second-hand) of contemporary currents of thought, psychology of form, theory of visibility, psychoanalysis, the philosophy of phenomenology. Certainly, all this does not constitute a system, but it does reveal a complicated construction in which everything seems to find its proper place.
The twist of time and space
Klee sees space and time simultaneously subjective and objective; for this reason, the sequence of values is endless and each value is not permanently bound to the object, but to the existence of the object in this or that point of space and time. It is bound to the recollection of its having been, to the possibility of its future being, under completely different conditions of space and time. The object itself has no certainty; it might have been and might be no longer; it might not be, but might be going to be. Since it is, ultimately, only a meeting of co-ordinate lines, a luminous point in the dark expanse of possible space and time, it could change into another object, whose trajectory may come to pass through that point. Should the unforeseeable parabola of our life pass through that point it could be that we might 'become' that object. Reality is a never-ending metamorphosis; this is a thought Klee had inherited from Bosch and shared with Kafka.
In this painting, space is no longer beheld three-dimensional, rather the very existence of objects is flattened, like a decorative pattern retaining nothing but symbolic meanings. Flowers are not flowers but flowers alike, cups are not cups but the resemblance of cups. This is another version of life that presents a possible world that humans have not ever imagined. The cluster of different objects is surprisingly in harmony.
Not only space and time are magical bricks for reconstructing reality, but they are also keys to open the mystery of unfathomable dreams. The following painting delineates one’s dream in twisted space and an altered timeline.There is a person sleeping like a log. Right above him hanging is an eclipse of the moon and the full-glowing sun representing the night and the day respectively. Though temporally, the moon and the sun appear in turns, the juxtaposition of their images alludes to the twist of time. As if a dreamer could embrace all the beautiful things at once. There is no way of knowing what exactly this person is dreaming of, but this unknown opens us to many possible scenarios that this person might have ever desired so eagerly in life.