Insight on Klee
Mendelowitz, Daniel M.
Insight on Klee The Diaries of Paul Klee, 1898-1918 Edited, with an introduction by Felix Klee. University of California Press. 424 pp. $10. Reviewed by Daniel M. Mendelowitz Paul Klee the man...
...Unconsciousness was what I needed, not recreation...
...I doubt very much...
...Personal experiences and feelings, his relationships with family, friends, and fellow artists, comments on the arts and his own work are all knit into a most revealing fabric...
...I never doubted my vital force...
...I complete...
...His groping continued...
...And should I really have to be a poet, Lord knows what else I should desire...
...I know my art needs this as a basis...
...At the age of twenty-one we find the emerging artist, bewildered by his own inability to accept the prevailing values, making the following "only alcoholic entry": "I maintain...
...One cannot help wishing that Paul Klee had continued his diaries during his years at the Bauhaus, in Dussel-dorf, and finally in Bern...
...The four diaries that constitute this volume were never, according to his son, Felix Klee, intended for publication but were written "merely for his own reflection...
...Soon after, the discontent due to artistic and sexual frustration takes on a more articulate form when he says...
...I oppose...
...The recognition that at bottom I am a poet, after all, should be no hindrance in the plastic arts...
...In Naples he studied the people...
...Nonetheless...
...In Italy he says, "I have now reached a point where I can look over the great art of antiquity and its Renaissance...
...And to create something outside of one's own age strikes me as suspect...
...I persist...
...Gradually Klee found himself...
...But how is it to fare with my chosen art...
...Fortunately a volume of his diaries, originally published in German in 1957, is now available in English, thanks to the University of California Press...
...Reviewed by Daniel M. Mendelowitz Paul Klee the man has always been something of an enigma, for his art, though extremely personal, does not deal directly with the experiences of his external life...
...I act...
...He wrote: "Everything that used to be foreign to me, all the rational procedures in my profession, I now begin to resort to after all, from necessity, at least as a matter of experiment...
...I don't believe, I first want to see...
...At the age of twenty-seven the conflicting feelings were resolved...
...Travel in Italy and in North Africa provided him with insights as to his particular stylistic needs...
...I weep...
...Ugly and poor, they lie about in the sun, sick, lousy, tattered, half-naked...
...I beg...
...But, for myself, I cannot find any artistic connection with our own times...
...I do not envy...
...In the same way the various studies of his life, even the extensive biography by Will Gromann, seem to skirt the essence of the artist as a man...
...Klee began the notations in 1898, when he was nineteen years old...
...I do not turn back...
...I am neutral—attached to them without pity, with a kind of knowledge-hungry aversion...
...Felix Klee has added a brief postscript to cover the years from 1918 to his death in 1940...
...Only quiet, only quiet...
...I wager...
...of what use, then, was a delightful landscape...
...I know...
...I imagine a very small formal motif and try to execute it economically, not in several stages, of course, but in a single act, armed with pencil...
...Rather than being a day to day record, the diaries are made up of sequentially numbered commentaries on selected experiences of particular significance to Klee...
...I must...
...I create in hatred...
...The bells of the herds up in the mountains had sounded there before...
...Twenty-one years old...
...In a sense the words round out and fill in the curious and fanciful outlines established through his paintings and drawings...
...Most persons interested in Klee are familiar with the facts of his birth, upbringing, and his slow but steady development as a painter...
...All who enjoy and admire Klee's works will enjoy and profit from seeing the artist and the works through another medium...
...It is a hopeless state, to feel in such a way that the storm rages on all sides at once and nowhere is a lord who commands the chaos...
...The story of his eventual success, his appointment as a professor at the Bauhaus and later at the academy at Dusseldorf, and his eventual flight from Nazi Germany back to his native Switzerland are also well known, but such information seems to provide little insight into his work...
...The dryads' chatter bored me...
...But we can at least be happy that he left us these notes from his earlier years, for the witty, cryptic, and enigmatic personality which we glimpse through his drawings and paintings takes on a new dimension seen in the light of his own comments...
...I hate...
...Entry after entry complements and completes the image we have of the artist, revealing the conflicts, the depths of feeling, and the rarified intelligence that made possible the tremendous and unique body of his work...
...Certainly, a sea swells within me, for I feel...
...On the water the despair of loneliness lurked around me...
...While I admit...
...The diaries start with recollections from the age of three and continue intermittently up to the end of World War I in 1918...
Vol. 29 • January 1965 • No. 1
