Word: klee
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...Germany circa 1903,” aims to show the period’s diversity of progressive styles and forward-looking artists. Also featured are drawings and prints taken from Harvard’s collections, among them early works by well-known artists such as Emil Nolde, Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky...
...1930s were not kind to paul Klee. When the Nazi Party rose to power in 1933, the celebrated Bauhaus painter was denounced as a "typical Galician Jew" - no matter that he was neither. His deceptively childlike yet technically sophisticated work was branded "degenerate," "subversive" and "insane." Within months he was suspended from his teaching job at the State Art Academy in Düsseldorf, and he reluctantly left Germany for Bern, where he had grown up. Then, in 1936, he was diagnosed with an incurable auto-immune disease which causes internal paralysis - including the constriction of blood vessels - and hardening...
...Pasternack ’05, who is also a Crimson editor, counts his fingers three times to get the number of band members right. Seven, he finally decides: Audrey de Smith, himself, Yan Xuan ’05, Neil G. Ellingson ’05, Eric P. Wehrenberg-Klee ’05 and Timothy H. Wong...
There was plenty of room for humor in his work, and none for deadly seriousness or pretension. The little personages of Klee's imagination are now absurd and bathetic, now goblin-like, now intrusive, but never really menacing; they interact beautifully with their titles. (One of many possible favorites was Hero with a Wing, a deliciously self-deflating proposition, since no such hero could be expected to fly as heroes should.) Klee found authority absurd; he didn't viscerally hate it, like the Dadaists, but he poked fun at it, as in The Great Emperor Rides...
Under the sway of Klee's probing, wobbling, sinuous line, everything stable seems to be coming apart, and we are brought into a world that is simultaneously lyrical and absurd. There was something prophetic about this disintegration, but perhaps it was just as well for Klee that he died in 1940, on the edge of the worst war in human history. Could he have been happy in the atrocious second half of the 20th century? One doubts...