Word: klee
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...first to recognize his value were the Dadaists. "In Klee's beautiful work," declared one of them, Marcel Janco, "we saw the reflection of all our efforts to interpret the soul of primitive man, to plunge into the unconscious and the instinctive power of creation." Even Marcel Duchamp, the least voluble of artists, admired the "extreme fecundity" of Klee--images begetting other images like horny little microbes in a Petri dish. His inspired doodling was morphed by the Surrealists, especially Max Ernst and Andre Masson, into what they called "automatism." His striped landscapes and magic-square paintings connect to Constructivism...
...been giving awards for picturesqueness, Klee would have been a nonstarter. And in all those thousands of works, to which Klee gave code numbers indicating their date and price range and his opinion of their quality, there is hardly one that has any discernible sexual content at all, no secret genitals or nipples that even the dirtiest-minded brat could ferret out. This has always helped to make him a great favorite with worried modernist parents and ensured that reproductions of his work, such as They're Biting, 1920, outnumber even those of Rousseau's jungle scenes in the nurseries...
...result has been to make Klee look both omnipresent and rather a whimsical bore. He has to be rediscovered every so often to wipe away the resentment the kiddies (now grown up) feel against his charm, wit, flyaway fantasy and all the rest. He is forever going out of style and then being dragged back into it by this or that exhibition. People have to be reminded how important an artist he was in his time, on a level with figures who now seem more formidable (if less loved) presences in the history books, such as the architect Walter Gropius...
Small pictures, powerful presence and an output that can't be compressed into a single show. The Hayward's version, "Paul Klee: The Nature of Creation," was curated by a critic, Robert Kudielka, and a painter, the supremely intelligent and responsive Bridget Riley, the grande dame of English art. As Kudielka points out in his catalog introduction, Klee's work was not rooted in any movement. However abstract, it came out of the experience of nature and culture blended. Perhaps the decisive moment in Klee's early career was a 1914 visit that he and his friend August Macke paid...
...Klee liked to make clear what sort of elements each painting was based on, as a composer states what key he is writing in. There were dot paintings, square paintings, crosshatch paintings and linear ones. The grammar of his compositions was always explicit but, at the same time, often surprising. He loved ruins, ideal scenery, viaducts, pyramids and everything that seemed both ancient and vulnerable: the stability of the pyramidal mountain in Ad Parnassum, 1932 (which translates as "To Parnassus," the mythical mountain of Apollo and the Muses), is decidedly undermined by being constructed from a faux mosaic of minuscule...