Word: klee
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Paul Klee (rhymes with fey) was one of the greatest artists of the 20th century, and he knew it. But the calculated modesty of Klee's art had the world fooled for a long time. Not until his death in 1940 (at 60) did it become apparent that Klee had raised the curtain on a thousand new ways of picturing things. Klee's ways are reassembled in a definitive study of his work by German Critic Will Grohmann (Paul Klee, Harry N. Abrams; $12.50), in U.S. bookstores last week...
Trouble at Four. Born into a cultivated music-teacher's family near Bern, Switzerland, Klee thought of making music his profession. He chose painting instead, simply "because it seemed to be lagging behind," and undertook rigorous formal training. Klee's chief means of advancing art was to let his unconscious whisper through his brush. At four, he would rush to his mother for protection from the "evil spirits" that appeared on his drawing paper. With age, he came to feel at home in his dream world of huge, dim forces, and was able to say, with none...
...Klee knew the course of his life and art precisely. "I have to disappoint at first," he confided to his journal. "I want to be as though newborn, knowing absolutely nothing about Europe; ignoring facts and fashions, to be almost primitive. Then I want to do something very modest, to work out by myself a tiny, formal motif, one that my pencil will be able to encompass without any technique . . . Pictures will more than fill the whole of my lifetime ... it is less a matter of will than of fate...
Splotched Fantasies. From that point forward, Klee produced a frosty torrent of little dream pictures (there are some 900 in U.S. collections alone). By catching his dreams on the wing, and being quite satisfied with just a feather, he was able to produce an almost endless variety. Some of his works resemble children's squiggles, others the splotched fantasies of the mad. Still others are made entirely of dots, or squares, or crosshatchings, or Oriental arabesques. Some of his pictures are composed simply of illegible script-foreshadowing Cartoonist Saul Steinberg. He illustrated Candide with raggedy stick figures...
...standards, however lucidly set or economically met, are by no means the whole of art, and the 20th century has produced at least three painters who rival Matisse in importance: Wassily Kandinsky (for daring), Paul Klee (for imagination) and Pablo Picasso (for passion). Picasso, the only one still living, has always been more easily bored than the others, and has always come back bursting with new beauties. If much of his work is mud, the best is thunder and lightning which makes Matisse's rainbow splendor seem a bit thin by comparison...