Klee's Craft

...Klee understood this, which is why his titles are user-friendly...

...Before I say something verboten about degenerate art, let us return to the Third Reich...

...When he died, at age 60, the world was plunged in war, and it hardly seemed as though one individual's painstakingly wrought little pictures (most of them less than two feet on a side) would end up towering over the grandiose cultural projects of Hitler and Stalin...

...Is "The Angler" a thwarted stab at realism...

...Usually something like "Look, there's a face," "That is definitely a horse," or "I heard he was diagramming his own brain waves...

...Rarely have I seen such eloquent tribute to art as mimesis...

...What springs from this source—whatever it may be called, dream, idea, or fantasy—must be taken seriously only if it unites with the proper creative means to form a work of art" (emphasis added...

...Nineteen-twenty-one was also when Klee began teaching at a new, experimental arts and crafts school in Weimar called the Bauhaus...

...At the Phillips Collection in Washington, where 80 works by the Swiss-born modernist are now exhibited, the link with children's art is made explicit by an adjoining room filled with the sort of masterpieces proud parents affix to refrigerator doors...

...What these titles represent is a burning desire to communicate what lies hidden beneath outward appearances— a motive very far from obscurantism...

...Founded in 1919 by the architect Walter Gropius, it bobbed like a white-and-beige cork on wave after wave of political chaos and economic catastrophe, relocating to Dessau in 1925 and then to Berlin in 1932, where in July 1933 it was finally sunk by Hitler...

...As a fine artist, he was to lecture on such hands-off, "formal" topics as geometry, volume, color, and design...

...Of course, as Wolfe notes, Gropius stepped into a good gig as head of Harvard's Graduate School of Design...

...When Klee made these evocative pictures, he was no longer at the Bauhaus...

...But he never scorned the hands-on, "practical" side...

...Klee's angler looks as though he could see this coming...

...decreed Adolf Ziegler, president of the Reich Chamber of Visual Arts, when commissioned by Joseph Goebbels "to select and secure for an exhibition works of German degenerate art...

...As a refugee from a blighted land, he would have been content with a friendly welcome, a place to lay his head, two or three meals a day until he could get on his own feet, a smile every once in a while, and a chance to work, if anybody needed him...

...Especially if it looks beautiful...

...To Wolfe, it was a disaster when figures like Marcel Breuer (inventor of tubular steel furniture), Josef Albers (painter of squares), Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (progenitor of nine-tenths of the IKEA catalogue), and Mies van der Rohe (father of Glass Box Row, otherwise known as Sixth Avenue) became idols to the "savages" in "colonial" America...

...In the bookbinding workshop, he plumbed the mysteries of paper, ink, and glue...

...Why did the Nazis make such a fuss about art that was neither fully abstract nor fully representational...

...Three years later, Meyer took a group of students to Moscow to help Stalin build the modernist future, but Stalin preferred the Socialist-Classicist ("wedding cake") style and Meyer was deported in 1936...

...These subjects would have been taboo even if rendered in the approved stilted academic style...

...But unlike countless postwar art educators, Klee did not think that the way to preserve the freshness was by prolonging the incapacity...

...The buildings he bequeathed to Dessau and East Berlin are so ugly even the Bauhaus-Archive Museum of Design describes them as "void of any creative component," "angular," "poor in detail," and having "quite a parsimonious appearance...

...Seventeen Klees were included as examples of "idiotic art" spewed out by a "primitive" mind mired in "disorder" and "confusion...

...By 1921, when Klee made this picture, he was already quite successful...

...Artists who cared about subject matter were considered less "advanced," and many fine representational painters and sculptors were shut out of the booming art market...

...have limbs curved like rubber hoses, with no discernible joints...

...And his face is distorted by an X on the forehead, a double mouth, and a reversed ear...

...Visit a Klee exhibition, and you'll feel welcomed by helpful, often witty titles like "Little Regatta," "The Twittering Machine," "Sketch in the Manner of a Carpet," "Conjuring Trick," "Arches of the Bridge Stepping Out of Line," "Lonely Flower," and "The Sick Heart...

...Mostly the eye appears trapped, bound to the clutching tentacles by a sort of ligament...

...Every museum-goer knows what it's like to read arrogantly obscurantist titles like "Hegemonic Aurora," "Convolution XIV," "Up Yours," and the ubiquitous "Untitled...

...And both his fishing line and the leg of the pier trail off in a bluish haze that deepens to indigo on all sides...

...In the 1940s, when New York was the art capital of the world, and abstract expressionism the triumphant style, art lovers were exhorted not to look for recognizable images but to focus on formal elements like color, scale, paint quality, and (Clement Greenberg's obsession) "the illusion of three-dimensional space on a flat surface...

...In that notorious show, which attracted 3 million viewers, the works were displayed alongside scrawled inflammatory slogans and, in some cases, photographs of deformed or visibly deranged individuals...

...By his own testimony, Gropius sought "men who would work, not automatically as an orchestra obeys its conductor's baton, but independently although in close cooperation...

...Gropius stepped down in 1928, and his successor, the Swiss architect Hannes Meyer, was a Marxist who steered the Bauhaus toward strictly functional design, mass production, and the scientifically proven need of the proletariat to live in sterile, featureless housing projects...

...Told not to play these guessing games, museum-goers get frustrated...

...Today, of course, the art market has boomed itself into senile dementia, with the world's number-one artist (according to ArtReview) being Damien Hirst, the aging YBA (Young British Artist) best known for his 1990s installations featuring animal carcasses and maggots...

...Toward such art, the official charge was "sheer insanity...

...Jawohl...

...two scholars had written monographs about him...

...Both Stalin and Hitler hated abstraction and loved representational realism...

...Rather he was a prudent man whose leadership style resembled that of Duke Ellington: Recruit the top talent and give them their heads, up to a point (the trick being to find the point...

...The results can be seen in such lovely works as "Arabian Song" (1932), painted with thinned oils on rough jute and evoking not only the beauty of a veiled women (whose eyes look directly at you) but also the actual fabric of her chador...

...Yet unlike certain of his peers, he was not an egomaniac out to clone himself...

...We smile because we expect that, one day soon, young Mikako will learn how to draw elbows and knees...

...By "proper creative means," he did not mean fingerpaint...

...For example, the jump ropers in seven-year-old Mikako Sugai's "Skipping" Martha Bayles, who teaches in the honors program at Boston College, posts a blog called Serious Popcorn at www.artsjournal.com...

...But what about Klee's "The Angler" (1921), in which a sketchy little man teeters on the edge of an even sketchier pier, holding what appears to be a lead-weighted fishing line...

...What do untutored museum-goers say when confronted with a totally abstract piece by Kandinsky or Jackson Pollock...

...His work had been shown at two cutting-edge galleries in Munich and at the new Société Anonyme in New York...

...More severe were the attacks on works with recognizable but unacceptable subject matter: prostitutes, non-Aryans, the horrors of war, corrupt officials...

...And it is this desire to make visible what is invisible, not some imagined freedom from the rigors of art-making, that forges the true link between Klee's art and that of children...

...Alone on his shaky pier, in a faint glow surrounded by darkness, he grimaces as he drops his line into the void...

...Severest of all were the attacks on "barbarism of representation," meaning "conscious disregard for the basics of technique," "garish spattering of color," and "deliberate distortion of drawing...

...and American collectors such as Arthur Jerome Eddy and Katherine Dreier were starting to buy...

...In the summer of 1937, 16,000 modernist works were seized from German museums and collections, and "The Angler" was one of 650 chosen for the Entartete Kunst ("Degenerate Art") exhibition that toured Germany and Austria for the next four years...

...Why can't the damned artist offer a hint, a clue, something for us to grab onto...

...Ignoring these grandiose aims, Klee devoted himself to the demanding, apprentice-style craft workshops that were the Bauhaus's chief distinction...

...Gaze of Silence" offers a stylized eye painted in green, brown, and gold, which conjures thoughts of an owl, a masked man, or some other being with a cool, steady, disconcerting gaze...

...Give us that, and most of us will accept, even relish, large amounts of what the Nazis dubbed "distortion...

...But, mercifully, and with a little help from Klee's American friends, they did...

...No art without craft, was his credo...

...The support he received from Americans, and from Germans living in the States, notably Emmy Scheyer, is the focus of the Phillips exhibition...

...These sins were not redeemable by inoffensive subject matter—indeed, some of the worst venom was hurled at landscapes, still lifes, and religious pictures done in the style of expressionism, fauvism, cubism, or some other "-ism" that got up the Führer's nose...

...Because of this, abstraction got a good rap after the war, realism a bad one...

...in the words of the German scholar Wilhelm Worringer, "The criterion of judgment to which we cling as something axiomatic, is, as I have said, approximation to reality...

...From Bauhaus to Our House, Tom Wolfe's hilarious send-up of modernism's impact on American architecture, aims many a barb at the "white gods" who emigrated to the United States in the 1930s...

...This laid-back style may help to explain why Klee stuck around for seven years, despite never really buying into the program stated in the Bauhaus Manifesto: Let us create a new guild of craftsmen, without the class distinctions that raise an arrogant barrier between craftsman and artist...

...My personal favorite is "A Visit to The DIA" (Detroit Institute of Arts) by 11-year-old Gregory Stafford, which shows dinosaurs strolling through an art museum, gazing at paintings and sculptures of dinosaurs much like themselves...

...Some of the tentacles contain arrows, a favorite hieroglyph of Klee's, which indicate both motion and threat...

...But in 1933 he was fired and forced to flee with his wife Lily to his hometown of Bern, Switzerland, where he lived until 1940, suffering from schleroderma but producing an amazing body of work...

...Two other works on jute, "Gaze of Silence" (1932) and "Angst" (1934), also look at you, if less directly...

...The image is that of a mind trapped by its own fears...

...Children occupy that same ground, for two reasons: perceptual freshness and technical incapacity...

...Angst," painted in pale gouache on jute coated with chalk, is more dynamic: The eye shrinks to the left while glancing back (with a red vertical slit of a pupil) at amoeba-like tentacles clutching at it from the right...

...It's worth noting that only 23 of the surviving pieces from the Entartete Kunst exhibition are totally nonrepresentational (16 of them by Klee's friend Wassily Kandinsky...

...Could it be that they understood, albeit perversely, that ordinary people often enjoy such art...

...All the more striking, then, to read Wolfe's admiring take on Gropius's arrival: Gropius had the healthy self-esteem of any ambitious man, but he was a gentleman above all else, a gentleman of the old school, a man who was always concerned about a sense of proportion, in life as well as design...

...As he explained in a 1924 lecture, "Our pounding heart drives us down, deep down to the source of all...

...Klee was interested in children's art because he occupied the middle ground between representation and abstraction...

...Even though Gropius's successor Meyer had no use for what he contemptuously called "the individual emotional activity of an artist," Klee stayed at the Bauhaus until 1930, at which point he took what he hoped would be a secure job at the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts...

...A few of these are delightful...

...His limbs are also curved like rubber hoses...

...in the weaving workshop at Dessau, he learned about dyes and textiles from masters like Gunta Stölzl...

...Most child artists fail to achieve anything like an approximation to reality, but we forgive them because we assume their failure is not deliberate...

...Together let us conceive and create the new building of the future, which will embrace architecture and sculpture and painting in one unity and which will rise one day toward heaven in the hands of a million workers, like the crystal symbol of a new faith...