Word: klee
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Bauhaus attitude as readily as jimmies are with Boston ice cream cones. In its art work the Bauhaus mixes mysticism with the concrete. In its pedagogy it encourages imaginative thinking yet demands well-defined results. And from this composite house of arts-crafts-architecture, appeared distinct personalities like Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Walter Gropius, Lazslo Moholy-Nagy...
What is missing in the exhibit is the eccentricity of certain personalities such as Johannes Itten and Georg Muche who shaved their heads and dressed as monks, or Oskar Schlemmer's stage sets and ballets. Yet the imagination of Klee works, or even of a doll-house like representation of a Metal Exhibit (Joost Schmidt 1934) complete with boat propellers and model airplanes, shows the creative richness of the Bauhaus that encouraged a tradition in education as well as art. The Bauhaus brought art off its pedestal and seduced even the common Pygmalion; the Busch should bring such attractive nuisances...
...point is that of Alfred Kubin (1877-1959), some of whose drawings are presently on show at the Serge Sabarsky Gallery in New York. For years, Kubin was regarded as a mere footnote to Austrian Expressionism-a man whose chief importance was vicarious, having influenced the young Paul Klee and provided enough indicative puffs of fantasy with his drawings and book illustrations to qualify him as a "precursor" of Surrealism...
Syntax of Fantasy. What connects Klee's inner vision to present experience is not his power to transmit "reality" but the enchanting spectacle of his language. His inventiveness was phenomenal and contained surprising propositions for, and anticipations of the future. Flower Myth, 1918-with its squiggled symbols for plants and trees and chirpy bird flying across the red landscape of an equivocal torso that might be Mother Earth-is the ancestor of the flattened, wrinkled landscape-nudes, scrawled with graffiti, that Jean Dubuffet was to paint thirty years later. It is a syntax of fantasy, the color swelling...
...Klee may have been the last painter who felt that he could construct a universe-not just some parts of it-in his own head, in complete microscopic detail. It was not life at large, but a doll's theater of life, that played out its tiny and absorbing dramas within the frames of his paintings. He may not have been a major artist. But he was a stunningly complete...