Word: klees
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...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...
That was indeed the crux of Klee's art. His work sprang from a peculiarly aseptic meditative center, neither "emotional" nor "intellectual," but simply withdrawn. His reputation as a great teacher seems to rest more on his published theories in the Pedagogical Sketchbook than on the results he got from his pupils. Though he was one of the ornaments of the Bauhaus during his years in Germany, working there did not affect his style, nor did his idiosyncratic style affect the Bauhaus theorists. It was just another monastery...
...early etching, Hero with a Wing, 1905, is typical. It belongs to the sardonic world of absurd theater-a parody of a classical statue, failed Icarus with a broken arm and a wooden leg, brandishing his one frayed wing like a plucked and grumpy rooster. Other artists of Klee's time, a Bonnard or a Matisse, could and did summon up with a few brush strokes a whole universe of specific experiences-the golden, fuzzy weight of a peach, the glaze of china, the density and pink warmth of an odalisque's leg. Klee was not interested...
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...