Paul Klee: The Visible and the Legible [Illustrated] 022609118X, 9780226091181

Citation preview

PA U L K L E E

PA U L K L E E The Visible and the Legible

ANNIE BOURNEUF The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

Annie Bourneuf is assistant professor of art history at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2015 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2015. Printed in China 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15   1 2 3 4 5 ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­09118-­1 (cloth) ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­23360-­4 (e-­book) DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226233604.001.0001 This publication is made possible in part by a grant from the Barr Ferree Foundation Fund for Publications, Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bourneuf, Annie, author. Paul Klee : the visible and the legible / Annie Bourneuf. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-226-09118-1 (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-226-23360-4 (e-book) 1. Klee, Paul, 1879–1940. 2. Art, Modern. I. Title. N6888.K55B68 2015 740.92—dc23 2014026786 This book has been printed on acid-­free paper.

For Ben

Contents

Acknowledgments  ix

A Note on Klee’s Sequential Numbering System  xiii

Introduction  1 1

The “Painter-­Draftsman”  13

2

Seeing and Speculating  65

3

A Refuge for Script  141

Epilogue: Old Sound  183 Notes  187 Index  243

vii

Acknowledgments

My first and greatest debt of gratitude I owe to Brigid Doherty for her support, her criticism, and her example. An incomparable mentor, her thinking has inspired and guided me from the first inklings I had of this project. Her questions and ideas have improved this book at every turn. Hal Foster shaped the aims of this book, and his encouragement and wisdom have sustained it. The incisive and detailed comments of Yve-­Alain Bois made me see more clearly the book’s weaknesses and strengths. Bridget Alsdorf helped me to understand how this project’s metamorphosis into a book might be accomplished. I owe special thanks to Charles W. Haxthausen, whose thinking on Klee has had a profound influence on this book and who could not have been a more welcoming and generous guide both to Klee and to Klee studies. I am grateful to Carol Armstrong for her criticism in the first stage of this project, and to Michael W. Jennings for his encouragement and support. The book has benefited enormously from discussions over the years with Saul Anton, Gordon Hughes, and Joyce Tsai. And I am grateful as well to all who have read and criticized portions of my study, including Maureen Chun, Noam Elcott, Alex Kitnick, Jennifer King, and Michele Matteini. At

ix

the University of Chicago Press, I thank the two anonymous reviewers whose thoughtful and detailed comments much improved the book, and my editor Susan Bielstein, who steered the project to completion with the greatest address. This study could never have been written without the generous support of the Fulbright Program, the Dedalus Foundation, and the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. I am grateful for the Felix Gilbert Membership that allowed me to bring the book to completion at the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study—­the ideal environment, both stimulating and serene. The Faculty Enrichment Grant I received from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, as well as the Jane Faggen Prize from Princeton’s Department of Art and Archaeology, were also most helpful. The months I spent at the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern were indispensable, and I am very grateful for the expert advice I received there from Christine Hopfengart, Fabienne Eggelhöfer, Patrizia Zeppetella, Myriam Weber, and Osamu Okuda, as well as for the kind help, during and after my visit, of Eva Wiederkehr Sladeczek, Edith Heinimann, and Heidi Frautschi. I thank Oskar Bätschmann for his hospitality. I owe thanks as well to Claudine Metzger of the Kunstmuseum Bern; Christine Ramseyer of the Kunstmuseum Basel; Julia Friedrich of the Museum Ludwig, Cologne; John Prochilo of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Mark Pascale of the Art Institute of Chicago; and the Galerie Jan Krugier, Geneva, for generously allowing me to spend time with works in their collections. In the search for illustrations, I thank Anthony Burton of the University of Chicago Press for his patience and helpfulness, as well as Jane Sykora of the Institute for Advanced Study, for her assistance. My translations benefited a great deal from the expert advice of Laura Frahm and Jens Klenner. Portions of this book first appeared in altered form in Bauhaus Construct: Fashioning Identity, Discourse, and Modernism, ed. Robin Schuldenfrei and Jeffrey Saletnik (London: Routledge, 2009), 105–­24, and in “Walter Benjamin’s Media Tactics: Optics, Perception, and the Work of Art,” ed. Michael W. Jennings and Tobias Wilke, special issue, Grey Room 39 (Spring 2010): 75–­93. I would like to thank the editors of these publications. x ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am grateful as well to the people and the institutions that allowed me to try out portions of this project in public—­Charlotte Schoell-­Glass and the Kunstgeschichtliche Seminar at the Universität Hamburg; Marsha Morton, Steven Mansbach, and the Historians of German and Central European Art and Architecture; Robin Schuldenfrei, Jeffrey Saletnik, and Peter Nisbet; Tobias Wilke and the Department of German at Princeton; and Beatriz Colomina

and the Program in Media and Modernity at Princeton—­and for the questions I received on these occasions. Megan Luke’s advice was invaluable. I would also like to thank Diane Schulte for so cheerfully smoothing out all manner of organizational complexities. I thank Maureen Chun, Lisa Lee, and Kate Nesin for their comradeship during the closing phases of writing, and Catharine Diehl for hers at the beginning. I am thankful as well for my colleagues and my students at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, who have aided this project in so many ways—­with encouragement, advice, and tough questions of the best kind. I thank my parents for their love and support these long years. I should probably never have written a book on Klee were it not for my father’s interest in him and the presence of Will Grohmann’s 1954 book in our home library. I would like to thank my father as well, now in his capacity as reference librarian, for crucial help in this project’s last stages. And I thank Ben Lytal for having worked on every paragraph that follows (as well as on all the book’s invisible reinforcements), for setting me an example by his own work, and for his sustaining faith in this project and in me—­this book is dedicated to him.

xi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A Note on Klee’s Sequential Numbering System

The captions for most of Paul Klee’s works reproduced in this book include a second number after the date; at times I use this number in the text as well. The second number is part of Klee’s own system for ordering his work: it corresponds to the sequence in which he entered the object into the oeuvre-­catalogue he used to keep track of his production. For instance, the caption for Klee’s Ship-­star-­festival (fig. 2.16) tells us that this was the sixty-­second work that he entered into his oeuvre-­catalogue in 1916. In this case, as in many others, Klee inscribed both the date and the second number on the work itself (here, in ink on the lower left corner of the cardboard mount).

xiii

Figure 0.1  Paul Klee, Landscape with Gallows

(Landschaft m. d. Galgen), 1919, 115. Oil and pen on primed gauze on cardboard, 36 × 46 cm. The Collection of David M. Solinger. © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Introduction

Paul Klee’s Landscape with Gallows (Landschaft m. d. Galgen) of 1919 consists of a painted ground of red, yellow, and blue on gessoed gauze, traversed by thin pen lines and dotted with figures drawn in black paint (fig. 0.1). The title encourages us to pick out the form of the reversed and inverted L centered at the top as the gallows; just one corner of this gallows touches the pen outline of the hill, which is marked by a cross. Klee’s painting has been compared to Pieter Bruegel’s Magpie on the Gallows (1568; fig. 0.2)1—­and indeed, both pictures present us with a gallows hill with a cross at the center and a landscape around it, swarming with detail and incident, or at least their indications. But Klee’s painting seems to reverse the spatial order of Bruegel’s. In Bruegel’s, we ourselves seem to hover above the hilltop mound on which the gallows stand; two men, standing just a few steps below that mound, surveying the panoramic river landscape below them, figure our viewing within the painting. In Klee’s, the gallows hill appears far in the background—­or, in any case, near the top of the picture. But many of Klee’s other small schematic signs—­these trees and buildings dotted here and there in the hilly Landscape—­do seem to correspond spatially to the things of Bruegel’s landscape.

1

Figure 0.2  Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Magpie on the Gallows, 1568. Oil on panel, 45.9 cm × 50.8 cm. Hessisches

Landesmuseum, Darmstadt, Germany.

The largest and most elaborate of Klee’s “buildings,” at the upper left, might be matched with Bruegel’s castle on a promontory in the corresponding position. So, too, might Klee’s boatlike “hieroglyph” near the center of his picture be matched with Bruegel’s boat navigating a bend in the river, and perhaps Klee’s spiral toward the bottom right with Bruegel’s water mill. We might even start to play this same game of matching with the letters that 2 INTRODUCTION

Klee places in his landscape like so many trees. Might that prominent E stand for Elster (magpie—­the German title of Bruegel’s painting is Die Elster auf dem Galgen)? The dot or period that follows the letter would indicate that it is indeed an abbreviation. Perhaps the T at the left could stand for Tanz (dance), for the peasants’ dance at the left of Bruegel’s painting, another important element that nothing but a letter seems to represent in Klee’s.

Klee’s partial pattern of correspondences not only involves the viewer in this game of matching but raises questions of what this game is about. Does Klee’s painting seek to “transcribe,” as it were, the elements and arrangement of Bruegel’s painting, to translate them into another pictorial idiom that appears to be in part scriptural, ranging from what look like rudimentary pictographs, such as the trees, to the letters of the Latin script? And is painting even the right word for Klee’s transcription or translation? It’s made of paint, to be sure: “Oil on stretched canvas primed with gesso and Krems white,” noted Klee in the catalogue he kept of his work.2 But the discontinuity between the linear black signs and letters, on the one hand, and the colorful field they inscribe, on the other, is so emphatic that one might prefer to call it a drawing on a painted ground.3 And why is it that Klee has positioned so many of his hieroglyphs and letters to parallel the placement of the ancillary incidents of Bruegel’s painting and yet inverted the position of the gallows hill, which, along with the title, invites the comparison in the first place? Are the rules governing how we are to understand the spatial positioning of the depicted things different in Klee’s Landscape? Whereas Bruegel’s painting unfurls up into the distance from the brambles and earth of the hilltop at the painting’s bottom edge, Klee’s placement of the gallows at the top might suggest that his picture is to be viewed instead from top to bottom, as one reads a page of text. The ladderlike paths Klee draws here and there seem to refer to the spatial order of Bruegel’s painting, the movement up the panel into the distance to examine this or that interesting feature of the landscape—­but perhaps the task of referring to that upward recession into distance falls to them alone. And if Klee’s Landscape seems to bring writing and picture-­making into close relation to each other through this translation, is this to be understood as responding to a closeness already obtaining in pictures in general? Klee did assert that writing and pictures are fundamentally one.4 Or perhaps in Bruegel’s painting in particular, which engages in its own form of play with the possibility of translating the visual into the textual in its rebus-­like arrangement of vivid depictions of Flemish figures of speech (to dance under the gallows, to shit on the gallows) that seem bizarre and nonsensical unless they are translated back into words? Bruegel’s titular magpie is itself not only a figure of speech but also a figure for speech—­for excessive gossip or chatter.5 What can it mean for Klee to transcribe this painted figure of speech as a laconic “E.”? Versions of the questions this picture raises about the relations among writing, drawing, and painting recur repeatedly in Klee’s art, and have often attracted commentators’ attention. Michel Foucault, for instance, asserted that Klee annulled one of the two defining principles of Western painting since the

3 INTRODUCTION

Renaissance—­the separation between “plastic representation” and “linguistic reference”—­“ by showing the juxtaposition of shapes and the syntax of lines in an uncertain reversible, floating space (simultaneously page and canvas, plane and volume, map and chronicle).” Foucault continues to describe Klee’s art as follows: “Boats, houses, persons are at the same time recognizable figures and elements of writing. They are placed and travel upon roads or canals that are also lines to be read. . . . The gaze encounters words as if they had strayed to the heart of things, words indicating the way to go and naming the landscape being crossed.”6 In Klee’s work, writes Foucault, we see “the intersection, within the same medium, of representation by resemblance and of representation by signs. Which presupposes that they meet in quite another space than that of painting.”7 Clement Greenberg picks up on some of the same features of Klee’s work as Foucault does, but to tell a different story. In a fascinating essay of 1950, Greenberg argues that these crossings between the visible and the legible in Klee’s work are “part of the struggle to save easel painting.”8 What seems to interest Greenberg most is how the “problematic relations between ‘literature’ and the ‘purely’ plastic” come to a head in Klee’s work (54). He insists that Klee’s art results from a complex operation in which “literary” means are used to non-­ “literary” ends; Klee, according to Greenberg, required “something resistant around which to deposit form, something more resistant—­in Klee’s case—­than just the medium,” and the “literary” filled this requirement, as “an impulse to formal invention and a source of it” (55–­57). The formal innovations of Klee’s art develop around his “parodying of ‘literary’ and pictorial art in general”: No longer taking the pictorial for granted but seeing it as one cultural convention among others, Klee isolates its distinguishing properties in order to burlesque them. . . . The pictorial in Klee’s notion of it comprises every system for making marks on a surface that mankind has ever used for the purpose of communication: ideographs, diagrams, hieroglyphs, alphabets, handwriting, blueprints, musical notation, charts, maps, tables, etc., etc.  .  .  . the parody of the pictorial is but a core around which he wraps layer on layer of a parody that 4 INTRODUCTION

aims at all commonly held verities, all current sentiments, messages, attitudes, convictions, methods, procedures, formalities, etc., etc. (58–­59)

This parody of the conventions of the pictorial, seen as including all other mark-­making systems, is the main means of Klee’s defining irony—­which is “total, but not nihilistic,” Greenberg remarks (59).

These striking features of Klee’s work that Foucault, Greenberg, and many others have picked up on are also the subject of my own investigation. How are we to understand Landscape with Gallows, for instance? Is it, as Foucault’s interpretation of Klee might suggest, an abrogation of a basic principle of painting since the Renaissance that displays its own historical awareness of what it is doing by referring to a sixteenth-­century panel painting that itself plays with the boundaries between discourse and figures? Does it, like Klee in Greenberg’s reading, parody Bruegel and the pictorial as such as a spur to formal invention? According to Theodor W. Adorno, the manner in which Klee’s art resembles writing makes possible the recognition that “all artworks are writing, not just those that are obviously such; they are hieroglyphs for which the code has been lost, a loss that plays into their content”; Klee’s art is for him a beautiful example of how, more generally, some modern works can, in their own enigmaticalness, destroy the seeming comprehensibility of “works sanctioned by tradition and public opinion.” Might we see Klee’s Landscape as doing just this—­revealing not only itself, but also Bruegel’s panel, as a “picture puzzle” with no solution?9 Or could it be, as Hubert Damisch has said of another work by Klee, the product of Klee’s “laboring within the framework of signs and as close to them as possible,” a project that opens onto a “structural, and still more profoundly ‘scriptural’” problematic of abstraction in particular?10 Does it represent, as Rainer Crone’s interpretation of Klee would suggest, an investigation into how the Bruegel panel (or painting in general) signifies, parallel to the investigations of structuralist linguistics?11 Is it a modernist revision of the Renaissance doctrine of ut pictura poesis (as is painting so is poetry), likening abstract painting to poetry as two kindred ways of arranging arbitrary signs to communicate ideas as well as appearances, as K. Porter Aichele claims?12 I will now step back from Landscape with Gallows and try to rephrase in more general terms the intertwined problems that this study investigates. The pursuit of analogies between writing and images, the solicitation of a reading-­ like mode of viewing, and the emphasis on often elaborately allusive titles are distinguishing features of much of Klee’s work. It seems that those relations between pictures and writing entailed by the visual appearance of the graphic inscription of language are central to Klee’s art. And it seems that relations between pictures and “literature”—­in the sense that art criticism since the mid-­ nineteenth century has used this word to establish an opposition between the “‘purely’ plastic” (to borrow Greenberg’s phrase), on the one hand, and elements of narrative, anecdote, or allegory, on the other—­are central as well. One way or another, these are important issues for a great deal of modernist art and crit-

5 INTRODUCTION

icism, but they seem particularly pressing and pervasive for Klee. As Charles W. Haxthausen and Marcel Franciscono have written, Klee struggled in the first decade of the twentieth century with the opposition, as formulated in contemporary German art criticism, between “poetic” painting and what Klee termed, in his own skeptical quotation marks in a journal entry of 1905, “‘pure’ plastic art.”13 During these early years of his career, Klee often wrote in his journal and letters about his often contradictory and unresolved attempts to come to terms with both the formalist aesthetics of “‘pure’ plastic art” and what he saw as his own fundamentally “poetic” disposition.14 Later, he would place the relations of seeing to reading and of pictures to literature at the core of his art.15 This book seeks to explain how and why he did so. In recent decades, much of the art-­historical literature on Klee has been oriented so strongly around Otto Karl Werckmeister’s project of ideology critique (in part a reaction to the posthumous presentation of Klee in the Federal Republic of Germany in the 1950s as the exemplary prewar artist for the postwar period) that interpretive questions get short shrift.16 Werckmeister’s study The Making of Paul Klee’s Career, 1914–­1920 is the most thorough and historically grounded to date, and I have drawn on it a great deal.17 However, in his monograph, which he presents as a “critical challenge to the myth of [Klee’s] art,” Werckmeister does not ask the questions I ask here and indeed could not do so within the framework of his premises. For Werckmeister constructs a stark alternative between two approaches to Klee’s art. On the one hand, Werckmeister writes, there is “the acceptance of Klee’s art on his own terms,” aiming at “a scholarly ratification of Klee’s public self-­presentation for posterity”—­the dominant approach of Klee scholars from Will Grohmann through Jürgen Glaesemer, anchored in biography rather than history.18 According to Werckmeister, the alternative to such art-­historical affirmation of Klee’s self-­presentation is an inquiry such as his own, which “aims at a historical critique of culture as ideology” and treats Klee’s works as “not ends but functions” of his career, the true object of Werckmeister’s study (9). The aims of my study do not fit either side of Werckmeister’s false dilemma. A major part of my project is to comprehend the terms of Klee’s art in a concep6 INTRODUCTION

tually and historically rigorous way: I aim to give an account of how the relations between pictures, writing, and “literature” signified in and for Klee’s art, as well as how and why these relations mattered to Klee and to his interpreters in the 1910s and 1920s. Such an account need not merely extend Klee’s self-­ presentation in his diary and publications. Take the notion Werckmeister calls one of the two “guiding ideas” of the Klee literature he criticizes as merely per-

petuating Klee’s self-­mythologization: “the convergence of Klee’s protracted autodidactic formation as a painter with the systematic buildup of painting from its elements.” This is the idea, as Werckmeister explains, underlying the often repeated developmental narrative of Klee’s life and art, in which he is said to have mastered first line, then tone, and then at last color, becoming a “true painter” with his 1914 trip to Tunisia (5). The argument of my study demonstrates that an interpretive investigation of the terms of Klee’s art need not merely repeat the mythic version of his artistic biography that the Klee literature of the fifties and sixties so often presented; in fact, such an investigation can complicate that story all the more decisively by keeping Klee’s art at the center of inquiry. I have focused my study on Klee’s work of the later 1910s and the early 1920s, because it is during these years that these questions of the visible and the legible became most pressing.19 One of my own premises is that relations between verbal language and pictures are far from immutable, and may function and mean very differently in different historical moments. I do not think that we can assume that the terms of these relations hold constant across the long span of Klee’s career, from his work as an art student in turn-­of-­the-­century Munich to his exile in Switzerland in the 1930s. Therefore I focus on Klee’s work beginning with its shift toward the “literary” at around the time of his conscription into the German army in 1916 and ending with his response to the 1923 reorientation of the Bauhaus, where he taught, because I see these relations as the crux of the new way of working that Klee arrives at in 1916, which provided the framework for his work in the following years.20 Whereas, in 1912 and 1913, during the initial period of Klee’s induction into the Munich avant-­garde, Robert Delaunay’s Windows series represented for him the most important paradigm for abstract painting and the model for his own work, I argue that Klee fundamentally rethought abstraction around 1916 by centering it not on painting but rather on graphic art (Graphik), understood not as the loose grouping of various processes and mediums usually implied by the English term graphic arts but rather as a singular art with its own proper essence, which, according to Klee, tends toward abstraction.21 “The essence of graphic art,” he writes, “tempts easily and rightly to abstraction.”22 The results of this reorganization, apparent in Klee’s art and writing, are peculiar. Klee’s graphic abstraction deploys eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­century theories of graphic art as near to writing and to literature (as has often been noted, a nearness emblematized etymologically by the Greek root of both the English word graphic and the German Graphik—­graphein, to write or draw).23 This graphic abstraction drew on, responded to, and pushed against a range of texts on the relations

7 INTRODUCTION

of art in general or of graphic art in particular to writing—­above all Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1766), but also texts by the Romantic writer E. T. A. Hoffmann, the poet and critic Charles Baudelaire, the artists Max Klinger and Wassily Kandinsky, the critic Julius Meier-­Graefe, and the reform pedagogue Georg Kerschensteiner. I argue that around 1916, Klee began to develop a theory and practice of a graphic abstraction that would be self-­reflexive in its insistence on certain peculiarities of the graphic arts as written about in eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­ century art theory: the close relation of picture to caption; the encouragement of “ideas” or “speculation”; the notions that the activity of looking at a work of graphic art is similar to that of reading a text, and that the demands such looking places on the viewer’s imagination make the graphic arts peculiarly appropriate for fantastic or “invisible” subjects. He began using the repertory of “hieroglyphs” (a word that occurs frequently in the titles of his works of the late 1910s)—­rudimentary stars, crescents, trees, animals, buildings, and so on, often interspersed with letters—­that seem to hover between signifying by resemblance and signifying by convention. He presented his Blätter (leaves, sheets, or pages, a word commonly used to refer both to artworks on paper and to the pages of a book)24—­not only works on paper, but also small pieces of gessoed and painted canvas that one would ordinarily think of as paintings—­in a manner customary for prints or drawings, mounting them on pieces of cardboard and inscribing them with titles. In one case, he took one of his own abstract oil paintings of 1914, when Delaunay was his model, off its stretcher bars, to glue it to a mount inscribed with a title that invites speculation—­Carpet of Memory. Klee appears to have invented this graphic abstraction in order to work against dominant theories and practices of abstract painting as well as against the formalist aesthetics put forward by the art critics Meier-­Graefe and Karl Scheffler, which he appears to have associated with Lessing’s Laocoon. I argue that Lessing’s treatise, which Klee read as a Gymnasium student, was decisive for him, and crucial for understanding the aims of his graphic abstraction of the 1910s: his invention of a graphic alternative to the painting of achieved tabular unity represented for him by Cézanne and Hans von Marées—­a self-­reflexive 8 INTRODUCTION

medium that includes those aspects of viewing that modernist painting, from impressionism through Kandinsky and Delaunay, excluded as “literary,” extrinsic to the concerns of the visual arts. Klee’s work of these years can be seen to push against conceptions of how pictures are to be looked at that emphasize instantaneousness—­he deploys the idea of the graphic against these conceptions, redefining abstraction as he does so. What has made this difficult to see is Klee’s

ambivalence toward the concepts, practices, and figures that he links together and works against through his graphic abstraction. They are of foundational importance for his art without being “influences” in the usual sense of positive models for identification (and yet they sometimes play that role, too). This aspect of Klee’s work has been occluded both by his celebration as an exemplary modern painter in the 1950s and 1960s and by more recent scholarship that deals with Klee’s art as an epiphenomenon of the art market, although for very different reasons. Tracing it out requires attention to what Klee counters, what he works against, and to his frequent tactic of inverting the terms of art-­ critical discourse. For instance, as Jenny Anger has demonstrated, Klee took up the idea of the ornament in the 1910s, when Kandinsky and Franz Marc were at pains to distinguish their work from mere decoration.25 My study shows that this operation of taking up and playing with the counterterm of an opposition is pervasive in Klee’s work of the later 1910s and early 1920s; this is an operation he performs not only on the expressionist opposition between abstract painting and decoration but on many other terms of art theory and criticism since the Enlightenment.26 Besides turning to the texts that I argue served Klee as resources and impetuses of various kinds, I also draw on commentary on Klee’s art from this same period, and most of all on the writings of Wilhelm Hausenstein and Walter Benjamin, both of whom were deeply interested in Klee, to aid me in interpreting his work and particularly in thinking about the significance of the graphic during and after the First World War. Hausenstein, a prominent Munich-­based art critic, became fascinated with Klee’s work as he became increasingly disillusioned with expressionism during the war and its aftermath. His 1921 monograph (the first substantial extended discussion of Klee’s art)27 argues that the “painter-­draftsman” Klee responds to the problem of painting in the crisis of representation brought about by modernity in general and modern warfare in particular by inventing a mode of painting-­drawing that is adequate to what Hausenstein describes as the ruined condition of persons and things in a way that painting cannot be. The first chapter of my study examines the shift in Klee’s work around the time of his 1916 conscription and the different explanations that have been offered for it, including Klee’s own reflections, the connections Hausenstein makes between the graphic mode of Klee’s art and conditions of social and technological modernity, and the explanations that art historians have offered more recently. Contrasting Klee’s 1913 translation of Delaunay’s essay on the aims of abstract painting, “On Light,” with the essay on graphic art that Klee drafted in

9 INTRODUCTION

1918, which turns the logic of Delaunay’s text on its head, I argue that Klee shifts to a model of abstraction based on graphic art and sharply divergent from the theories of abstract painting developed by the leading avant-­garde artists with whom he was in contact during the years right before the war. Furthermore, I show that this shift precipitated out of Klee’s protracted negotiations with ideas of “‘pure’ plastic art,” as he termed it, arguing with and against figures ranging from Lessing to Delaunay. The second chapter asks why Klee’s recentering of abstraction on graphic art had the consequences it did, and in particular how it allowed him to reconceive the activity of viewing a picture. Examining a little-­known fragment written by Benjamin in 1918 or 1919, in which he speaks of the “uncolorful” picture as one that demands that the viewer “describe” it, as well as ideas of the graphic in older texts that served as resources for Klee, I show how graphic art was understood as inviting a mode of engagement on the beholder’s part that was sometimes called speculating, or imagining, or thinking, that was often linked with verbal language and contrasted with seeing, and that this activity was a matter of active controversy. Finally, some of the most frequently remarked features of Klee’s art in the later 1910s and early 1920s result, I argue, from his reflection on such speculation. In this work, Klee takes up negative terms from writing about art with which he was familiar—­the hieroglyph, the schema, the fairy tale—­as positive models allowing him to conceptualize hybrids of writing and picturing. While the first two chapters examine Klee’s art over the same handful of years from two related perspectives—­first by thinking through the differences between painting and graphic art as they were understood in the early twentieth century, and second by examining the distinct kinds of engagement each was understood to demand, seeing and speculating, respectively—­the third chapter is a departure. It bears down on a particular reservation that many critics have felt about the kind of engagement that Klee’s art solicits: how the very form and scale of his pictures seem to address the viewer as a private individual. I aim first to explain what privateness meant for Klee and his interlocutors, and to show how Klee came to diverge as sharply as he did from both his expressionist and his postexpressionist peers in his conception of his art’s address. While the first 10 INTRODUCTION

two chapters emphasize Klee’s work of the war years, the third closes with an examination of the important series of grid paintings that Klee initiated in the early 1920s, arrangements of colored rectangles that would appear utterly removed from the graphic and “literary” mode I explicate in the preceding chapters. But I show that this series continues many of the concerns of the earlier work, above all by seeking to provide a place for the slow, sequential, contempla-

tive, and private kind of looking that Klee sees as analogous to certain forms of reading, while engaging with a new set of interlocutors who sought to pave the way for a modernized reading that would have none of the qualities that made reading a model for the kind of viewing Klee wanted his art to invite. During his early years at the Bauhaus, as during the 1910s, I argue, Klee’s project can only be fully understood in relation to avant-­garde proposals for the transformation of the artwork and of what the beholder might do with it, to which Klee’s art responds in complex and ambivalent ways. A close study of his work reveals that although it is in a sense eccentric, for it does not participate in the projects driving many of the most important artists working in Germany at the time, it can nevertheless be most fully understood in relation to those projects, and often constitutes a rich and valuable commentary on them.

11 INTRODUCTION

1

The “Painter-­Draftsman”

On September 9, 1917, Paul Klee reported in a letter to his wife Lily that he had left the accounting office of the military flying school in Gersthofen, where he worked as a clerk, at around noon to spend the rest of the day painting watercolors outdoors, in the fields around the Lech River. He wrote that three of his watercolors turned out well, truly “seizing” him, and then asked what connection might obtain between his art and the changes the war imposed on his life: “If I’d calmly gone on living, would my art have shot up so fast as in the year 16/17??”1 This is a version of one of the questions that this chapter seeks to answer, although I will not stay within the terms of Klee’s letter. Although it passed unremarked for decades in the literature, there is, in fact—­as Klee notes—­a striking change in his work in 1916–­ 17. In this chapter, I argue that this change should be understood as Klee’s shift away from the dominant practices and theories of abstraction in the avant-­garde circles around him, which were centered on painting, to a practice and theory of abstraction centered instead on graphic art. The consequences of this shift should not be underestimated: Klee’s revision of abstraction as graphic fundamentally alters his art and the kind of viewing it invites, and by following it we can discern connections between seemingly un-

13

related aspects of Klee’s art of the late 1910s, seeing how they hang together as a solution of sorts to problems arising from his reservations about some of the foundations of modernism—­and how both far-­reaching and unstable this solution was. But my first task is simpler: it is to establish that there was indeed a shift in Klee’s art around 1916, a step that is necessary because it has so often been overlooked. I will begin with an overview. In 1916 and 1917, Klee developed a new mode of working, upon which he then elaborated over the next couple of years. His work assumed the form of a sprawling profusion of what he called Blätter (leaves, sheets, or pages)—­drawn and watercolored pictures on very small pieces of paper or cloth (often scavenged bits of airplane linen), seldom more than a foot long in either dimension and almost always mounted on board. Klee often covered these supports with thin, roughly applied coats of plaster, lending the watercolors a gouache-­like, light-­reflecting brilliance; in the case of his scrappy cloth supports, he often applied the white ground roughly, emphasizing rather than smoothing over the texture of the cloth, and frayed the edges, which stand out against the mounts. He often inscribed the mount with an allusive, suggestive title underneath the picture, like the caption of an illustration. The pictures swarm with little signs—­stars, crescents, hearts, and so on—­which seem just as repeatable as the letters with which they are often interspersed. The allusive titles and little signs we can find in many of Klee’s drawings from earlier in the decade, but it is only in 1916 that they frequently enter his watercolors.2 We can see some of these features in what might be the three watercolors he speaks of in his letter of September 9: Play of Forces of a Lech Landscape (1917, 102), J.D. (1917, 103), and Landscape Hieroglyph with Emphasis on Sky-­Blue (1917, 104) (figs. 1.1, 1.2, and 1.3). These features do not always coincide (these three Blätter, for instance, have no “captions”) but they hold together with enough coherence to constitute a recognizable type in Klee’s production—­and one that dominates his work from 1916, when he was drafted into the German infantry reserves, to 1919, when he was demobilized. Moreover, it was the first exhibition of the Blätter in 14 CHAPTER ONE

Figure 1.1  Paul Klee, Play of Forces of a Lech Landscape (Spiel der Kräfte einer Lechlandschaft), 1917,

102. Watercolor on primed canvas and paper on cardboard, 16.4 × 24.3 cm. Galerie Rosengart, Lucerne. © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Figure 1.2  Paul Klee, J.D., 1917, 103. Watercolor on primed paper on cardboard, 17.4 × 27.7 cm.

Location unknown. © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Figure 1.3  Paul Klee, Landscape Hieroglyph with Emphasis on Sky-­Blue (Landschaftliches Hieroglyph mit

Betonung des Himmelblau), 1917, 104. Watercolor on primed linen on cardboard, 16.5 × 17 cm. Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, Livia Klee Donation. © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

February 1917 that marked Klee’s critical and commercial breakthrough. This exhibition—­Klee’s second solo show at Herwarth Walden’s Sturm Gallery in 16 CHAPTER ONE

Berlin, then the central point for the promotion of international modern art in Germany—­suddenly established him as a major artist.3 In his review of the exhibition in the Berliner Börsen-­Courier, the critic Theodor Däubler called Klee “the most important painter of the expressionist tendency”: “His exhibition is really staggering; it is unbelievable how much he has deepened and developed just recently.”4

The relation of these Blätter to Klee’s work before and afterward is puzzling. When one surveys Klee’s oeuvre, these Blätter appear both as an integration of two lines of his art that had previously run separate courses, and as an interruption. Between 1913 and 1915, there is a clear division in Klee’s work between, on the one hand, the fantastic drawings (which often ran to the caricatural, anecdotal, bizarre, obscene, humorous, and grotesque) and, on the other, oils and watercolors which attempted, in a variety of ways, to establish themselves as what Klee called “wholly abstract form-­existence[s].”5 The watercolor Blätter, from 1916 onward, seem somehow to overcome this division, as Charles W. Haxthausen has emphasized. But they also coincide with a hiatus in Klee’s work: from 1916 through 1918, he ceases oil painting almost entirely.6 In examining Klee’s oeuvre over the course of the 1910s, it is clear that between 1916 and 1918, he broke off certain lines of his work—­his struggles with oil painting, which posed great difficulties for him but to which he had devoted considerable effort from 1913 through 1915, as well as his watercolor-­on-­paper attempts of 1914 and 1915 to create a purified abstract style.7 After he was demobilized in 1919, he took up oil painting again (see Landscape with Gallows, fig. 0.1), which now became a major medium for him: he produced fifty oils in 1919, most of them “small oil pictures,” as he describes them in his oeuvre-­catalogue, on cardboard or on paper on cardboard. At around the same time, he began using his oil-­transfer technique, transferring a line drawing by means of homemade transfer paper coated with tacky paint or oily lithographic ink onto a new sheet of paper, which he would usually then stain with watercolors.8 Together, these two shifts established a new set of relations among what were, from 1919 onward, Klee’s main mediums: oil painting, watercolor, and drawing.9 The very success of Klee’s breakthrough exhibition of 1917 suggests that, like Däubler and like Klee himself that year, the art public on some level recognized that the artist’s new mode of 1916 was a turning point: just a little less than a year before, in March 1916, it had more or less ignored Klee’s first Sturm Gallery exhibition, at which he showed watercolors of 1914–­15.10 But this turning point goes unremarked in most of the writing on Klee published since the mid-­1920s. There are several reasons why this turn in Klee’s work disappears, as it were, in the commentary. First, the dominant way of telling the story of Klee’s career tells of his progressive mastery over the elements of painting: Klee, it is said, began first with line, then taught himself tonality, and finally, on his 1914 journey to Tunisia, broke through to color to become a true painter.11 Essentially, this narrative superimposes on Klee’s own artistic development the perfectly

17

The “Painter-Draftsman”

conventional sequence from line to tonality to color through which Klee took his students when he taught at the Bauhaus from 1921 to 1931—­an elegant stylization that makes of Klee’s art and his pedagogical writings a closed circuit, and gives his formation a misleading appearance of logical inevitability.12 Because the Blätter of the war years do not fit this story, they are often downplayed or left out. But there are other reasons as well, lying in the history of Klee’s reception. In 1924, Will Grohmann, in the first article he wrote about Klee, disparaged the artist’s work of the war years, and this had important consequences. The aim of Grohmann’s article, “Paul Klee 1923/24,” is clear: to detach Klee’s reputation from his enthusiastic reception in both expressionist circles in Berlin in the wake of the 1917 Sturm exhibition and protosurrealist circles in Paris.13 Grohmann describes Klee’s earlier reception as cultish, subjective, and romantic, but he also implies that Klee’s earlier work welcomed such reception. He sees Klee’s most recent work, on the other hand, as demanding a different kind of recognition—­as great painting grounded in “metaphysical” insight. Thus Grohmann draws a line between Klee’s most recent and his earlier work, which Grohmann rather disdains: Klee’s work is, as the recent works prove beyond question, no romantic misconception at the limit of wisdom and representation, but rather one of the most telling contributions to the discovery of painting’s possibilities. We have for all too long contented ourselves with purely subjective impressions and elaborated them according to our own poetic, philosophical, and musical imagination [Phantasie]. The French still believe today that Klee’s work is a typically German affair of the heart, distant from art, which does not lay claim to go beyond the circle of initiates. . . . What appeared earlier in Klee’s work as amiable woolgathering has become an artistic event. Not much is gained in face of the latest works if one speaks of a refined art of the nerves; they are achievements in which a great human being with all his mental, spiritual, and metaphysical powers took part.14 18 CHAPTER ONE

As Christine Hopfengart explains, Grohmann’s essay established a “caesura  .  .  . that had long after-­effects. Seeing Klee’s artistically serious work as beginning in the Bauhaus era is a division that has lasted basically unaltered to the present day.”15 For it was Grohmann’s postwar writings that, along with Werner Haftmann’s, set the terms of Klee’s posthumous reception in Germany and in the United States after the Second World War; it was Grohmann’s Klee who

could, and did, function in the Federal Republic of Germany as an exemplary figure, as a great German painter of “classic modernism” (die klassische Moderne).16 Grohmann’s richly illustrated book Paul Klee, published simultaneously in Germany, France, Switzerland, Italy, and the United States in 1954, largely continues and even sharpens the emphases of his 1924 article.17 And it appears that Klee himself, at around the time that Grohmann wrote the article, wished to distance himself from his pre-­Bauhaus work and reception.18 Oddly, perhaps another reason why Klee’s Blätter of 1916–­18 attracted so little commentary for so long after Grohmann’s first essay lies in the close chronological fit between this body of work and the period of Klee’s service in the German military; as we saw above, Klee himself wondered how the two might relate. On the one hand, this fit leads to questions about biographical circumstances—­very small format watercolors would be much more practicable than oils when time, space, and supplies were scarce.19 And Klee wrote at the time that his military service caused him to dwell more and more in fantasy. 20 On the other hand, it leads as well to broader questions of how Klee’s work might be understood in relation to the First World War and to the ways avant-­garde artists responded to it, in part by choosing certain mediums and discarding others.21 The younger artist Hans Arp, for instance—­with whom Klee was in touch in 1912–­13, and who tried to help Klee publish his Candide illustrations of 1911–­12—­recounted how he and Sophie Täuber set aside oil painting during the same period: “Sophie Täuber and I resolved never to use oil colors again. We wanted to discard any reminder of oil painting, which seemed to us to belong to an arrogant, pretentious world.”22 Klee never made any such statement figuring his turn to Blätter as a response to the war, and at no point shared Arp and Täuber’s project of creating anonymous works. However, as we shall see, the status of the Blätter as artworks was highly problematic and unstable, and they were often seen at the time as rejections of the “arrogant, pretentious world” that had given rise to the war. Hugo Ball, for instance, wrote about Klee’s art in these terms in a March 1917 diary entry occasioned by Waldemar Jollos’s lecture on the artist, one of the events surrounding the opening of the first exhibition of the Galerie Dada in Zurich, which included art from the Sturm Gallery (by Wassily Kandinsky, Heinrich Campendonk, Jacoba van Heemskerck, and Carlo Mense as well as Klee) alongside works by the Zurich Dadaists themselves and pieces of “primitive” art.23 “In an age of the colossus,” writes Ball, Klee “falls in love with a green leaf, a star, a butterfly’s wing.” Ball continues, emphasizing the small scale and page-­like space of the Blätter:

19

The “Painter-Draftsman”

He always stays quite close to his first statement and the smallest size. . . . If he reaches the edge, he does not immediately reach for a new sheet, but begins to paint over the first one. The small formats overflow with intensity; they become magic letters and colorful palimpsests. What irony and even sarcasm this artist must feel toward our hollow, empty epoch. . . . He finds the shortest path from his idea to the page. The wide, distracting stretching out of hand and body that Kandinsky finds necessary to fill the large format of his canvas with color is bound to mean waste and fatigue; it demands a thorough exposition, an explanation. When painting wants to assert unity and soul, it becomes a sermon, or music.24

Later in the spring of that year, the critic Adolf Behne wrote a short essay for Die weissen Blätter praising Klee’s art in terms similar to Ball’s, contrasting them with Kandinsky’s paintings and emphasizing their smallness as an implicitly critical ethical stance: “‘Large formats, oil paint, decoration, museum work and major work’—­here the conscience is too razor-­sharp for such things.”25 But in the early 1920s, many of Klee’s most avid critical supporters in the later 1910s turned against his work.26 By 1923, for instance, Behne had no interest in Klee’s work, mentioning him only in passing in his review of the 1923 Bauhaus exhibition, asking rhetorically, “And is activity in the sense of a rigorously real-­political, in the end indeed anti-­painterly forming [Gestaltung] to be expected from the other masters, Feininger, Klee, Muche?”27 Clearly, such shifts in interest followed from major reorientations in German art, such as the impact of Russian constructivist works displayed at the Galerie Van Diemen in Berlin in 1922 (very important for Behne) and the articulation, already becoming widespread around 1920, of avowedly postexpressionist forms of art pledged to what critics called “objectivity,” “neonaturalism,” or “verism.”28 In the early twenties, reviewers scorned the features of Klee’s work that Ball and Behne described so glowingly in 1917—­even, importantly, in reviews praising Klee’s most recent work. So, for instance, in 1922, a critic for Der Cicerone looked back at Klee’s earlier art as “coloristic and linear stenographs, which—­see the letters set between them!—­bear a disturbing similarity to tramp signs,” and 20 CHAPTER ONE

have “nothing more to say to the broad public,” but averred that Klee’s very most recent works, on the other hand, lead “out again into the transcendental sphere with in part extraordinary results.”29 Essentially, Grohmann’s 1924 essay consolidated this break between the first phase of Klee’s critical reception, which Grohmann repudiated, that began in 1917 in response to Klee’s wartime Blätter, and the second, which began in the early 1920s in response to Klee’s

Bauhaus-­era work—­a break that Grohmann’s postwar writing carried into art history. Thus, between the mid-­1920s and the late 1970s, Klee’s Blätter of the war years, so crucial to his initial reception, passed little remarked as a distinct period in his work, until Haxthausen’s 1976 dissertation and the 1979–­80 Munich exhibition of Klee’s early work.30 At this juncture, given the neat match between the period of Klee’s production of these Blätter and that of his military service, we should turn to his biographical circumstances. His question in his 1917 letter to Lily cited above—­“If I’d calmly gone on living, would my art have shot up so fast as in the year 16/17??”—­shows not only that Klee saw something important happening in his art in 1916–­17, but that he wondered about the connection between his altered circumstances and this change. Although I will not stick to the terms of his own understanding of this change, as registered in his diaries and letters, it is nevertheless important to begin by understanding these terms, as well as their limits. Klee, drafted into the German army in 1916 at age thirty-­six, was extraordinarily fortunate: after basic training, shortly before he was to be sent to the front as a foot soldier, he was suddenly transferred to a safe job at the airfield in Schleißheim, not far from Munich, in the summer of 1916. 31 Klee’s well-­ connected friend, the eminent graphologist Max Pulver, had acted to prevent him from being sent to the front; after the deaths of Klee’s close friend Franz Marc and others, the Bavarian government had decided that “talented Munich artists were to be spared,” and Pulver had taken advantage of this just in time to protect Klee, apparently without the latter’s knowledge.32 Only two years before, Klee had written in his journal, summing up what he saw at the time as his breakthrough to color on a North African journey à la Delacroix, “I am a painter.”33 Now, as he recounted in his diary, the sergeant who received him and the three other men transferred with him told them they were “no longer only painters [Maler], but rather artists [Kunstmaler].  .  .  . Now we would be given work on which we could test our art” (355).34 If Klee himself did not know that he had been spared the dangers of combat because of his status as a talented Munich artist, it appears from his diary that his superiors at Schleißheim, on the other hand, did. Perhaps it amused them to give Klee, whose job at Schleißheim was essentially that of a “factory worker,” painting tasks that alluded to artist’s work: in his diary, Klee reports that he “brushed easels with varnish,” “glazed two blackboard stands,” and stenciled numbers on planes (356). In January 1917, Klee was transferred again, to Gersthofen, another Bavar-

21

The “Painter-Draftsman”

ian airfield; he speculates that his supervisors at Schleißheim wanted to get rid of him because of his frequent absences (373). Although he was told that he would be the “chief painter [Obermaler]” at Gersthofen, he was in fact, after some weeks of construction work, made a clerk in the paymaster’s office (372–­76).35 He was able to continue his own work, painting and drawing in off-­hours and even at his desk (he commemorated the room in which he worked in a watercolor that he called Memorial Page (to Gersthofen), fig. 1.4).36 There he remained until Christmastime 1918, when he applied for home leave from the soldier’s council that had taken control of the airfield after the armistice in November; he was officially discharged in February 1919.37

Figure 1.4  Paul Klee, Memorial

Page (Gedenkblatt), 1918, 196. Pen, pencil and watercolor on paper on cardboard, 28.5 × 21 cm. Private collection, Switzerland. © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

In the letter to Lily cited above, after Klee poses the question of the relation between his wartime circumstances and the great change in his work, he writes: “A passionate drive towards transfiguration is also, after all, the product of external experience.”38 For Klee, the shift in his work of 1916–­17 was at least in part a “drive towards transfiguration,” which in turn was at least in part a reaction to the outward changes in his life. In earlier diary entries, he had written of the horror of war as provoking his withdrawal into crystalline abstraction, along the lines of Wilhelm Worringer’s influential linkage of formal abstraction with fearful recoil from the phenomenal world.39 Here, however, he seems to turn from seeing his response to the war as a withdrawal into abstraction to viewing it in elevated, quasi-­religious terms as a “drive towards transfiguration.” In his diary, Klee consistently speaks of the war as changing his art by changing his “worldview.”40 Some commentators have followed suit, whether to admire or to criticize. But the brief notes Klee made in his diary and letters during his years of service about his idiosyncratic metaphysics—­pessimistic, idealist, mystical, yet skeptical toward esoteric movements41—­have little direct purchase on the striking features of the turning point in his work during these years. “The formal must fuse with the worldview,” he writes in a diary entry of 1917.42 But how are we to connect Klee’s “worldview” to the particular, and peculiar, features of the Blätter? Jim M. Jordan and O. K. Werckmeister both follow the pattern of explanation suggested by Klee’s letter, although they do so very differently. Jordan interprets the art of what he calls Klee’s “Expressionist period” as expressing what Jordan regards as a turn to the mystical in Klee’s worldview, resulting from his experience of the war. Werckmeister’s interpretation of what he calls Klee’s “war style” is more complex and historically grounded than Jordan’s, but here, too, worldview serves as the intermediary between the Klee’s work and the war. But in Werckmeister’s account, this worldview is to be located in the escapist fantasies of the war-­weary art market rather than in Klee’s psyche; thus it affects the form of Klee’s art by means not of Klee’s expression of his otherworldly metaphysics in his art but rather of his canny adjustment of its features so that the market will reward him for suiting a widespread taste for otherworldly metaphysics. Thus Werckmeister suggests we might read Klee’s phrase “external experience” in the letter of September 9—­which Klee reformulated as “the great change in the conduct of life” when he copied the letter into his diary—­as denoting not only the artist’s wartime circumstances and experiences but more importantly his “recognition that in the third year of the war a growing public was becoming ready to follow the ‘passionate drive toward transfiguration.’”43

23

The “Painter-Draftsman”

Werckmeister has written more extensively than any other scholar about the shift in Klee’s work around 1916. This shift he describes as Klee’s betrayal of his previously intransigent modernism for the sake of economic success, the selling of a spurious worldview, tailored to the German art market, in the form of pictures. Werckmeister writes that the start of the war brought about a downturn in the art market and an upturn in nationalist attacks on modern art, triggering a “setback for Klee’s newly gained self-­confidence,” the result of his contacts with modernist circles in the years just before the war. “Thus,” continues Werckmeister, starting in 1916, he presented his work in a different light. Instead of a testimony to individual creative freedom, it was styled as the illusion of a mystical, timeless message, transcending into the metaphysical. Klee himself worked at contriving this illusion after his first endeavors to reassert an uncompromising modernist intransigence through the year 1915 had met with no success. The change brought him to prominence in the canon of modern art, but its premise cannot stand the test of time.44

Werckmeister identifies as aspects of this shift of 1916, which he terms Klee’s “new concept of illustrative painting,” many of the same features of Klee’s Blätter that I have mentioned (99–­100). To argue that this shift was, above all, an adjustment to market conditions, he cites the critical and commercial success of the February 1917 Sturm exhibition. Noting that it was the newest works, the ones partaking in Klee’s “new concept of illustrative painting,” that sold best at the Sturm exhibition, Werckmeister describes them as follows: Apparently Klee’s most recent works were successful because they either featured illustrative figurations or bore descriptive and yet enigmatic titles suggesting mysterious contents. The six works purchased by Walden were masterpieces of the new, literary line. . . . The profundity of meaning evoked through the titles was enhanced by a new ambivalence of form. Just as in the year before, the public did not go for the clear, transparent, and constructive 24 CHAPTER ONE

color composition of the three watercolors from 1915. Compared to that style, many of the new works featured a forced, ragged simplicity. Essentially pure color compositions are advanced with contrived technical crudity on shreds of airplane canvas with irregularly torn edges. Seemingly awkward image-­signs for “constellations”  . . . visualize uncertain meanings suggested by mysterious titles. (92)45

Werckmeister’s discussion of this turn in Klee’s work is particularly valuable since few commentators have had so much to say about it. But the explanation of it that he advances is insufficient. To refer the set of shifts (formal, material, and, as we will see, theoretical) in Klee’s work of 1916 to the demands of the market is to pass the interpretive buck; it is not clear that such an account explains these shifts any better than referring them to Klee’s intentions as articulated in his own writings, especially given the vagueness of the connections Werckmeister asserts between features of Klee’s pictures and the “mystical, timeless message” that it is their function to embody, thereby appealing to the market. Werckmeister seems to see these pictures as contrivances for “flight from reality” (Wirklichkeitsflucht), echoing the accusations of the Berlin Dadaists’ 1919–­20 critique of expressionism in general—­and of the art sold by Walden (“a typical German philistine who believes it necessary to wrap his transactions in a Buddhistic-­bombastic little cloak”) at the Sturm Gallery in particular—­as offering its audience “the flight of feelings and thoughts, away from the unbearable circumstances of life on earth, to the moon and the stars, to the sky.”46 Indeed, it was perhaps Klee’s chief aim to make pictures that are occasions for contemplation and speculation, and he spoke of art as offering viewers a soul-­nourishing “country villa residence” (Villegiatur).47 Not only on the side of reception but also on that of production, Klee stressed contemplative withdrawal, suggesting that his art was produced in part in a state of Versunkenheit, immersion or absorption: this is the title Klee gave his 1919 pencil quasi caricature (fig. 1.5) of a man’s head in a tense state of closed-­eye withdrawal so total it lacks ears—­a programmatic self-­representation that must be seen in opposition to the genre of the self-­portrait using a mirror.48 Pictured here is not probing visual self-­inspection but the effort, registered especially in the lines of the mouth and the furrowed brow, of self-­enclosure. In short, Werckmeister’s “critical challenge to the myth of [Klee’s] art” is a version of ideology critique as the unmasking of mystification, aiming to replace ideological superstition with truth. In seeking to understand Klee’s works in general as “functions” of his career and, more specifically, his pictures of the late 1910s as vehicles for delivering a mystical message to the art public, Werckmeister relies on quite crude models of ideology and of critique. Moreover, his inquiry is undergirded by oversimple and, given his commitment to “radical historicity,” curiously ahistorical notions of how pictures mean and how viewers relate to them.49 As we shall see, these will not do if we wish to grasp Klee’s Blätter. In what follows, I propose another description of what happens in Klee’s work in 1916, one that leaves the question of “worldview”—­artist’s or art mar-

25

The “Painter-Draftsman”

Figure 1.5  Paul Klee, Absorption (Versunkenheit),

1919, 75. Pencil on wove paper, mounted on cardboard: sheet, 27.0 × 19.4 cm; mount, 32.1 × 23.8 cm. Norton Simon Museum, The Blue Four Galka Scheyer Collection. © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

ket’s—­to the side. In his dissertation, Haxthausen emphasizes something important that both Werckmeister and Jordan miss when he characterizes the “major turning point” of 1916 as the point at which Klee “synthesized drawing with painting,” bringing to “this new synthetic mode .  .  .  the poetry, humor, and inventiveness that had hitherto been limited to his prints and drawings.”50 Indeed, much evidence suggests that what happened in 1916 involves the relation between drawing and painting—­a reworking of abstraction that recenters it on 26 CHAPTER ONE

graphic art rather than painting. In fact, Werckmeister recognizes that an essay Klee drafted in 1918, which will be discussed at length below, “amounts to a definition of pictorial art as such in terms of graphic art,” but he sees this as a regression, a “retreat from the ideal of pure painting to that of graphic art,” in which Klee “reverted from the certainty that pure color represented the highest level of his artistic self-­assurance  . . . to the earlier stage of a predominantly

graphic definition of his work.”51 Werckmeister does not explain why we should see the aesthetics of graphic art as regressive and therefore Klee’s abstract watercolors of 1915 as more advanced than the “illustrative” work of 1916–­18, but he is firm and consistent in these valuations, which play a major if implicit role in his argument: they allow him to describe the changed relation between drawing and painting as backsliding from an earlier “uncompromising modernist intransigence,”52 without a logic of its own to investigate. One of the most acute and interesting contemporary commentators on Klee’s pre-­Bauhaus work, the Munich-­based critic Wilhelm Hausenstein, offers us an important resource if we wish to examine Klee’s turn to the graphic in 1916 in terms of the shifting historical ground against which it must be understood. Hausenstein was Klee’s first major critical supporter. Not only was he among the first to write at any length about Klee’s art, but he was also one of the most important exponents of expressionism in Germany in the 1910s—­one of very few who unstintingly supported expressionism from an explicitly left-­wing standpoint—­and then one of its bitterest detractors.53 Hausenstein not only sees Klee’s work as distinguished by its peculiarly graphic modality—­which he construes broadly, as I do as well, as something to be found not only in Klee’s prints and drawings but as the peculiar characteristic of his pictures even when they are made of, say, cloth and watercolor—­but also seeks to connect this graphic modality to the problematic conditions of representation after a war that Hausenstein sees as having made painting, in a sense, impossible.54 One might not initially see Hausenstein’s 1921 book about Klee, Kairuan, or a Story of the Painter Klee and of the Art of This Age, as amounting to an account of Klee’s work.55 Its language is bizarre and highly literary, and its origin in Hausenstein’s deep disappointment with the failure both of the revolutionary Bavarian Republic and of expressionist attempts to produce a collective style is obvious: Hausenstein drew a sharp distinction between expressionism and Klee’s work, and his interest in Klee at the time he wrote Kairuan went hand in hand with his conviction of the “bankruptcy” of expressionism.56 The resources the monograph offers, however, are inseparable from these features. Hausenstein’s book, which Klee called “really outstanding,” was not the first about the artist: the first two were Leopold Zahn’s and Hermann von Wedderkop’s monographs of the previous year, timed to accompany Klee’s first major retrospective, but these two were hastily written (Klee called them “advertising”), whereas Hausenstein had begun planning his book several years before.57 Hausenstein notes at the end of Kairuan that his plan for the book had “intensified” during the course of the war, that he had begun work on the manuscript in

27

The “Painter-Draftsman”

1919 and finished it in 1920.58 In a letter to Klee of November 1919, he describes the book as follows: “You are placed at the center, and around this center the problem of the art of this time (and of this time) is developed.”59 Hausenstein’s vision of the present era and its art was dark; his hopes that socialist politics and expressionist art would together forge a new collective had been dashed. A Social Democrat since 1907, he exited the SPD in 1919; a leading exponent of expressionist art, he publicly repudiated expressionism in a lecture in Munich in April 1920.60 It was at this juncture, Hausenstein’s deeply disappointed turn away from his earlier art criticism, that he wrote what he conceived as a treatment of the overarching problem of the situation of art in postwar Germany: a monograph on Klee, whose work he had found both compelling and problematic since 1914. One might well wonder why on earth Hausenstein would choose to focus on Klee, whose work seems so little concerned with articulating any relation between art and the historical situation of postwar Germany: as Hausenstein himself writes, “The political and social  . . . remained foreign to him, even antithetical.”61 Much of the explanation lies in the way he saw Klee’s art as unboundedly subjective, opposed to the collective (49–­50), and thus in a sense more representative of a society of disconnected individuals than any attempt to create a collective style expressive of a people (22). Now, such unbounded subjectivism, says Hausenstein, must itself be understood in relation to the war: “One who has been militarized  . . . one from whom uniformed concession to a travesty of collectivism was extorted: that he now springs back completely into the diametrically opposed distance of subjectivity, is the most primitive of dialectical events” (101).62 But, in one crucial chapter—­after the bulk of the book, a recapitulation of Klee’s career from his youth through the war years—­Hausenstein articulates the relation between Klee’s art and the historical situation in which he produced it in different terms, around the difference between painting and drawing. In this chapter, Hausenstein describes contemporary life as not really one at all but rather a substitute, a sham—­“the activity of the cities, maintained with surrogates in its homunculus existence, with tramways, automata, and cinemas” (94).63 This condition is difficult for artists, he writes. Some try to flee, 28 CHAPTER ONE

like Gauguin or Nolde, to a place where they think they might find “organic objectivity,” people or things that they might be able to paint; Klee’s famous 1914 trip to Kairuan, in Tunisia—­for which Hausenstein names his book—­is of this nature as well (93–­94). But such escape attempts are pointless, for, writes Hausenstein, there is no outside to escape to, and Tunisia is after all a French colonial possession (93).

Then, however, Hausenstein opens up another approach to the problem; although artists’ attempts to find people or things that have enough “organic objectivity” to be painted may be fruitless, an artist may choose another medium. Hausenstein proposes that drawing is adequate to the ruined condition of people and things in postwar Europe in a way that painting is not—­or is not unless it in effect becomes drawing: The painter who is consistent must today be a draftsman: for no more support is offered to the breadth of the painterly, but the speculation of the graphic is spurred. The painter-­draftsman [Malerzeichner] who is consistent must draw and paint ruins. (95)64

But what does Hausenstein mean by this conjoint coinage, “painter-­draftsman” (Malerzeichner)? It is no term of common use, but Hausenstein refers to Klee by this epithet throughout his book. It echoes and parallels the term Malerradierer (literally, “painter-­etcher”), the standard translation of the term peintre-­ graveur, which was popularized by the great catalogue of old master prints published by Adam von Bartsch in Vienna in the first decades of the nineteenth century, an honorific term made to distinguish original printmakers such as Dürer, Rembrandt, and Callot from engravers who reproduced the images of others.65 At the start of his career, from 1903 to 1905, Klee produced a series of etchings (for instance, fig. 2.9 and fig. 2.28) in a manner that drew on Dürer as well as on nineteenth-­century artists who saw themselves as working in the peintre-­graveur tradition, particularly those working in the established tradition of the fantastic and the grotesque; Hausenstein cites Odilon Redon, Félicien Rops, Max Klinger, and Albert Welti as influences (48–­49), and refers to Klee at this time as a “Bernese Malerradierer” (53). Even when he is not discussing these etchings, he joins Klee to a lineage of original printmakers, emphasizing how much Klee learned from the graphic work of Ensor, Daumier, and Munch (66). Later, too, Hausenstein describes Klee’s work as similar to that of Picasso (whose cubism he speaks of as itself a “very specific complex of painting and graphic art”) but as carried out not in an atelier like Picasso’s, but rather in the “cabinet of a new type of peintre-­graveur” (81).66 But despite the resonance Hausenstein sets up between the art-­historical concept of the Malerradierer and his own concept of the Malerzeichner, the latter goes beyond the former; indeed, Hausenstein is not even particularly interested in Klee’s graphic work in the narrow sense, from the early etchings through the important illustration projects as well as the occasional lithographs that

29

The “Painter-Draftsman”

he produced from time to time for dealers and publishers afterward. There are no reproductions of Klee’s lithographs or etchings in Hausenstein’s book. But there are many of his oil-­transfer drawings, made by a process of image duplication that alludes to printmaking not only as a method of duplication but also through its similarity to the use of transfer paper to translate a drawing to a lithographic stone, and the appearance of the resulting image, which looks as if it were made by some clumsy mechanical device.67 In part, such as when Hausenstein emphasizes that Klee’s early work was the “cultivation of graphic genius,” the critic is simply saying something that has often been said of Klee: that he is, as it were, essentially and originally a graphic artist, a draftsman.68 Echoing Klee’s own comments, critics and historians from Hausenstein onward have remarked on how he began as a graphic artist, how his painting in some sense lagged behind his drawing until quite late in his life (various dates are proposed for when, according to various formulations, his painting and drawing were integrated, or his painting became as innovative and masterful as his drawing), and how, throughout his career, his drawing had a very particular value for him, arguably exceeding that of his painting.69 But Hausenstein’s interpretation of the graphic character of Klee’s work is far from commonplace. For him, Klee exemplifies the artist who has drawn the consequences of his historical situation and thus become a “painter-­draftsman.” Thus, writes Hausenstein, “for consistency’s sake,” Klee’s pictures “can be pictures [Bilder] no longer, but rather only Blätter.”70 Hausenstein describes Klee’s art as responding to the same situation as the futurists and the Dadaists—­all of whom Hausenstein disdains as “scholastics” who “are uninteresting.”71 But he asserts that Klee, by becoming a “painter-­draftsman” and making Blätter, has found a way to be an “artist” rather than a “scholastic” of this situation.72 Hausenstein can help us to see how charged with changeable meaning the apparently straightforward demarcation between drawing and painting was in the early twentieth century. But now we need to see how Klee himself handles this demarcation, and the shift in how it operates in his work in the 1910s, for he does so very differently than Hausenstein. A great deal of evidence in Klee’s own writings attests to a reorganization of his theory and practice of abstraction, a 30 CHAPTER ONE

recentering of abstraction around graphic art rather than painting. In this next section, I analyze the aims of this reorganization by examining Klee’s writings, most importantly the essay he drafted in 1918 and titled “Graphic Art [Graphik].” In January 1913, Klee published “On Light,” his extremely free translation of a short statement by Robert Delaunay, in Walden’s journal Der Sturm.73 In August

1918, Klee drafted “Graphic Art” in response to the invitation extended by the expressionist writer Kasimir Edschmid to write about his own work for an anthology Edschmid was compiling of statements by artists and writers, a volume Edschmid published in 1920 and titled Creative Credo.74 In the meantime, Klee wrote nothing for publication. These two essays, which roughly bookend the years at the center of this chapter, could scarcely differ more from each other; together, they not only attest amply to the major shift in Klee’s conception of the artwork in the intervening years, but can help us to understand the terms in which he conceived this shift. Klee visited Delaunay on his second Paris trip, in April 1912; that summer, Delaunay wrote a short statement on light, color, and art entitled “La Lumière,” which he sent to Klee in the autumn.75 We must see Klee’s version of it, “On Light,” not as simply translating Delaunay’s views for the German-­speaking art public, but as both an appropriation and an adaptation of them, or a one-­ way collaboration: not only is the translation extremely free, but it is the only translation Klee ever published, and he was a great admirer of Delaunay at the time. In his 1912 review for a Swiss general-­interest magazine of the Kunsthaus Zürich exhibition organized by the “Moderne Bund” of Swiss artists (a group founded by Arp, Walter Helbig, and Oscar Lüthy), Klee called Delaunay “one of the most brilliant [artists] of our time” (fig. 1.6). He wrote enthusiastically about what he saw as Delaunay’s “astonishingly simple way” of solving the problem of the “inconsistency” of the treatment of motifs in cubist painting: Delaunay “created the type of an autonomous picture that leads a wholly abstract form-­ existence without a motif from nature. A structure of plastic life, nota bene, almost as distant from a carpet as a Bach fugue.”76 Klee’s description of Delaunay’s art as entirely autonomous and abstract, as analogous to music and not to be confused with the applied arts, fits easily into German writing on Delaunay at this time, when many artists and critics saw the French artist’s painting as a model to follow; more broadly, these were notes frequently sounded in the nascent discourse on abstract art.77 And at the time, autonomy and abstraction were the ambitions of Klee’s own art as well. According to “On Light,” the autonomy of painting is founded on light. This short text defends the claims of this kind of autonomous painting over and against, on the one hand, other senses and other arts, and, on the other, painting that has not raised itself to this level of self-­sufficiency. Vision—­celebrated as the dominant sense and chief intermediary between the human brain and the “vitality of the world,” characterized by relations of simultaneity—­is contrasted with hearing, which does not permit such a perception of simultaneity

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The “Painter-Draftsman”

Figure 1.6  Robert Delaunay, Les

Fenêtres sur la ville (Ière partie, 2e motif), 1912. Oil on cardboard, 39 × 29.6 cm. Location unknown; formerly collection of Sonia Delaunay, Paris.

but rather only “a successive movement,” like the “beat of a clock.” This temporal successiveness—­described as a “lack”—­limits architecture and sculpture.78 Painting, on the other hand, by virtue of its emphasis on the purely visual 32 CHAPTER ONE

simultaneity of light and color, is not marred by this lack. It must still guard against debasing itself by imitating anything other than the “synchromic action” of nature, its “true and sole subject” (117). The imitation of anything else debases art, involves it in another kind of lack: “As long as art does not get away from the object, it remains description, literature, it debases itself in using deficient means of expression” (116).79

Thus runs Klee’s version of Delaunay’s influential formulation of an abstract painting that seeks its foundations in the nature of vision, in the simultaneity that differentiates vision from the other senses, and aims to make this simultaneity into the object as well as the means of representation. Let us now examine a painting in which Klee attempts to translate these ideals into practice. In 1913, the year his Delaunay translation was published, Klee made a small number of plant still lifes—­a group of oil-­on-­board and, in one case, oil-­on-­paper paintings that stand apart from the rest of his work but resemble one another compositionally and materially.80 They seem to represent his abortive attempt to find a way of painting in oil that would not amount to drawing with paint (in contrast, in many of the oil paintings of 1909 and of 1914, Klee handles paint almost as if it were ink, or draws with a pen on a painted ground). In these plant still lifes, Klee attempts to make paintings of an organic self-­sufficiency—­to create “structure[s] of plastic life” (to borrow the phrase he used to describe Delaunay’s paintings in his 1912 Moderne Bund exhibition review) that would actually hew to Delaunay’s program.81 Klee marked some of these paintings in his oeuvre-­catalogue as having been made “after nature,” some “without nature.” Works from both groups, including the ones Klee notes that he painted without a motif before him, such as Flower Bed (fig. 1.7), have the appearance of having to do with seeing, of adjusting themselves to the complexities of visual perception, relative to the rest of Klee’s work, both before and after. The X-­marks of Flower Bed both pay homage to the diagonal divisions of the grid of Delaunay’s Windows and, at the same time, turn in space, suggesting some gap between the space the painting depicts and the surface of the painting, with which the painting must work to come to grips. As such, they stand in sharp contrast to the X-­marks of oil paintings of the next year, such as Creative Handwritten (fig. 1.8), in which the X becomes a repetitive surface marking, or indeed of works of the later 1910s, in which the X becomes a schematic mark that can stand in as easily for a body, the space around it, or the letter X—­a unit of perfect fungibility. (When these later X-­ marks do turn in space, as in Presentation of the Miracle [fig. 1.9], they do so not to acknowledge the visual perception of spatial depth but to demonstrate how automatically the illusionist trick of rudimentary perspectival depth may be performed, rather like, so the work suggests, the sideshow act represented—­ and then to undo it again by the same means. Compare the X-­marks creating the sides of the box out of which the pink-­faced homunculus in the foreground seems to be emerging, which seem to join the spatial recession suggested by the parallelogram of the catwalk, with those, similarly colored, just above the steps

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The “Painter-Draftsman”

Figure 1.7  Paul Klee, Flower

Bed (Blumenbeet), 1913, 193. Oil on cardboard, 28.2 × 33.7 cm. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Estate of Karl Nierendorf, by purchase, 48.1172.109. © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Figure 1.8  Paul Klee, Creative

Handwritten (Schöpferisch handschriftlich), 1914, 194. Oil on cardboard, 25 × 30 cm. Private Collection / The Bridgeman Art Library. © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-­ Kunst, Bonn.

Figure 1.9  Paul Klee, Presentation

of the Miracle (Vorführung des Wunders), 1916, 54. Gouache, pen, and ink on plastered fabric, mounted on board, 29.2 × 23.6 cm. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Allan Roos, MD, and B. Mathieu Roos. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY. © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

to the catwalk, which do no such thing.) The function of the X-­marks in Flower Bed is very different—­they signal the work of adjusting at once to the painting and to visual experience. The scale of these paintings signals the exceptional nature of this series as well; they are considerably larger than the usual minuteness of Klee’s work in the 1910s—­close in size, in fact, to the smaller paintings of Delaunay’s Windows series. Unusual, too, is the very fact that Klee registers the size of two of the paintings (Kakteen hinter Butzenscheiben and Blumensteg) in his oeuvre-­

35

The “Painter-Draftsman”

catalogue—­something he rarely does. It is as if they are not merely larger than most of Klee’s work of the 1910s but rather have size and exist in space in a way that the other works do not. But this short series stands quite alone in Klee’s work. In his next programmatic statement on art—­“Graphic Art,” the 1918 draft of the essay for Edschmid—­ almost every feature of “On Light” is turned on its head. Klee, in his contribution to Edschmid’s anthology, does mention Delaunay, approvingly if parenthetically, to speak of his “use of analyzed color opposites” as an example of how opposing and complementary elements may be combined to arrive at “a state resting in itself, hanging above the play of forces.” 82 In fact, besides one reference to the mid-­nineteenth-­century painter Anselm Feuerbach, Delaunay is the only artist he mentions. But the larger structure of Klee’s argument takes up the two crucial distinctions drawn in “On Light”—­the distinction between the simultaneity delivered by vision and painting, and the succession delivered by the other senses and arts; and the distinction between art that has freed itself from the object, in which light has raised itself “to presentational autonomy” (zur darstellerischen Selbständigkeit), and art that has remained “description, literature” (116)—­to counter them so determinedly that this text reads as a repudiation of the earlier one. Klee devotes the fourth section of his essay to arguing against the frequently made “distinction between temporal and spatial art,” which he does chiefly by describing the making and viewing of artworks as extending over time. He presents this section of his essay as directed most of all against Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s canonical formulation of this distinction in his Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1766). And although Klee dismisses Lessing’s division of the arts here as a “learned delusion,” his disagreement with Lessing appears to have been of the highest importance for his shifting conceptions of art (119).83 Explicit evidence of Klee’s disagreement with Laocoon recurs in his writing, and the productivity of this disagreement for his art necessitates a bit of an excursus on the topic. One of the reasons why Klee created in the 1910s a 36 CHAPTER ONE

practice and a theory of abstraction centered on the graphic as his particular and unusual solution to the problems that modernist painting posed him was a conscious and articulate intellectual commitment he seems to have adopted as an adolescent in Bern: his opposition to Lessing’s fundamental division, in his Laocoon, between painting and poetry, the visual arts extending over space and the literary arts unfolding over time. Klee’s opposition to and simultaneous

fascination with Laocoon is foundational for his understanding of art in the years before the First World War, and was one of the great motivations for the mode of painting-­as-­drawing that he developed during the war. Now, Klee is hardly alone in turning to Lessing; the first half of the twentieth century saw such ambitious responses to Laocoon as Rudolf Arnheim’s “A New Laocoön: Artistic Composites and the Talking Film” (1938), Clement Greenberg’s “Towards a New Laocoön” (1940), and Joseph Frank’s “Spatial Form in Modern Literature” (1945)—­a series inaugurated, according to David E. Wellbery, by Theodor A. Meyer’s The Stylistic Law of Poetry (1901). Wellbery asks an important question: “What are the historical conditions for this renewed relevance? What is it that, starting in 1901 and continuing until today, makes Lessing citable once again?”84 Wellbery argues that idealist aesthetics, exemplified by Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics, by conceiving of art as the sensuous appearance of spirit, and therefore ascribing little importance to differences between mediums, made an inquiry such as Lessing’s unthinkable (200–­201). But when “the distinction between consciousness and communication,” and with it a “purist ethos of medial specificity,” comes to the fore again around the turn of the twentieth century, Laocoon becomes relevant again (203). But unlike the later texts of Arnheim or Greenberg, Klee is attempting not to renew but rather to counter Lessing, and indeed in part, as we shall see, in order to counter a contemporary “purist ethos of medial specificity”—­by, as it were, going after the Enlightenment figure most celebrated and cited as its forebear. The first bit of evidence we have of Klee’s opposition to Lessing is telling. In 1898, at the end of his indifferent career as a student at the Städtische Gymnasium in Bern—­where he was taught the standard curriculum of Latin and German classics that bourgeois boys of the German-­speaking cantons of Switzerland had to master to receive the Maturität, the Swiss school-­leaving certificate—­Klee and two of his friends published a satirical, one-­off newspaper called Die Wanze (The Bug, subtitled Not Illustrated but Strongly Spiced Commercial Newspaper, fig. 1.10). Their publication made enough fun of the Gymnasium teachers (particularly a certain Dr. Otto von Greyerz, a German teacher with whom Klee got along very badly) and the culture promoted there (targets include Goethe philology, classical archaeology, and Swiss dialect poetry) to provoke the anger of the school commission.85 One item in the newspaper presents itself as the “Ten Commandments” of the Gymnasium, satirizing the worshipful adulation of German classicism propagated by the educational system: “I. You shall believe in Aristotle’s infallibility. II. Likewise in that of Lessing, his prophet (with the exception of ch. 6 [Lessing is mistaken] of the Laocoon).”86

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The “Painter-Draftsman”

Figure 1.10  The Bug: Not Illustrated but

Strongly Spiced Commercial Newspaper (Die Wanze: Nicht illustrierte aber stark gewürzte Commerszeitung), September 24, 1898. Photograph courtesy of Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern.

Why might the sixth chapter of the Laocoon be singled out in this odd parenthetical double negative of mockery? The commandments as a whole are clearly intended as parody, but the parenthetical remark is difficult to read as a mocking imitation of the overbearing voice of the official culture of the humanistic gymnasium—­it appears that another voice breaks in here, as if it were unbearable that the sixth chapter be endorsed even parodically. This chapter of Lessing’s essay argues that the ancient sculptor of the Vatican’s Laocoon group imitated Virgil rather than the other way around, extending into a discussion 38 CHAPTER ONE

of the translatability of poetry into art and art into poetry. Lessing asserts that because the sphere of poetry is wider, encompassing “the limitless field of our imagination [Einbildungskraft], and the incorporeal nature of its forms,” poetry cannot always be “translated” into painting or sculpture (and thus, for instance, the sculptor had to deviate from Virgil’s description), but painting and sculpture can always be translated into poetry.87 This wider range of poetry is underwrit-

ten by Lessing’s fundamental distinction between the spatial and the temporal arts, between “the whole which our eyes can or should be able to survey at a glance” that a comprehensible work of visual art must be and the possibilities of successive description available to poetry (42). The adolescent Klee appears to have bridled at Lessing’s ascription of such a larger field to poetry than to the visual arts and at the apparently modest scope Lessing grants the sculptor, despite his meager reassurance that the sculptor is “as great in [his] art as the poet in his” (in that he has the “wisdom” to follow Virgil and yet make the necessary “deviations from the model” required by the differences between poetry and sculpture, giving him “ample opportunity to think” for himself) (40). This reference, mocking and, given the confusion of voices and of levels of the text introduced by that parenthetical exception, highly ambivalent, is the first of many for Klee. He refers to Lessing as he attempts to resolve the ongoing conflict between what he calls “ideas” and “pure art,” to which his letters and diary entries between 1902 and 1912 so often attest.88 Here, too, Klee’s statements on Lessing are ambivalent: five years after Die Wanze, he wrote a letter to Lily Stumpf, his future wife, arguing that a work of visual art cannot originate in “a poetic mood or idea,” making a strict separation between a “poetic” or “philosophical” idea, on the one hand, and, on the other, the kind of idea proper to the visual arts. Then, in the space of a sentence, he refers to Lessing for support and rejects him: “Lessing already called attention to this foundation  . . . but because Lessing erred in some details (but never in principle!), he is generally wrong.”89 Two weeks later, he even urges Lily to read Lessing: “Every educated person must know Lessing’s ‘Laocoon.’ Some day when you have some time to pick up the book, you must ask me for a short and very good excerpt that Doctor von Nervenstimulus [Klee’s name for Otto von Greyerz] gave us in his day.”90 Years later, in his contribution to Creative Credo, Klee articulates his objection to Lessing as follows: In Lessing’s Laocoon, on which we once frittered away youthful thought experiments, a lot of fuss is made about the difference between temporal and spatial art. And yet on closer examination it is only a learned delusion. For space, too, is a temporal concept.91

But this “learned delusion”—­much as Klee disagreed with it—­was, as he makes clear in his 1903 letters to Lily, also of great value to him: it seems to have been a kind of treasured irritant. (Perhaps it returned him to a paragone-­like struggle with Otto von Greyerz; Klee already wished, although not without hesitations,

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The “Painter-Draftsman”

to become an artist, and his teacher’s Lessing extract must have appeared as an interdiction, an attempt to limit what artists in general and Klee in particular might attempt.) Sometimes Klee sees Lessing as a prime example of the kind of artificial, academic stricture that afflicts the epigone, but which the example of innovative modern artists gives him the courage to cast off. In his 1912 article on the Moderne Bund exhibition, Klee contrasts what he sees as the freedom of Kandinsky as a Russian with his conception of the peculiar situation of the Swiss artist, provincial yet highly educated (“so utterly infected by school”), on whom the paralyzing burden of European culture weighs heavily, imposing itself prior to any firsthand visual experience of art: “We read Laocoon, we knew and judged pictures and museums before we had seen them.”92 Similarly, in Klee’s December 1912 review of a Munich exhibition of the Italian futurists, he especially relishes how reading the titles printed in the catalogue affects the viewing of the paintings, and the very elaborateness of the written scenarios of urban dynamism that the paintings are to express—­in short, the scandal of these titles from Lessing’s point of view: One gets more from the pictures if one consults the catalogue now and again. There it reads, for instance: “When one opens a window, all the noise of the street, the movement and objectivity of things outside, suddenly enters into the room,” or “The power of the street, the life, the ambition, the anxiety that one can observe in the city, the oppressive feeling the noise causes.” Indeed, such things are really expressed with full effect (holy Laocoon!).93

In this period of Klee’s induction into vanguard culture—­the year he participated in the second Blaue Reiter exhibition in Munich alongside Kandinsky, Marc, and August Macke, and visited Paris to see work by Picasso, Braque, and Delaunay—­he appears to have seen some aspects of it as a liberation of the visual arts from Lessing’s limitations.94 But more importantly, Klee seems to understand one formalist version of modernism, which he associates chiefly with Julius Meier-­Graefe, one of the 40 CHAPTER ONE

first to seek to convince the German public of the importance of impressionism, and the artists he championed, above all Cézanne and Hans von Marées, in part as reinforcing Lessing’s delimitation of the proper boundaries of the pictorial arts—­which Klee wished to reject.95 However, this rejection is again highly ambivalent. Klee calls Cézanne the “teacher par excellence” and seeks unsuccessfully to interest Meier-­Graefe in his own work; in short, the formal-

ism with which Klee identifies both is just as much a model as an adversary.96 Indeed, he sees Meier-­Graefe and Cézanne as teachers above all and, as such, both models and adversaries. In a 1908 diary entry, Klee speaks of his attempts to learn “how I must do it to become a good artist” from “teacher Meier-­Gräfe” and “teacher Karl Scheffler” (also an influential art critic and a crucial supporter of impressionism) in terms that mock both the two powerful critics and himself.97 He imagines the critics as schoolmasterly figures scolding and guiding him, a schoolboy, pathetic in his eagerness to please his masters. A range of figures, from Lessing to these formalist critics to the painters these critics hold up as exemplary, are identified with one another and combined into the figure of the demanding schoolmaster. When Klee painted Flower Bed (1913), discussed above, five years later, he gave it a little that revisits the imaginary scenario of this diary entry, in which Klee goes on to speculate about whether there is a god, or whether nature is godless “habituation, chance, and adaptation,” but “Herr Teacher says: What should you care about the essence of god, just look at his flower bed, that’s enough. I do want to be good, Herr Teacher!”98 It seems that the plant still lifes are Klee’s attempt to be “good,” to avoid any hint of “speculation.” In this diary entry, however, it is clear that Klee finds himself pathetic for wanting to please the composite figure of the teacher, and therefore wants to displease him as well; as we saw, the plant still lifes of 1913 are an isolated group. And many of the peculiar features of Klee’s art a few years later, his departures from dominant formulations of modernist painting—­above all, his concerns with making clear that the production and reception of pictures take place in time and with devising ways of working in the borderlands between writing and the visual arts—­are in part directed against the interdiction he perceives in formalism. In an autobiographical text that Klee wrote for Hausenstein in 1919, he relates his struggle with Scheffler and Meier-­Graefe in 1908 to his reading of Vincent van Gogh’s letters, and his decision, spurred by van Gogh’s example, to forgo poetic invention in favor of working sur le motif.99 He cites both this practice and his reading of the two critics as contributing to his overcoming of what he calls “the speculative” in his art: 41

The speculative [a sort of expressionist dead end] of some of my works of 1907 was put in a sharp light. For complete recovery intention to return before nature. . . . Recovery from the speculative partly thanks to the influence of Meier-­ Graefe’s and Scheffler’s books.100

The “Painter-Draftsman”

The books in question are likely two polemics launched by the two critics against what they viewed as the German art public’s unfortunate preference for pictures providing occasions for “dreaming” or “thinking,” provoking “speculation” on the part of the viewer, exemplified by the art of Arnold Böcklin: Meier-­ Graefe’s The Case of Böcklin and the Doctrine of the Unities (1905), which Klee notes that he read the year it was published, and Scheffler’s The German and His Art: A Necessary Polemic (1907).101 We should keep in mind, while thinking about Klee’s response to these polemics, that as a youth he had admired Böcklin (whose reputation in the German-­speaking areas of Switzerland in the 1890s, when Klee made up his mind to become an artist, was enormous); as Klee wrote in another 1919 text for Hausenstein, “Böcklin, who was seen as important and modern in Switzerland back then, seemed very beautiful to me.”102 Klee’s talk of “recovery from the speculative” connects well with the arguments made by both critics; the word speculation was often used in Wilhelmine Germany to speak of a certain mode of looking at paintings that was a matter of active controversy around the turn of the century.103 At that time there was widespread concern that associative habits of viewing encouraged by the midcentury predominance of allegorical Gedankenmalerei (thought-­painting), as practiced by Peter Cornelius and Wilhelm von Kaulbach, were a major impediment to the reform of German art, which critics of the most divergent directions felt necessary, and it was just this mode of looking that Meier-­Graefe and Scheffler criticized. Meier-­Graefe and Scheffler described the appeal of Böcklin and his followers in terms of the painting’s invitation to viewers to engage in forms of imaginative activity that the critics saw as leading beyond the bounds of the painting itself. For instance, Meier-­Graefe explains the popularity of Böcklin’s Self-­Portrait with Death Playing the Fiddle (1872; fig. 1.11) in terms of its appeal to the viewer’s imagination (Phantasie), the play of which the viewer mistakes for true enjoyment of art (Kunstgenuß): If one demands from the picture a closed, harmonious cosmos that . . . gives a legitimate reflection of the artist’s perception, then the Self-­Portrait with Death 42 CHAPTER ONE

is infinitely weak art. On the other hand, it does convey more or less how Böcklin looked in the year 1872 and, apart from that, portrays a bizarre situation. . . . The viewer mixes himself up in the matter; and one cannot blame him, for in this picture nothing but the emblematic really stands out. . . . This addition of the symbolic serves to divert the eye from the work, and in this way apparently something is created that resembles in its effect what we recognize as essential

Figure 1.11  Arnold Böcklin,

Self-­Portrait with Death Playing the Fiddle (Selbstbildnis mit fiedelndem Tod), 1872. Oil on canvas, 75 × 61 cm. Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin.

for the enjoyment of art. . . . But is it really the soul that delights in the fantastic autobiography of this portrait? . . .  Is it not rather a Phantasie that is enticed here, a game whose flexibility makes one forget its aimlessness? . . .  This self-­ portrait stimulates thought  . . . [but] fulfills neither the purpose of thinking, for it does not strengthen the thinking apparatus, but rather mollycoddles and weakens it; nor does it fulfill any aesthetic end, for the enjoyment of art has nothing to do with thinking.104

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In a passage criticizing the viewing habits of the art public, Scheffler writes similarly of the “educated German” who “believes he is permitted to dream in front of a picture. He thinks he feels artistically when, standing before a landscape, he experiences a bathing trip in his mind’s eye; spurred on by a painterly depiction, he elaborates the situation dramatically, and therefore temporally—­ and is convinced that he thereby grasps the essence of spatial art.”105 Scheffler goes on to cite Lessing in his attack on this belief that he imputes to the art public: This is an old view, which Lessing tried already to dispute and which nevertheless comes up again and again for discussion. . . . The painterly can only operate spatially, and therefore pictorially; it presupposes inalterability in time. In the sense that neither the before nor the after of the moment represented may ever be of interest. As soon as a thought wanders out over the frame, either the picture is bad or the beholder inferior.106

Klee was drawn to Meier-­Graefe’s and Scheffler’s views on the kind of engagement a picture should offer its viewers and at the same time resisted them, repeating the contradictions of his attitudes toward Lessing. But we need even more of a sense of the history of his attempts to mediate between these contradictions, broadly conceived. It would be useful to back up to survey, at least in outline, Klee’s ambivalence toward formalist ideals early in his artistic career, on the basis of the ample evidence he left in his diary and letters. Much of this ambivalence is bound up with his reservations about painting itself. Around the turn of the century, the young Klee wrote a great deal in his letters about the latter, about the profession in which he was being trained and the “oily-­smelling brush-­goddess” he felt duty-­bound to embrace: “I don’t want to become a damned one-­sided painter, I want to become an artist.”107 (At times, tellingly, the opposing term to “painter” is not “artist” but, rather, “draftsman”: “Do you know what I want to become for the time being: a painter? No! merely a very common draftsman.”)108 Between 1902 and 1912, Klee worked through his ambivalence toward paint44 CHAPTER ONE

ing as a métier together with his attempts to find his place vis-­à-­vis modernism in repeated negotiations between the “poetic” and the “painterly,” the “speculative” or “philosophical” and the “purely plastic,” to echo his own language as he tried to articulate how he wanted to relate the two. The problem returned, never staying resolved for long. It is already there in a letter to Lily of July 11, 1902, in which Klee critiques his own first paintings as “purely poetic” rather than

“painterly,” a problem he says he addressed by looking at “older painting,” doing “form studies,” extending his grasp of anatomy, and visiting Italy, so as to devote himself to the “architectonic,” formal elements of painting. But, he says, he has already begun working toward a new synthesis, taking “das Poëtische” into account again—­on a different basis, presumably, than in his first paintings.109 This narrative—­a dialectical story of development, of an originally poetic orientation that then confronts, absorbs, and overcomes a one-­sidedly formal orientation toward art, to return to the poetic but in a transformed form—­recurs in Klee’s writings. Although he tells it as a story of conflict followed by resolution, it repeats—­it remains unresolved, a fundamental ambivalence.110 A few years later, in a diary entry of 1905, he returns to the issue—­but this time, instead of speaking of a new synthesis of the “poetic” and the “painterly,” he disputes the opposition between them, asserting that the “dogma” of “‘pure’ plastic art” is too simple (note his skeptical quotation marks), and that a drawing, however autonomously formed, always functions as a symbol as well, citing Wilde’s aphorism from the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray: “All art is at once surface and symbol.”111 But the next year, instead of trying to undermine the distinction between the “poetic” and “‘pure’ plastic art,” he sharpens it by allotting each a separate realm: graphic art (Graphik) for the first, art (Kunst) for the second. In his letter to Lily of June 13, 1906, he criticizes his earlier etchings for attempting to be “pure art” and “pure Graphik” at once, whereas he now believes it necessary to enforce a strict separation between the two—­between his “thought-­sketches,” on the one hand, and his “pure art,” which he saw as turning toward impressionism, on the other.112 He looks back, as we have seen, at his engagement with van Gogh, Meier-­ Graefe, and Scheffler as curing him of “the speculative”—­but, as is clear from the 1908 diary entry discussed above that imagined the critics as schoolmasters, this “recovery,” this cure, is problematic for him. A journal entry of 1912 on two Swiss artists, Albert Welti and Hans Brühlmann, articulates the dilemma in which Klee saw himself, which his turn to graphic abstraction later solved.113 Welti, the “good old craftsman” who was heavily influenced by Böcklin, is in no way a promising path forward; Klee writes of Welti’s etching of his wife’s funeral procession, Burial (1912; fig. 1.12), “He wrote a sentimental saying beneath it, and there the half-­kitsch was.”114 But Brühlmann’s rejection of Böcklin is also problematic for Klee. He writes of Brühlmann as an all too obedient student, in terms that recall the 1908 diary entry:

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The “Painter-Draftsman”

Hans Brühlmann agreed too much with Meier-­Graefe. He allowed his Böcklin-­ veneration to be beat away with a stick. . . . The non-­fantastic remained restricted in the “modern” track. Of course next it’s Marées and Cézanne. Brühlmann becomes a follower, he listens attentively!115

Drawing on Meier-­Graefe’s Case of Böcklin, Klee constructs an opposition between the fantastic and the “non-­fantastic”—­and is determined to be critical of both sides. As we can see in his discussion of Brühlmann, his strong sense of artistic and personal independence made signing on to either program repellent—­but this opposition articulated the terms through which he arrived at his own position, his attempt to create something that would allow the fantastic without falling into kitsch. Certain ideas he wished to borrow from Marées and Cézanne, Scheffler and Meier-­Graefe—­but he wanted also to be able to use much of what they rejected.

Figure 1.12  Albert Welti, Burial (Begräbnis), 1912. Etching, 7.5 × 13 cm. Printed by Heinrich Wetterroth. British Museum,

London. © Trustees of the British Museum.

Now that we have surveyed Klee’s vexed relation not only to Lessing but also to debates about the limits of painting in the early years of the twentieth century, we can return to his frontal attack on Laocoon in the “Graphic Art” essay, in which he argues that Lessing’s distinction is false, for “space, too, is a temporal concept.”116 Klee argues that beholding an artwork is a temporal process, and that vision is a matter of succession, not unlike touch (he speaks of the feeling or grazing eye [“abtastenden Auge”] that must, like a sensitive fingertip, trace what it perceives). In his account, the beholder “brings one part at a time into the fovea, and to arrive at a new piece, he must leave the old one behind” (120).117 In “On Light,” the primacy of vision was founded on the experience of simultaneity: “Without the perceptual possibilities of the sense of sight we would be left behind at a successive movement.”118 But in the “Graphic Art” essay, vision itself is redescribed as a successive movement. Klee cites the painter Anselm Feuerbach (the leader, with Böcklin, of the “German Romans”) as support, for, in an aphorism titled “On the Contemplation of an Artwork,” Feuerbach makes the following recommendation: “Whoever wishes to understand and enjoy an artwork should go, unaccompanied if possible, and buy himself a chair, if such a thing is available, seat himself at the correct distance and try, remaining silent, to forget his honorable self for at least a quarter of an hour.”119 Klee writes that the purpose of the chair is to keep the viewer from being disturbed by tired legs, and “Legs get tired from long standing. Hence, scope (Spielraum): time” (120).120 One might adumbrate how Klee’s opposition to Lessing became productive for his art by turning for a moment to later scholarly writing on Laocoon. In his classic study Ut Pictura Poesis (1940), Rensselaer W. Lee comments that were Lessing not led astray by his lack of familiarity with modern painting and too narrow conception of “formal beauty,” few would argue against Laocoon, “for no one will deny the general rightness of his contention that the greatest painting, like the greatest poetry, observes the limitations of its medium; or that it is dangerous for a spatial art like painting to attempt the progressive effects of a temporal art like poetry.”121 W. J. T. Mitchell remarks of Lee’s comment that such a danger may be taken “as a challenge to take a certain kind of risk, not a prohibition of its very possibility.”122 Laocoon appears to have been of crucial importance to Klee’s art as a “challenge” for Klee—­a challenge to invent ways of overturning the prohibition. Mitchell discusses in general terms claims deployed against Lessing’s opposition between the temporal and spatial arts—­for instance, that “a literary work is spatial insofar as it is written” and that “painting  . . . must be scanned in some temporal interval.” Much of Klee’s oeuvre, as well as his writings, displays and explores the graphic writtenness of letters and words and the

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The “Painter-Draftsman”

temporal grazing, to use one of his favored expressions again, of the groping or feeling eye moving over a picture (120).123 The latter claim, says Mitchell, is “met with the counterargument that these temporal processes are not determined or constrained by the object. We can perform these scannings in any order we wish (more or less), and we know throughout this process that we are the ones moving in time.”124 We might see Klee’s great concern that his pictures lay down particular paths for the viewer’s gaze as attempting to counter this counterargument. The mode of “hieroglyphic” picture-­making that he develops around 1916 appears to turn around Lessing’s condemnations of allegory in painting and his warning that allegory makes painting “an arbitrary method of writing”; in these pictures, Klee puts the terms of Lessing’s warning into playful practice.125 I will deal with these matters in more detail in chapter 2, but wish here to give an overview of the importance of Lessing’s essay to Klee’s art—­or, more precisely, of how Klee’s struggle against the basic distinctions that Lessing drew formed many of the stranger aims of his art. In one section of the “Graphic Art” essay, Klee performs a sort of demonstration of this successive movement of looking at an artwork, which is such an important part of his anti-­Laocoonism. In this famous passage, beginning with his suggestion, “let us make a little trip into the land of better understanding, following a topographical map,” Klee gives us several paragraphs of a short narrative of a journey, which he presents as resulting from the viewing and interpretation of a succession of what he terms “form-­elements of graphic art” (Formelemente der Graphik) (118).126 He begins as follows: Jumping over the dead point is the first act of movement (line). After a short time, stop to catch our breath. (Broken line, or line articulated by several stops.) Look back, how far along we are already. (Countermovement.) Mentally considering the path, this way and that (bundle of lines). A river wants to obstruct, we use a boat (wave-­motion). (Ibid.)127

From these first sentences, we can already see how very much Klee’s notion of vision here differs from that of his Delaunay translation. 48 CHAPTER ONE

That this programmatic statement about looking at a picture takes the form of a narrative of a journey, of movement through space over time, reinforces Klee’s argument that the viewer must traverse the space of an artwork one piece, one detail, at a time. But these paragraphs present themselves not only as the journey itself but also as the consultation of a map of the journey’s terrain. Very short descriptions of various parenthetical “form-­elements of graphic art” al-

ternate with sentences and sentence fragments that interpret the parenthetical “form-­elements,” like a series of captions which together form the narrative of a journey. Klee suggests that this alternation between formal elements and narrative bits is something like the activity of reading or making a topographical map (one thinks of the legend that informs the viewer of the meanings of the cartographer’s signs) or, perhaps more precisely, telling a story over it, using its codes. Each graphic element is seen both parenthetically as more or less itself and as something else—­rather like, to extend Klee’s analogy, the dashed lines, smaller and larger dots, and decodable pictographs used by the cartographer to denote various kinds of borders, smaller towns and larger cities, and so on. But even the parenthetical description that presents itself as the graphic element seen as itself, before it is seen as something else, is already something else. The “river,” for instance, that “wants to obstruct” elaborates on the initial comparison made between a wave and a certain kind of line by the word wave-­motion; the “form-­element,” already metaphorical, does not oppose but rather initiates the viewer’s further metaphorical substitutions. Klee seems to propose that seeing is always seeing as.128 There is an enormous distance between this proposal and the Delaunay essay, in which art that fails to free itself from the object is debased, unfree “literature”; here Klee proposes that the viewing of the formal elements of an artwork involves the viewer seeing them successively as the actions, incidents, and objects of a diminutive narrative. Looking at an artwork, Klee suggests, generates “literature.” Hausenstein comments on this passage at some length, emphasizing the apparent contradiction between Klee’s insistence on seeing each “element” as something else and aim of what Klee himself terms the “pure cultivation of the means”: This is what is called cultivation of pure form, even absolutism of the means [Mittel, means or medium, as in means of representation or expression]. . . . The absoluteness of the means visibly turns into the expression of a representational—­or in any case of a meaning that does not exhaust itself in the run-­out, in the persistence, in the withdrawal of the means, but instead comprises the meaning of some kind of matter. . . . The means is again really means: mediator, middleman, intermediate term; not purpose and aim. The means hieroglyph, rune, also stenograph—­condensed type, abbreviation. Stenograph that hardly another could learn.129

Clearly, there is a great distance between the conceptions of art in “On Light” and the essay for Edschmid’s anthology, and between the kinds of engagement

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The “Painter-Draftsman”

each asks of its viewer: they are, after all, different arts. In the Klee translation of the Delaunay text, it is obvious that “art” means, above all, painting: the concluding sentence states that nature’s “synchromic action is to be regarded as the true and sole subject of painting.”130 Klee’s later text is about a different set of media altogether; here, “art” means, above all, graphic art. The 1918 draft, which is after all titled “Graphic Art,” begins as follows: “In itself leading still more justifiably toward abstraction, it had to receive higher regard in our age.”131 Although Klee leaves the comparison implicit, it is surely “still more justifiably” than painting that graphic art leads to abstraction; Klee seems to be positioning himself here in relation to visions of abstraction centered on painting, such as Delaunay’s or Kandinsky’s (or, for that matter, looking beyond Klee’s immediate interlocutors, Mondrian’s or Malevich’s).132 This particular claim is dropped in the 1920 published version, but that version, too, is a discussion of the “essence of graphic art” (Wesen der Graphik), of what he terms in his concluding sentence “aphoristic, many-­branched graphic art” (die aphoristisch-­vielverzweigte Graphik)—­its particular capacity for a certain mode of abstraction, its own kind of purity, its specific formal elements.133 And when Klee makes statements about art in general in this essay, the surrounding context suggests that graphic art is paradigmatic here, the art with regard to which those statements about art in general are most fully relevant—­as painting is in “On Light.” This is the important turn that takes place in this essay: for Klee, graphic art, rather than painting, might be called the paradigmatic medium of abstraction. Abstraction results, for him, from the observation of the particular nature of graphic art, from the discovery of its formal elements, from their deployment in a fashion that does not obscure the construction of the work out of these elements: “The elements should make up forms, but without sacrificing themselves in the process. Preserving themselves,” he writes.134 He emphasizes this point even more in the 1918 draft: “A jack of all arts will indeed, violating the elements, produce certain illusions through their accumulation. But that is no longer pure art, for the element is sacrificed and therefore disappears.”135 Klee sees graphic art as anti-­illusionistic in its essence and thus peculiarly suited to abstraction. 50 CHAPTER ONE

In the first paragraph of the published version of his essay, he writes: The essence of graphic art easily and rightly tempts to abstraction. . . . The purer the graphic work, that is, the more weight is laid upon the form-­elements underlying the graphic representation, the more the armature for the realistic representation of visible things is lacking.136

There is a degree to which one could describe Klee’s essay as reiterating a set of claims about how art, becoming conscious of the capacities and limits of its own particular means of expression (Ausdrucksmittel, to use the favored phrase of critical discourse among supporters of modern art in Germany in the 1910s), which differentiates it from others, discards the task of depicting recognizable things outside itself to become pure and abstract.137 It may seem at first that Klee simply substitutes graphic art for the usual painting as the particular medium in question (a parallel between this essay and “On Light” may be found in how Klee speaks of Graphik as a singular art with a singular essence—­as was indeed very common in contemporary discussions, in which the opposition between painting and Graphik often smoothed over the enormous differences within the rather motley group of technical processes included under this rubric). Certainly Klee uses the language of such claims, as developed in German art criticism from Julius Meier-­Graefe through Kandinsky, in which Klee was steeped. But something strange happens: one cannot simply substitute graphic art for painting in this argument, or not without the argument taking on an unfamiliar shape. For in Klee’s essay, this familiar line of argument is combined with quite a different one—­an older discourse, elaborated largely in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, about the particular characteristics of graphic art as opposed to painting. These characteristics have less to do with any sort of common denominator between the various technical processes (from hand drawing to woodcut to etching) involved in the production of works termed “graphic” than with the particular modes of reception that such works were understood to invite in contradistinction to painting: the graphic arts were often viewed as particularly inviting the involvement of the viewer’s imagination to expand on what was seen as their characteristically incomplete, laconic, elliptical means of representation. This view appears to derive from the aesthetics of “ideal presence” and the “non finito,” which, as Eric Rothstein explains, must be understood in terms of a practice of “imaginative expansion, visual and nonvisual” that was, for eighteenth-­century readers and viewers, an intrinsic part of experiencing an artwork.138 Examining texts by a range of critics, including Lessing, Rothstein explicates the underlying reciprocity between, on the one hand, the notion that the excellence of an artwork lies in its ability to present a viewer or reader with an illusive “ideal presence” as vivid as, in Lord Kames’s words, a “waking dream,” and, on the other, the aesthetic interest in the unfinished, fragmentary, abbreviated, or otherwise apparently inadequate representation that leaves the viewer

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ample room to fill it out and complete it (309). Elaborating on an ancient topos (Pliny the Elder discussed how an unfinished sculpture might spur a viewer to imagine it perfect and complete), critics pledged to the pictorial vividness of “ideal presence” in poetry, of the kind described by Joseph Warton as “turning readers into spectators,” did not demand lengthy visual descriptions as one might expect but rather “poetry in which the laconic sparks sudden imaginative expansion,” writes Rothstein (310, 321). In the visual arts, critics elaborated on Roger de Piles’ praise of less finished drawings (“l’imagination y supplée toutes les parties qui y manquent, ou qui n’y sont pas terminées, & que chacun les voit selon son Goût”), according special importance to the sketch as offering scope for the viewer’s imagination.139 Not only the sketch but also other works of visual art that seemed somehow incomplete, such as Gainsborough’s paintings, whose “unfinished manner” Sir Joshua Reynolds lauded, were also seen as asking for a notional completion within the viewer’s imagination that far surpassed what a more “finished” work might possibly achieve without it (326). Rothstein’s analysis of the aesthetics of the “non finito” in the eighteenth century is coupled with the recommendation that scholars take into account imaginative expansion as an important aspect of what eighteenth-­century readers and viewers did with poems and pictures. His plea for scholars to elaborate “a historical phenomenology of response” follows from his assertion that eighteenth-­century works were “written or painted with formal, affective criteria  . ..  sharply different from those of the aesthetic purism now commonly practiced” (331).140 If looking at eighteenth-­century works with twentieth-­century criteria is distorting, it may seem bizarre to relate Klee’s essay—­which is about aesthetic purity, among other things—­to these eighteenth-­century terms. Yet it seems to me that what Rothstein describes as the reciprocity of “ideal presence” and “non finito” provides a good way of thinking about how ideality and insufficiency hang together in much German writing about drawing and the graphic arts since Romanticism. A strikingly extreme example is Friedrich Schlegel’s 1804 discussion of Dürer’s engravings not as finished works but as akin to sketches, as “ideas” that might even potentially be “carried out” by present-­day painters, should there be any worthy of such a project: they should be viewed, 52 CHAPTER ONE

writes Schlegel, as “a collection of artistic thought-­fragments, a reserve of creative art-­ideas, and not merely as copies of paintings robbed of color and thus very incomplete.”141 Schlegel perceives their inky linearity as a lack of color, and this lack as inviting some sort of completion on the part of other artists—­many other commentators will see it as inviting notional completion on the part of the viewer. Such reciprocity of the ideal and the incomplete can help us to under-

stand why E. T. A. Hoffmann and Max Klinger, among others, saw the graphic arts in particular as akin to poetry and as addressing the viewer’s imagination by inviting speculative reverie, as I will discuss in chapter 2. And this way of conceiving the particularity of the graphic arts is, I argue, crucial for understanding Klee’s essay and his aims more broadly. It appears that for Klee, the “essence of graphic art,” which tends in itself toward abstraction, is, though he does not put it thus, its “non finito,” which solicits imaginative expansion as an intrinsic aspect of its viewing, just as Klee seeks to demonstrate in the passage narrating the “little journey.” He is adamant that the pure graphic artwork be visibly constructed out of the formal elements that make it up; it is these formal elements themselves that become the basis of imaginative expansion. Thus a kind of narrative, “literary” viewing condemned in modernist criticism from the mid-­nineteenth century onward as extrinsic to the visual arts in general is reclaimed by Klee as in fact intrinsic to the graphic arts in particular. If Delaunay and others derived a conception of pure painting devoted solely to what painting alone could do, Klee appears to set forth a notion of a pure graphic work, which would derive its own mode of abstraction from its own particular capacities—­above all, its capacity to be seen as something else, to call for imaginative elaboration, as in the “little journey.” To return to the opening paragraph of Klee’s essay, we can observe his strange combination of what he calls purity and this understanding of graphic art as laconic and thus inviting imaginative expansion: The essence of graphic art easily and rightly tempts to abstraction. The shadowy and fairy-­tale-­like quality of the imaginary character is given and expresses itself with great precision at the same time. The purer the graphic work, that is, the more weight is laid upon the form-­elements underlying the graphic representation, the more the armature for the realistic representation of visible things is lacking.142

The abstraction that Klee sees as resulting from following the lead of graphic art’s “essence,” of coming to terms with the givens of graphic art, is abstraction in an entirely different sense from that which Delaunay advocates. It follows from his description of the given features of the graphic arts in terms that strongly suggest a conception of the graphic as definitively “non finito,” emphasizing the graphic work’s lack of illusionistic resources and the way that this in turn makes it particularly open to the imagination. In Klee’s essay, “abstraction” does not follow from the medium’s formal elements’ refusal to

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refer to objects outside themselves—­it is not opposed to representation.143 To the contrary, the formal elements of Graphik at their purest point unceasingly beyond themselves. For Klee, they are properly seen as other things and are, so to speak, metaphorical to the core: “A flash of lightning on the horizon (zigzag line).”144 When Klee says “abstraction” in this paragraph, he seems to mean that graphic art lacks many of painting’s resources for sensuous similitude, what he calls “the armature for the realistic representation of visible things.” Thus the written letter or number is “abstract” in the manner of the “abstract form-­ elements” of graphic art, which, Klee writes, may be combined into either “concrete beings” or “abstract things like numbers and letters.”145 When graphic art is seen as a medium particularly given to abstraction, when that abstraction is seen not as self-­referential closure but as a multiplication of signifying chains, when numbers and letters are “abstract things,” we can see that the use Klee makes of the term abstract in his essay for Edschmid is very different from the way that it is used in other writings on abstract art in the 1910s, including those by other artists he knew and admired, such as Kandinsky or Delaunay, whose concepts of abstraction were far more influential than his own. In the idea of pure graphic work that Klee puts forward in this essay, there is a concern for the “purity” of graphic art analogous in some respects to that of painting as put forward in Kandinsky’s prewar writings. In fact, in Klee’s letters to Lily and in his diary, he speaks of reading and admiring Kandinsky’s essay “Painting as Pure Art” (1913) while writing and revising his first draft in September 1918.146 An anthology titled Expressionism, edited by Herwarth Walden, had just appeared, and while Klee dismisses most of the pictures and texts included as “warmed-­over,” he is enthusiastic about Kandinsky’s “splendid” essay, first published in Walden’s magazine in 1913. He compares it to his own effort and envies Kandinsky’s sureness as a writer, while also implying that he himself lacks that sureness because he is more complex than Kandinsky: “I am not yet so far as a writer, I still operate with a certain nervousness, because nothing is yet overcome. Quite apart from the fact that my disposition is altogether more complicated.”147 When Klee writes of purity in his own essay, one can read this as sharing in 54 CHAPTER ONE

the meanings Kandinsky gives this term in his essay on pure painting, in which he speaks of painting as originating in “practical” and “bodily” needs but gradually becoming “spiritual,” undergoing independent development to become free from having to fulfill such needs (which Kandinsky equates with the subject matter of nature) and therefore “pure.”148 Klee seems to be especially interested in the self-­reflexivity of Kandinsky’s idea of pure painting, singling out one line

for particular praise: “A phrase such as ‘the artwork becomes the subject’ says it all.”149 However, if Klee is attempting in his own essay to put forward an idea of a pure (disinterested, autonomous, nonillusionistic, and self-­reflexive) graphic work, he does not construct it as a perfect parallel to Kandinsky’s pure painting. Klee cannot, for there is no color in his “graphic art,” nor is there anything that plays a role equivalent to that played by color in Kandinsky’s writings on painting. (There is nothing like, for instance, the “inner parallels” Kandinsky draws later, in Point and Line to Plane, between various graphic lines and colors, such as his comparison between the diagonal line and the color red.)150 Whereas for Kandinsky, it is ultimately the spiritual effects of color on the viewer that allow him to speak of a pure art “where spirit can speak to spirit in purely artistic language,” the graphic “elements” of Klee’s essay have no parallel function: for Klee, the viewer sees the elements as various things, whereas Kandinsky’s concept of the color-­language of painting depends on color as acting directly on the viewer and thus allowing the artist to transmit the inner content of his soul to the viewer.151 The role of color in Delaunay’s version of pure painting is a very different matter again; in his “On Light,” color’s simultaneity elevates vision over the other senses, allowing our brains to access the vital movement of the universe. But here, too, there is no parallel between the role of color in Delaunay’s theory of abstract painting and anything in Klee’s theory of abstract graphic art. Comparing “On Light” with the essay for Edschmid, we can venture to say that Klee, at some point between 1913 and 1919, fundamentally departs from the project of abstract painting as advocated by Delaunay, to which he had previously subscribed. By choosing to elaborate a version of modernist arguments around graphic art rather than painting, and by, in many respects, understanding the particularity of graphic art as inhering in the invitation it offers to the viewer’s imagination, Klee arrived at very different conceptions of abstraction and of what it is to look at an artwork. Before Klee wrote the draft of the essay for Edschmid, he wrote a diary entry, dated July 1917 and titled “Thoughts at the Open Window of the Accounting Office,” which seems to reflect on how he arrived at the idiosyncratic positions he states more programatically in the later essay, especially his view of seeing as ineluctably seeing as. The diary entry is exceptional: while most of Klee’s entries from the time of his military service are closely related to his letters to his family and deal with everyday affairs, this one is instead a carefully wrought art-­theoretical reflection.152 In it, Klee seeks to explain and justify how he turned

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The “Painter-Draftsman”

away from the idea of abstract art which had guided his production earlier in the decade: Philosophy has a disposition toward art; at the beginning, I was astonished at all that they saw. For I had only thought of the form, the rest arose by itself. However, the awakened consciousness of this “rest” has been very useful to me and made possible a greater variability in my creative work. Now I could even again become an illustrator of ideas, after I had struggled through formally. And now I no longer saw any abstract art at all.153

In this passage, Klee sets forth a rather paradoxical combination of three of the ways in which, as we have seen, he had sought to deal in the previous decade with his ambivalence regarding formalist criticism, despite their apparent incompatibility—­that of an achieved synthesis between the “purely poetic” and the “painterly” (as in his letter to Lily of July 11, 1902); that of a rejection of the very idea that there is a strict line to be drawn between the two (as in the diary entry of 1905); and that of a strict separation between the “poetic” and “‘pure’ plastic art” (as in his letter to Lily of June 13, 1906). In the 1917 entry, Klee presents himself as having first separated the two (as in the 1906 letter) until other viewers revealed to him things one could not call form in his art—­ what Klee calls “the rest”—­allowing him to become, once again, “an illustrator of ideas” (as in the 1902 letter), and leading him no longer to see any art as “abstract” (as in the 1905 diary entry). In fact, the basic idea Klee sets forth here of a two-­step process, in which he creates an object initially as “‘pure’ plastic art,” and representation and interpretation enter in later—­allowing him to combine all these negotiating strategies together—­is itself a recurring one. A version of it can be found in a 1908 journal entry in which he describes a procedure for oil painting in two separate stages: first apply spots of color, then “read” these spots “objectively” and bring out what is read in them in a second campaign of work.154 In this entry, Klee compares the second step of the process to his childhood love of finding and drawing “human grotesques” in the network of lines in the marble of his uncle’s 56 CHAPTER ONE

restaurant tables, about which he reminisces at the beginning of his journal, and which echoes in turn Leonardo’s oft-­cited advice to painters to find inventions in the chance configurations of a stained wall.155 Given the way the 1917 entry echoes the oil-­painting method Klee had described in 1908, we may suspect that the anonymous “philosophical” viewers are none other than Klee himself, playing the role, as it were, of other viewers. Later, Klee will create still other

variations of this story of his work as a two-­step process, first of purely formal creation and then of integrating the results of an associative, interpretive mode of viewing into that creation, as in Klee’s Jena lecture of 1924, his teaching at the Bauhaus, and conversations with interviewers—­none of which can be taken as straightforward descriptions of Klee’s actual working processes.156 That they recur so insistently attests again to the urgency of the tension between the “philosophical” and the “formal,” to borrow Klee’s terms of 1917, that this two-­step story of the work’s creation seems intended to resolve by, as it were, letting Klee have it both (or, better still, all) ways, at different moments in the process of production. At the same time, as Haxthausen stresses, they lead to Klee’s remarkable positioning of himself as another beholder, another interpreter, with no particular claim to control the meaning of his work.157 In the 1917 diary entry, Klee asserts, in short, that whatever the artist’s intentions, both the artist and other viewers will ineluctably see other things in the work besides “the form”—­the “rest”—­and that this “rest” should be acknowledged and used. Thus an entire series of terms which formalist criticism, as it developed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, had condemned—­ philosophy, illustration, ideas, all those terms used by critics from Baudelaire onward to speak of the wrongheadedness of the philistine viewer, who wants an “idea” because he cannot appreciate “form”—­become privileged terms in Klee’s graphic abstraction. To close this chapter, let us turn away from Klee’s writings to examine a well-­ known work of his that might be seen as one of the artist’s most elaborate and sustained reflections on this reconceptualization of abstraction as graphic: Carpet of Memory (fig. 1.13). This is an unusual work, fairly large for Klee, consisting of a rectangle of primed linen mounted on board and bordered with strips of watercolored paper; on the mount, Klee wrote the title as well as the date and work number, “1914, 193.” This work has a complex history of reworking, which Osamu Okuda has most carefully and convincingly investigated in an important essay.158 As Okuda demonstrates, the Carpet only took on its present appearance and title some years after 1914, but before its first exhibition in 1922—­most likely, he argues, in 1921 or 1922. Initially, the entry for number 193 in Klee’s oeuvre-­catalogue read as follows: “Interior Architecture [Architectur Intérieur] oil picture oil primer h 46 × w 34.” Architectur, it should be noted, is a word Klee often used to speak of the formal structure of visual art in opposition to the “poetic”; for instance, he writes in a 1902 diary entry, “Now the poet in my plastic work had to yield,

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The “Painter-Draftsman”

Figure 1.13  Paul Klee, Carpet of Memory (Teppich der Erinnerung), 1914, 193. Oil on primed linen on card-

board, 37.8/37.5 × 49.3/50.3 cm. Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern. © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

for these days I must play the puritan. Everywhere I see only architecture, line rhythms, surface rhythms.”159 But sometime after 1916, Klee altered the entry, crossing out the original title and writing the new one, reversing the dimensions of height and width, and adding the following note: “cloth with (oil primer) glued on white card58 CHAPTER ONE

board.”160 Interior Architecture, one of six oils Klee registered consecutively in his catalogue in 1914, appears to have been a vertically oriented oil painting stretched on stretcher bars in the usual manner. But at some point after 1916, Klee took the canvas off the stretchers, rotated it, mounted it on board, and inscribed the board with its present title, retaining the date and work number of Interior Architecture.

This was not the first time that Klee had rotated one of his works; indeed, he had been using this “method of estrangement” since 1908 at the latest.161 In a 1908 journal entry, he speaks of rotating drawings to separate out considerations of the overall linear composition from those of the representation of nature, describing a three-­step procedure: first draw “strictly from nature,” then flip the drawing 180 degrees and emphasize its main lines “according to feeling,” then turn it right side up to rework it once again, to bring “1 nature and 2 picture into harmony.”162 Furthermore, as Okuda points out (387), rotation plays an important role in the anecdote Kandinsky uses in his 1913 “Reminiscences” to speak of his discovery that the depiction of recognizable things could diminish the power and beauty of his pictures: Kandinsky writes about returning at dusk to his studio and becoming entranced by “an indescribably beautiful” but “incomprehensible” picture—­which was his own, but “standing on its side,” so that the artist could make out “only forms and color” rather than “content.”163 But rotation was only one of many steps in the process by which Interior Architecture became Carpet of Memory. As Okuda remarks, “Traditionally, oil paintings on canvas or board require a frame without margins; a mount is only occasionally used with small works. Until 1914, Klee held to these conventions to a large extent, but now he obviously tried to go beyond them” (381). The actual dimensions of this piece of “cloth with (oil primer)” mounted on board are in fact a couple centimeters larger than the dimensions Klee wrote in his catalogue, when he simply reversed height and width. The cause of this discrepancy is clear: one can see that when Klee transferred the canvas onto the board, he cut off most, but not all, of the unpainted canvas that would not have been visible when it was tacked on the stretchers, resulting in an unpainted periphery bordering the painted portion of the canvas. This periphery, writes Okuda, “arouses the impression of the frayed edges of an old ‘carpet.’ In this way, Klee emphasized the object-­character of his picture” (ibid.). Furthermore, the canvas gives a remarkable impression of reworkings over time, of strata that might reward an archaeologist’s attention; the brownish underlayers give an impression of colors once bright, now muted, the slightly shiny texture reads as worn, as if with use over time, and the very brightness of the red and green markings (circles, X’s, and lines) in a waxy paint that sits on the uppermost surface of the Carpet emphasizes the layered quality of the canvas, pushing back the underlayers beneath them.164 The painted cloth does not lie flat on its mount; as a result of repeated reworkings, its surface buckles and swells dramatically. The shift of 1916 is exemplified with great clarity by the post-­1916 transformation undergone by this piece of painted canvas—­the destruction of Interior

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The “Painter-Draftsman”

Architecture and creation of Carpet of Memory. The vertically oriented oil of 1914, painted when Delaunay’s Windows were still the model for the abstract paintings Klee struggled to make, returning to some of the aspirations of the plant still lifes of the previous year, is taken off the stretcher bars, turned ninety degrees, and glued onto an inscribed piece of board, presented in a manner that would be conventional for a print but is unusual for an oil painting. To put it in Hausenstein’s terms, what began as a Bild has been remade as a Blatt. And the title Klee gives the transformed work plays on a metaphor frequently used in art criticism of the 1910s to designate what abstract painting was not. As Okuda remarks, the artists and critics of the prewar Munich avant-­garde often articulated the aims of abstract painting by contrasting its spiritual quality with the merely ornamental quality of a carpet. At times, this rhetoric responded to criticism in the press. In the review Die Kunst für Alle, the Munich critic Georg Jakob Wolf mocked Kandinsky’s Komposition Nr. 2, shown in the Neue Künstlervereinigung München exhibition in the Galerie Thannhauser in 1910, as follows: “No title even occurred to the painter himself for this arbitrary accumulation of colors. Some occur to me, among them ‘Color Sketch for a Modern Carpet.’ But I’m wide of the mark! The people who exhibit here are too good to be put on a level with ‘artisans.’ They create free, pure, high art—­so they think.”165 Franz Marc countered Wolf by suggesting that Kandinsky’s large compositions should indeed be hung alongside “Muhammadan carpets,” for “they will withstand this dangerous test, and not as carpets, but instead as ‘pictures [Bilder].’”166 During the early 1910s, when Klee was finding his footing with the avant-­ garde after his long period of isolation, he partook in this rhetoric as well, calling one of Delaunay’s Windows in his own review of the 1912 Moderne Bund exhibition “a structure of plastic life, nota bene, almost as distant from a carpet as a Bach fugue.”167 And Wolf put down Klee’s own work by saying that he should design carpets instead. Regarding the abstract watercolors with evocative titles that Klee showed in the spring 1915 exhibition of the New Munich Secession, Wolf wrote: “Generally, such severe derailments, like those that again befell Mr. Paul Klee, are excused (or rather explained) by saying, when a canvas or a panel 60 CHAPTER ONE

is filled, it doesn’t depend on the theme or on the representation, but instead on the rhythm of the lines, on the beauty of the combination of colors, on the overcoming of objectivity. That might be right subjectively, but he who feels the need to express himself artistically in such a fashion should draw carpets and not name his fibs ‘Thoughts about the Battle’ or ‘View from a Forest’” (figs. 1.14, 1.15).168

Figure 1.14  Paul Klee, Thoughts

about the Battle (Gedanken an die Schlacht), 1914, 140. Watercolor on paper on cardboard, 15.5 × 24.3 cm. Private collection, Germany. © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Figure 1.15  Paul Klee, View

from a Forest (Ausblick aus e. Wald), 1914, 137. Watercolor on paper on cardboard, 17.5 × 20 cm. Location unknown. © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Earlier, in the late nineteenth century, the comparison of a painting to a carpet had served as an important positive paradigm for artists and critics, the history of which Joseph Masheck has usefully traced.169 As Masheck writes, the carpet was particularly important as “an inspiration in the divesting of art  . . . of all its narrative baggage” (87) and as a “flat overall decorative totality”—­“a simultaneous totality” or, in the words of Alois Riegl in 1895, a Gesamtkomposition (92). As Masheck explains further, and as we see in the hostile criticism discussed above, the carpet metaphor was no longer positively coded in the 1910s, in line with a broader turn away from the decorative. So why would Klee call this work a Carpet? This work plays an important role in Jenny Anger’s detailed study of Klee’s sustained engagement with the vicissitudes of the decorative in modernism. According to Anger, this work “represents  . . . a renewed effort to reclaim and assert the power of the decorative” after Klee’s successful campaign to distance himself from this category, in which he uses the pseudo-­auratic effect of the put-­on “aging” of the surface in order to reinforce the pleasures of the decorative.170 This reading is convincing, but not the end of the matter. Attending to Klee’s ongoing negotiation with problems of abstraction, narrative, and speculation alerts us to another maneuver: Klee uses the metaphor of painting as carpet in order to flip it (a move perhaps itself metaphorized in the canvas’s rotation), using it not to divest the work of “narrative baggage” but rather to invite speculation precisely by means of this metaphor (thereby drawing attention to the very metaphoricity of the carpet metaphor—­so often used in art criticism of the 1880s and 1890s to separate out aesthetic enjoyment from metaphorical speculation). Or, from another perspective, we might say that Klee uses the carpet metaphor not to assert the “simultaneous totality” of his work but rather to make this metaphor the very means of presenting his work as a fragment incorporating some form of temporal distance. Klee turns the carpet metaphor against the very mode of viewing for which the carpet metaphor once served as an important support, while showing that the abstract patterning of form and color, and a way of working that draws attention to the artwork’s materiality, can be compatible with speculation. By thus retitling one of his own abstract paintings of 1914—­one that a hos62 CHAPTER ONE

tile critic might compare to a carpet (as Walden remarked regarding criticism of expressionist art, “every other critic makes this clever remark”) and one that Klee might himself have earlier insisted was not to be mistaken for one—­Klee at once playfully materializes a counterterm of Munich avant-­garde art theory and calls attention to the material makeup of his picture.171 The title both draws attention to the material, textile support of the painting and invites us to inter-

pret this very material as itself a carpet, for the work presents itself, as Haxthausen writes, drawing on Nelson Goodman, “not as a representation of a carpet  . . . but as a sample, an exemplification—­or, rather, a pseudo-­exemplification—­of a type of artifact.”172 We are invited to imagine the painting as a small fragment of an ancient rug, say, too old, too fragile, and too precious to be used as a rug and instead mounted, labeled, and put on display; and yet we are at the same time always reminded that this imagining is fanciful: we know that carpets are knotted or woven, whereas Klee’s Carpet is evidently made of paint on a cloth support, and cannot plausibly be all that old, for its idiom is that of modern painting—­it is indeed, as Haxthausen says, a pseudo-­exemplification and makes no attempts to conceal it. Moreover, it is not merely a worn and aged carpet that we are invited to imagine, but a Carpet of Memory, a conceit such as poetry might present, particularly in the phrase’s ambiguous combination of a tangible artifact with an intangible concept; indeed, Klee’s title echoes that of Stefan George’s poetry collection of 1899, Carpet of Life (Teppich des Lebens).173 The title invites speculation—­what would a Carpet of Memory be? A remembered carpet, memory as itself like a carpet, memory in the form of a carpet? I do not think that Klee wished to make any one reading of his title definitive. Indeed, doing so would have worked against his purpose—­of turning this cloth once intended as an abstract painting into an object for a kind of “literary” speculation that incorporates even those features of the work that one might expect would resist such speculation.

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2

Seeing and Speculating

In chapter 1, I connected the changes evident in Klee’s work in the later 1910s—­a shift extending from the mounting and titling of Klee’s Blätter to their “hieroglyphic” appearance to the kind of viewing they solicit—­with the mode of abstraction that Klee sees as founded in the “essence of graphic art.”1 I argued that the appeal of this graphic abstraction lay in the solution it seemed to offer for the problem posed by Klee’s deep-­seated ambivalence toward Lessing’s Laocoon and formalist criticism. This explanation is incomplete, however, unless we take a look at how the graphic arts were at times conceived in early twentieth-­ century Germany as distinguished by their ability to solicit a certain kind of engagement—­the kind often called speculating, imagining, or thinking, and often linked to verbal language, especially to reading, and opposed to seeing.2 Without grasping these conceptions of the graphic arts, we cannot understand how this notion of the graphic served as a resource for Klee in his theory and practice of graphic abstraction, how it was of so much use to him as he struggled with Lessing, Meier-­Graefe, and Scheffler. Yet a historical survey of conceptions of the graphic in German art theory and criticism would demand a study of its own. Instead

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of attempting such a project, the first part of this chapter focuses on a few signal texts especially pertinent for considering Klee’s art: Walter Benjamin’s discussion in the late 1910s, with reference to Klee, of the relations among painting, graphic art, and language; E. T. A. Hoffmann’s invocation of the etchings of Jacques Callot as a model for his own writing in the preface to his Fantasy Pieces in Callot’s Manner (Phantasiestücke in Callot’s Manier, 1814); and Max Klinger’s highly influential articulation of the aesthetics of the graphic arts in his essay “Painting and Drawing” (1891). Klee read Klinger’s essay, which he describes in his journal as “of rather dubious value,” in December 1905.3 Although he makes no explicit reference to Hoffmann’s preface, he does mention reading Hoffmann (most likely the Fantasy Pieces, which entered his library in 1905) in the same December 10, 1918, letter to Lily in which he wrote the first version of what became the oft-­cited first line of his essay for Edschmid (“Art does not reproduce the visible, but rather makes visible”). I will begin with the writings of Benjamin—­another contemporary commentator on Klee’s work, whose interest in the artist can be traced back to 1917, the year of Klee’s breakthrough exhibition at the Sturm gallery. Benjamin’s later writings on Klee have attracted more attention (above all, his famous citation of Klee’s Angelus Novus in his “On the Concept of History”), but I will focus instead on the moment that Klee’s art first enters Benjamin’s thinking in the late 1910s, when he connects Klee to “the possibility of a .  .  .  radically uncolorful painting,” a possibility that Benjamin does not explain, but that his writings suggest might be seen as at once radicalizing and dislocating aspects of contemporary understandings of graphic art. In August 1917, Benjamin’s friend Gershom Scholem, at that time a student of mathematics and philosophy, visited the Sturm gallery. There he saw an exhibition of works by Marc Chagall, Alexei von Jawlensky, Fernand Léger, August Macke, Kandinsky, Marc, and Picasso, among others, which made an enormous impression on him—­Picasso, especially.4 He wrote a letter about what he had seen to Benjamin, then living in Switzerland, who in his reply disagrees sharply with most of what Scholem says.5 Scholem divided painting into two 66 CHAPTER TWO

great tendencies, two essentially opposed ways of knowing or communicating the world: “colorful [farbig]” and “colorless [farblos]” painting.6 Benjamin emphasized instead the “unity of painting despite its apparently so disparate schools,” the ground shared by “a Raphael and a Cubist painting as such.”7 And against Scholem’s idea of “colorless” or linear painting, Benjamin denied that there is such a thing as line in painting.8

The two friends do concur in some matters. Both feel strongly that Picasso’s cubism is a failure—­Scholem speaks of “unheard-­of kitsch,” Benjamin of an “impression of impotence and inadequacy.”9 Both feel that cubism nevertheless contains enormous potential. Such views were not uncommon in expressionist circles in Berlin in 1917. When it came to speaking of what this potential might be, however, neither Scholem’s nor Benjamin’s views could be called commonplace. For Scholem, “Picasso is perhaps on the way towards colorlessness”—­cubism’s great potential is that it might become purely colorless painting.10 Benjamin objects strenuously to Scholem’s notion of colorless painting and, in an obscure passage, proposes that the problem of cubism lies rather in the possibility of uncolorful painting: Seen from one side, the problem of Cubism lies in the possibility of a, not necessarily colorless [farblos], but radically uncolorful [unfarbig] painting in which linear shapes dominate the picture—­without Cubism ceasing to be painting and becoming graphic art. I have touched this problem of Cubism neither from this nor any other side, on the one hand, because it has not yet become decisively clear to me before concrete pictures or masters. The only one among the new painters who has touched me in this sense is Klee, but on the other hand I was still much too unclear about the foundations of painting to progress from this profound emotion to theory. I believe I will get there later.11

Benjamin notes in his letter that the difference between the colorless and uncolorful “must of course first be explained and clarified,” but does not go on to explain it. And then there is the matter of the reference to Klee—­Benjamin’s first. Later, Benjamin would acquire two of his works (his wife Dora gave him Presentation of the Miracle [fig. 1.9] in 1920, and he bought the Angelus Novus [fig. 2.1] the next year); as is well known, Klee returns repeatedly through Benjamin’s writing, from the early moment under examination here, through Benjamin’s glosses from the early 1930s on Klee’s figures as exemplars of positive barbarism, through his description of the “angel of history” with reference to the Angelus Novus in his last major work, “On the Concept of History.”12 But this does not make Benjamin’s reference to Klee in this letter any less of a mystery; Klee was not included in the exhibition Scholem visited, and he had only just had his breakthrough exhibition, discussed in chapter 1, at the Sturm gallery earlier that year, which I suspect Benjamin saw.13 And Benjamin never did move from his “emotion,” the way Klee touched him, to arrive at an explicit theory of “radically uncolorful painting,” of this problem of cubism.

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Figure 2.1  Paul Klee, Angelus Novus, 1920, 32. Oil transfer and watercolor on paper on cardboard, 31.8 ×

24.2 cm. The Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Gift of Fania and Gershom Scholem, Jerusalem; John Herring, Marlene and Paul Herring, Jo Carole and Ronald Lauder, New York, Accession number: B87.0994. Photo © The Israel Museum, Jerusalem by Elie Posner. © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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Nevertheless, I will seek to gloss this strange phrase, “radically uncolorful painting,” and suggest why Klee’s work might have touched Benjamin “in this sense.” About a year after writing this letter to Scholem, Benjamin did arrive at a theory of the uncolorful as a particular relation between a picture and its description. However, the concept of a radically uncolorful painting was for him

a compound of extreme volatility; he could pursue his idea of uncolorfulness only by disjoining it from art. Scholem’s letter to Benjamin about cubism is, unfortunately, lost. However, the diary pages in which Scholem wrote about his visit to the Sturm gallery have been preserved and seem to have served either as a draft for or a record of the letter; they are the basis my construction of his argument. Reading them, it is clear that the painting that provoked Scholem most was Picasso’s Woman Playing the Violin of spring 1911, an austere work of what is often called hermetic cubism, marked by emphatic verticals (fig. 2.2)—­he even sketched it in his diary (fig. 2.3).14 The painting provokes Scholem both in that it suggests to him cubism’s potential to become a new “symbolism,” which would, like mathematics and Judaism, obey the “ban on the ‘image,’” and in that it fails to fulfill this potential, which Scholem calls “colorlessness.”15 For Scholem, the presence of chiaroscuro makes the painting a betrayal of itself, and thus “kitsch.”16

Figure 2.2  Pablo Picasso, Woman

Playing the Violin, 1911. 92 × 65 cm. Private collection. Photo Credit: bpk, Berlin / Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen, Berlin / Jörg P. Anders / Art Resource, NY. © 2014 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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Seeing and Speculating

Figure 2.3  Gershom Scholem, page from journal, August 30, 1917. ARC.4° 1599/265, Department of

Archives, National Library of Israel, Jerusalem.

Scholem repeats, in a sense, the venerable opposition between painting governed by color and painting governed by drawing, which may be traced back to Vasari’s glorification of Florentine disegno over Venetian colorito, and which many had already applied to modern painting in the 1910s, contrasting the “conceptual” concerns of Picasso’s nearly monochrome analytic cubism to the “sensuous” bliss of Matisse’s color.17 Commonplace, too, was the notion that cubism was an “art of transition,” a stepping-­stone to some fulfillment. However, Scholem’s combination of these commonplaces—­his claim that 70 CHAPTER TWO

“Picasso is perhaps on the way towards the colorlessness” of cubism’s fulfillment—­is peculiar, and stems from his peculiar understanding of what this colorlessness would entail. He is not at all satisfied by analytic cubism’s banishing of local color: indeed, he refers to the use of dark and light in Woman Playing the Violin as “the Fall.”18 The extremity of Scholem’s insistence that cubism ought to banish tonality can be registered by comparing his views with those of Daniel-­

Henry Kahnweiler, Picasso’s and Braque’s dealer in the years before the outbreak of war in 1914 and afterward one of the most important explicators of their art. Kahnweiler’s essay on cubism, published the previous year in the expressionist monthly Die weißen Blätter, also presents chiaroscuro as problematic because, although it is an “illusionistic” pictorial device, it remains the indispensable means of “the representation of form.”19 In his later book-­length version of this essay, Kahnweiler, citing Locke, speaks of “the object’s form and its position in space” as the “primary qualities” in painting and thus Picasso’s primary concerns; “color and tactile qualities” are secondary.20 Here Kahnweiler’s position draws on academic art theory, in which drawing and chiaroscuro are, as allied means of rendering three-­dimensional form intelligible, sharply distinguished from the secondary element of transitory sensation that color delivers.21 For Scholem, however, form has no place in cubism—­“The Cubist picture of genius must be colorless. That it must be formless is clear”22—­and thus tonality must be banished along with color. Scholem believed the colorless painting of cubism’s fulfillment would be a matter of “symbols” alone—­“tremendous symbols (the semicircle, the vertical and the horizontals, mainly the \ , less often the /),” a new “symbolism of the straight line.” In Woman Playing the Violin, for instance, the symbols are, for Scholem, above all the “unheard-­of verticals | and the / -­horizontals.”23 At the end of his article, Kahnweiler also speaks of the interpretation of these “regular straight lines and curves” distributed over the surface of analytic cubist paintings, hoping to correct those inexperienced viewers who see such paintings as “geometric”: The associations call up memory-­images of the only thing that seems to fit the straight and regularly curved lines of the picture, namely geometric shapes. Experience has shown that this geometric impression disappears entirely as soon as, thanks to habituation to the new mode of expression, the process of seeing-­into [Hineinsehen] takes place correctly.24

Scholem, however, does not interpret these straight and curved lines as bound together into “geometric shapes”—­instead, he takes each line segment as a repeatable and discrete unit of meaning, a “symbol” governed by a code outside the painting in which it is found. It seems that he compares these symbols to those of the equations of analytic geometry—­perhaps proposing that cubism’s distance from likeness is like that between the equation of a shape and its diagram.25 The purity and adequacy to thought that Scholem saw in Picasso’s symbols were of a piece with what he valued in mathematics and certain devel-

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opments in logic, as becomes clear from his writings that same year on Gottlob Frege’s “concept writing,” or system of logical calculus, the “symbols” of which he viewed as escaping the distortions of language.26 For Scholem, the colorlessness of cubism’s perfection would be that of these “symbols” alone, against the impurities not only of color but also of ordinary language. In taking Picasso’s analytic cubism as something like a formal language, Scholem is, again, both drawing on and transforming a commonplace of cubist criticism. Many critics and artists compared Picasso’s painting of 1910 through 1912 to a new language. Kahnweiler, for instance, insisted on speaking of the “‘script [Schrift]’ of the new art,” of cubism as a “new form-­language.”27 The metaphor of language has a number of special functions with regard to cubist painting, beyond those of the very general metaphors of language long used to speak of painting. One of these lies in the way the metaphor of language, of looking as reading, can speak to a viewer’s bafflement before a cubist painting—­by comparing it to that experienced before writing in an unknown language. Thus, for instance, Picasso said, “The fact that for a long time Cubism has not been understood .  .  .  means nothing. I do not read English, an English book is a blank book to me. This does not mean that the English language does not exist, and why should I blame anybody else but myself if I cannot understand what I know nothing about?”28 At times, Kahnweiler uses the metaphor similarly, to speak of the difficulty of these paintings that the viewer must first learn to see. For Kahnweiler, the similarity of cubist painting to language that must be learned entails that a cubist painting must be supplemented with more language outside it—­a language already known to the viewer. He insisted on the importance of attaching descriptive titles to cubist paintings—­translating, so to speak, the painting’s unfamiliar language into one the viewer already knows. Indeed, it was Kahnweiler himself who, as Picasso’s and Braque’s dealer during the cubist years, named their paintings.29 He emphasizes the importance of those names as follows: Naturally, with this, as with any new mode of expression in the arts, often the associations do not immediately arise for viewers not yet familiar with it. It 72 CHAPTER TWO

is therefore strongly to be advised that Cubist works always be provided with descriptive titles, like “Bottle and Glass,” “Playing Cards and Dice,” since thus the state H. G. Lewes [sic] called preperception is brought about and then  . . . the memory-­images already prompted by the title adapt more quickly to the stimuli produced by the painting.30

The descriptive title produces a state of “preperception” that directs what the painting will be seen as. Kahnweiler refers to George Henry Lewes, the nineteenth-­century British polymath, whose theory of “preperception” attributes great power to the name in the construction of one object as a representation of another, as something it is not. As an example, Lewes gives the following explanation of how a child comes to see a toy horse as a horse: The child at first no more mistakes a wooden horse for a live horse than the dog does. Interpreting the visible signs without the aid of symbols, both child and dog see no resemblance in the wooden horse to the huge live animal. But no sooner does the child associate the name of gee-­gee with this wooden horse, than the name as a dominant revives the images of horses: the preperception of the living animal is thus brought to bear on the perception of this wooden toy  . . . the identity of name acts in his construction of the object. . . . The toy is fed, caressed, and beaten  . . . by an identification through identity of name.31

For Kahnweiler, the viewer confronted with a cubist painting, like a child with a toy horse, must construct the object through the name. For Scholem, however, the metaphysical meanings of the cubist symbols are “there only for the one who sees symbolically-­mathematically, but, for him, there immediately.”32 The descriptive title, so important to Kahnweiler, plays no part. The sentence in Benjamin’s reply in which he objects to Scholem’s interpretation of cubism as mistaken about painting’s relation to its “sensuous object” implies that Scholem is as mistaken to neglect the title. One cannot “paint lady with fan (for example), in order to thereby communicate the essence of space through analysis. On the contrary, the communication must under all circumstances relate entirely to ‘Lady with Fan,’” writes Benjamin, marking off “Lady with Fan” the second time with quotation marks, as the title.33 Benjamin announces in his letter that he will soon send the “plan” for an essay called “On Painting” as his reply to Scholem’s letter on cubism.34 In this plan, Benjamin marks out two separate spheres, that of the sign [Zeichen] and that of the mark [Mal]. Each sphere may be discussed in terms of both its mythological essence and the art form it includes—­drawing [Zeichnung] in the sphere of the sign, painting [Malerei] in that of the mark.35 This is where Benjamin’s theory of painting diverges from Scholem’s most decisively: whereas, for Scholem, the colorless and the colorful are an opposition within painting, Benjamin separates graphic line and painting into entirely different spheres.

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Benjamin interprets Scholem’s ideal “colorless” painting as painting become graphic line, painting become drawing—­which would be, for Benjamin, utter nonsense. The first paragraph of Benjamin’s discussion of painting argues that there is no graphic line in painting, that “the reciprocal demarcations of the colored surfaces (the composition) of a picture by Raphael are not based on graphic line.” The only kind of picture, he writes, in which graphic line and color may come together is the “watercolor, in which the contours made with the drafting pencil [Konturen des Stiftes] are visible and the color is put on transparently,” for there the ground (Untergrund) that defines graphic art, as opposed to painting, is preserved (223). The course of Benjamin’s remarks suggests that he is arguing less against Scholem than against the art historian Heinrich Wölfflin, whose lectures Benjamin had attended (and loathed) in 1915. Much of his fragment seems directed against Wölfflin’s opposition between “linear” and “painterly” painting; Benjamin’s choice of Raphael as the only painter he names seems aimed less at Scholem (who never mentions Raphael in his diary entry) than at Wölfflin, who takes him as an exemplary master of the “classic linearism” of the High Renaissance.36 Once, writes Benjamin, one has grasped that there is no graphic line in painting—­not even in Raphael—­one “must be astonished to find a composition in the picture that cannot be traced back to a graphic design [Graphik]” (223).37 This is the central problem of his remarks on painting in this fragment. If composition is, as Benjamin implies, traditionally linked to line in art theory since the Renaissance (an error, he writes, due in part to the misreading of “the purely technical fact that, before painting their pictures, painters compose them by means of draftsmanship” [ibid.]), how will he account for composition in line’s absence? In his letter to Scholem, Benjamin speaks of the connection between “On Painting” and his earlier essay “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man” (1916). At this juncture, to account for composition in the absence of line, Benjamin adumbrates, as Charles W. Haxthausen has pointed out,38 his retelling in the earlier essay of the biblical story of Adam’s naming of every living creature in paradise: 74 CHAPTER TWO

The fact that such a composition does not exist as mere semblance [Schein]—­ that, for example, the beholder of a picture by Raphael does not perceive configurations of people, trees, and animals in the mark by chance or by mistake—­ becomes clear from the following consideration: if the picture were only mark, it would be quite impossible to name it. (223–­24)

Benjamin thus displaces the questions of resemblance and representation by that of nameability, redefining composition as that which relates the picture to “what the picture is named after” (224). Instead of the commonplace relation between line and color as constituent elements which together make up painting, Benjamin substitutes a relation between the painting and language: “The picture may be connected with something that it is not—­that is to say, something that is not a mark—­and indeed this connection is achieved by naming the picture.” The composition is the entry of “a higher power into the medium of the mark” that is nevertheless “related” to the mark—­“the linguistic word, which lodges itself in the medium of the language of painting, invisible as such and revealing itself only in the composition. The picture is named after the composition” (ibid.).39 As in the relation between name and thing in Benjamin’s account of the language of paradise in “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,” that established by the picture’s “nameability” between the linguistic word and the picture is not to be understood as an arbitrary imposition from without. In the language of paradise, the connection between human language and the “language of things” excludes such arbitrariness: naming translates the silent language of things into human language through a particular way of looking, “that viewing [Anschauen] of things in which their language passes into man.”40 In “On Painting,” something similar happens between the “beholder” and a “picture by Raphael”; indeed, the essay on language suggests that painting remains in contact with thing-­language although postlapsarian spoken language does not.41 Like the naming of things in paradise, the naming Benjamin speaks of here in relation to paintings is receptive, demanded by the thing—­in this case, the painting—­itself. This new relation Benjamin proposes between the mark and the painting’s nameability—­between what painting is and what painting is not—­takes on many of the functions of the relation between color and line, perennial of art theory since the Renaissance, that it turns inside out. Like the relation between color and line, that between mark and word is a way of dividing painting’s specificity as painting from its discursiveness, the very fact that it may be spoken about. It provides a division around which differences between epochs of painting may be articulated. But these differences lie not in the relative preponderance of one element over another, as in both academic art theory and Wölfflin’s art history.42 Instead, the “great epochs of painting” may be differentiated according to “which word and into which mark it enters.” The two examples Benjamin gives of such dif-

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Figure 2.4 Raphael, Madonna and Child with Saints Hieronymus and Francis, ca. 1502. Oil on poplar, 34 ×

29 cm. Inv. 145. Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen, Berlin. Photo Credit: bpk, Berlin / Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen, Berlin / Jörg P. Anders / Art Resource, NY.

ferentiation return us to “On Language as Such”: “For example, it is conceivable 76 CHAPTER TWO

that in the pictures of, say, Raphael the name might predominate, and in the pictures of present-­day painters the judging word [richtende Wort] might enter the mark.”43 We have already seen how a viewer before a Raphael is called upon to name the picture after its composition, its configurations of people and things, repeating, as it were, Adam’s task. I would hazard that it is worth noting the prominence of the proper names in the titles of the Raphaels in the

Kaiser Friedrich-­Museum in Berlin at that time (Madonna and Child, Madonna and Child with St. John the Baptist, Madonna and Child with Saints Hieronymus and Francis)—­for the proper name is central to Benjamin’s theorization of the name in general.44 The Berlin Raphaels may be said to ask the viewer to provide proper names (“John the Baptist”) from the painted figures’ attributes (camel-­ skin tunic, reed cross); the proper name seems particularly central to Madonna and Child with Saints Hieronymus and Francis (fig. 2.4). The head of St. Francis is encircled by a halo of his name in letters of gold; the halos of the Madonna and child and St. Hieronymus, patron saint of translators—­whose name may itself be translated as “sacred name”—­are, however, uninscribed, for the viewer must translate their attributes into language to provide their “sacred names.” The connection between what Benjamin calls the “judging word” and the paintings of “present-­day painters” (the cubists, we may guess in this context) may be interpreted in at least three ways. In his essay on language, Benjamin proposes that the “origin of abstraction” lies in the Fall and the rise of the “judging word”: although the “concrete elements” of “existing language” are rooted in the name, the “abstract elements of language” come from the “judging word.”45 He appears to be speaking of the traditional logical distinction between, for instance, the concrete term white and the abstract term whiteness, attributing linguistic elements of the latter sort (which would include words such as good and evil) to the “judging word.” Associating a Raphael with the “concrete” and a cubist painting with the “abstract” fits easily into the widespread view of cubism as a step toward an abstract painting that would withdraw itself from the world of perceptible things to represent essences. But by speaking of this movement from concrete to abstract in terms of how different kinds of language settle into painting, Benjamin makes of it something very different from the purification of painting as painting that this movement was so often understood to entail. But Benjamin’s linking of the “judging word” with contemporary painting might be located elsewhere as well, albeit more speculatively. In “On Language as Such,” he consistently speaks of the “judging [richtende] word” as “judgment” [Urteil].46 If he speaks of cubist painting as that in which the linguistic word in the form of judgment is lodged, this may point not only to abstraction but to the centrality of aesthetic judgment in conceptions of art since Kant, perhaps even to historical transformations of the form of judgment (from a statement like “this is beautiful” to one like “this is painting”) brought about in cubist and postcubist painting.47 In keeping, however, with Benjamin’s critique of subjectivism, this judgment is located within the painting. If Kant attempts to ground aesthetics in the observer rather than the artwork by making the observer’s judgment

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into the object of inquiry, here Benjamin locates that very judgment within the artwork itself. Still another possible connection results if one reads richtend, which I have thus far translated as “judging,” in another sense—­the verb richten can also mean to steer, direct, turn; to give something a particular direction (Richtung). Thus the “richtende word” that enters contemporary painting might also be read as referring to the crucial role of cubist paintings’ descriptive titles, as theorized by Kahnweiler—­the role of steering the viewer toward the desired “reading” of the “‘script’ of the new art.” About a year after his letter to Scholem and essay on painting, Benjamin wrote a short fragment called “On the Surface of the Uncolorful Picture-­Book.”48 Although the explicit subject of the fragment is children’s picture books, it may also be read as elaborating and qualifying the mysterious phrase from Benjamin’s October 22 letter on the “possibility of a  . . . radically uncolorful painting,” as well as aspects of “On Painting.” In it, Benjamin writes about a certain kind of picture from which color need not literally be absent, but is nevertheless “uncolorful” in that it solicits language in a particularly pressing way—­the “uncolorful” makes a “demand for description” (113). There is in this fragment another version of an intimate connection between looking and naming. But here, instead of Adam before the animals or the beholder before a Raphael, we have a child before a picture book: If one wanted  . . . to put before the child a depiction of a ball next to a real ball resembling this depiction to the smallest detail, it couldn’t be the end of the matter for the child somehow to “recognize” here the sameness of the depicted and the real. Rather this recognition would only prove genuine and clear if the child pronounced the sameness of the two balls in its way, or  . . . demanded to know the name. (112)

Benjamin is at pains to make clear that the kind of picture that demands the word in this way is not painting, not art: “Only the solely and simply depictive picture [abbildende Bild] demands the word so implacably.” He is speaking, rather, of pictures in the plainer kind of picture books, of the sort recommended 78 CHAPTER TWO

by “rationalist pedagogy,” such as “the typical picture-­book [Anschauungsbilderbuch]” used in German schools.49 In this demand for the word posed by these pedagogical picture books, writes Benjamin, the child is introduced to language. While specifying the sort of images he is speaking of, Benjamin qualifies his claim in “On Painting” that a Raphael, for instance, lays claim to nameability

and thus to language: “And indeed the picture does not in itself call forth [the word]—­the claim that a Madonna by Perugino refers to the word would surely be highly problematic” (112). The problematic claim to which he refers is likely his own in the earlier essay; the early Raphael Madonnas in Berlin were painted when Raphael was Perugino’s apprentice and indeed resemble very closely his master’s paintings.50 Benjamin wishes to speak of pictures that, unlike artworks, are “solely and simply depictive,” for they must demand the word—­they must be describable—­in two ways that would rule out artworks. First, he wants to speak of pictures that would be fully, even exhaustively, describable: “The possibility of describing the simply depictive representation is the clear expression of its reliance on the word. Only depictive representations, not the artwork   .  .  . are describable” (113). Second, the child’s description of these pictures involves, at its limit, “the other, concrete meaning of the word”—­the verb beschreiben can mean not only to describe something but to write on it. The child, in Benjamin’s account, both describes the picture in words and “scribbles on it.” The characteristic “surface” of uncolorful picture books makes this possible—­it “is not, like that of the artwork, a Noli me tangere. ..  .  It is instead only as it were hintingly worked and might be made infinitely denser” (ibid.). The surface of an uncolorful picture invites scribbling, whereas the artwork, in its untouchable richness, turns back description. In an earlier fragment of 1917, Benjamin wrote of the difference between painting and graphic art as that between the vertical and the horizontal, a point to which he did not return in “On Painting.”51 He had written of children’s drawings as demanding to be placed horizontally, exemplifying the “transverse section of certain graphic works,” determined, he implied, by our habit of reading pages in the horizontal. The “surface of the uncolorful picture-­book”—­a page that welcomes children’s scribblings—­brings aspects of this horizontality into the field of the uncolorful. Benjamin found it necessary to disjoin the “radically uncolorful”—­the kinds of pictures that pose a pressing demand for language, for description—­from painting and from art, including Klee’s pictures that had “touched him in this sense,” to pursue them instead in the domain of children’s books. His writings about color during the same years offer a close parallel. The pure colors of imagination, too, were to be found not in art but rather in the glowing colored plates of nineteenth-­century children’s books: “Complete renunciation of the spirit of true art is the only condition under which the color in which imagination [Phantasie] dwells can be moved.”52

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Figure 2.5 Henri Rousseau, The Bridge at Sèvres, 1908. Oil on canvas, 80 × 120 cm. Pushkin Museum of Fine

Arts, Moscow. Photo Credit : Scala / Art Resource, NY.

Thus Benjamin pursued colorfulness and uncolorfulness through an extraordinary series of writings about children’s books, not art.53 Yet these concepts might be understood as turning the hoary art-­theoretical opposition of color and line inside out, dislocating it in the relation between picture and description. And thus the question returns of the relations of the colorful and the uncolorful to painting and art, problematic as Benjamin found them. In a puzzling passage in “On the Surface of the Uncolorful Picture-­Book,” Benjamin—­ 80 CHAPTER TWO

directly after explaining that this uncolorfulness, this demand for language, must be restricted to the artless “depiction” (Abbildung)—­turns straight to painting for verification: And indeed the picture does not call forth [the word] in itself  . . . but rather only the solely and simply depictive picture demands the word so implacably, a

Figure 2.6 Henri Rousseau, View of Malakoff, Hauts-­de-­Seine, 1908. Oil on canvas, 46 × 55 cm. Private collection.

remark that may perhaps be verified by certain details of Rousseau’s pictures, which on the whole, as artworks, are not solely and simply depictive, but in detail sometimes have this character from the strength of their peculiar style. One recalls Rousseau’s airships and telegraph poles.54

Works of art, it seems, or perhaps only certain of their details, can at times touch upon the “uncolorful”—­can, that is, demand the word. Surely it is relevant that Henri Rousseau—­the self-­taught “Sunday painter” celebrated by the cubists and the Blaue Reiter artists—­occupies a place set some distance from that indescribable richness and untouchable inviolability that, for Benjamin, pull painting apart from the uncolorful (figs. 2.5, 2.6). Let us return to the perplexing sentence from Benjamin’s October 22 letter with which we began: “The problem of Cubism lies in the possibility of a, not

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necessarily colorless, but radically uncolorful painting in which linear shapes dominate the picture—­without Cubism ceasing to be painting and becoming graphic art.” We recall that the later fragment on the “uncolorful picture book” suggests that the uncolorful might indeed have color, and certainly would not aspire toward the pure symbolic code, as would, by contrast, Scholem’s vision of “colorless” painting. But it would—­as cubist painting does in one sense, and illustrations in didactic picture books do in another—­demand naming, description. Now we can speculate as to why Klee seems to have provoked Benjamin’s unresolvable notion of “radically uncolorful painting”—­why he “touched” Benjamin “in this sense.” Klee’s small, page-­like pictures, in which “linear shapes” often “dominate,” and which draw upon both children’s drawings and picture books, could indeed be said to “demand the word implacably,” as will be elaborated in this chapter—­although they certainly are not “solely and simply depictive.” Beginning with their suggestive titles, written, like captions, visibly on his pictures, they solicit language, further description. Following Benjamin’s lead in connecting Klee with radical uncolorfulness, one might turn away from the receiver, that turn on which Benjamin so often insisted, as when he wrote, in “The Task of the Translator,” certain correlative concepts retain their meaning, and possibly their foremost significance, if they are not from the outset used exclusively with reference to man. Once might, for example, speak of an unforgettable life  . . . even if all men had forgotten it. . . . Analogously, the translatability of linguistic creations ought to be considered even if men should prove unable to translate them.55

Benjamin’s writings on the uncolorful suggest that a parallel construction might be used to speak of Klee’s “radically uncolorful painting”—­something like describability. If Benjamin’s early writings that we have examined above suggest that we might think of some of Klee’s Blätter as describable in this sense, as demanding descrip82 CHAPTER TWO

tion, then we could see Benjamin as having responded to the demand posed by one such Blatt in the many descriptions and redescriptions he wrote of Klee’s watercolored oil-­transfer drawing Angelus Novus. While this work cannot be said to demand Benjamin’s particular allegorical descriptions, it can be said, like many of Klee’s Blätter, to invite this kind of activity on the viewer’s part. As I will seek to explain in the rest of this chapter, this quality of describability must

be connected to the way that Klee takes advantage of certain conceptions of the kind of involvement that graphic artworks were understood to invite on the viewer’s part, although Klee often takes advantage of them in works that would not ordinarily or easily be thought of as graphic. Let us begin developing this claim by turning back to Klee’s essay on graphic art for Edschmid’s Creative Credo, to examine its famous first line—­“Art does not reproduce the visible, but rather makes visible”56—­in relation to Hoffmann’s text on Callot’s etchings, which Klee would very likely have known, along with Klee’s later pen drawing “to make visible,” in which he cites his own aphoristic statement. This statement, I will argue, is still another attack on Lessing’s division between poetry and the plastic arts, but this time taking aim at Lessing’s argument that the plastic arts must confine themselves to rendering the visible. Now, Klee’s dictum has usually been interpreted as his claim to be an artist-­ seer capable of rendering metaphysical insights visible through his work. Werckmeister claims that Klee’s sentence is “ultimately derived” from a line in Theodor Däubler’s essay on the art shown at the Sturm gallery: “No flight from reality, but rather a making visible of the transcendent and the given: this is the new metaphysics.”57 Although I see no reason to trace Klee’s statement back to Däubler’s, Klee does indeed suggest that his art was concerned with making the transcendent visible; he speaks explicitly in this essay of the “relativity of visible things” as but only one of many latent truths.58 However, Klee’s statement is not only to be interpreted in connection with his idealist metaphysics, or as a general motto for the artist as visionary: it is also an important moment in his argument against Laocoon, which is just as explicit in this essay and so crucial for his art. It should be noted that although this line is so often taken out of context, it is embedded here in a consideration of graphic art in particular. Moreover, the very structure of this sentence asserts that art is concerned with an intransitive action or process of “making visible” rather than with making something (“transcendent” or “given”) visible: the first part of the sentence, addressing what art does not do, has a direct object, but the positive statement of what art does lacks one. In the preliminary formulation of this statement in a letter to Lily dated December 10, 1918 (“Plastic art does not depend on seeing. It only wants to become visible”), it is plastic art itself that wants to become visible.59 As Klee mentions reading E. T. A. Hoffmann in this same letter (but says nothing of Däubler, whom it seems he regarded with mild disdain, although he was gratified by the glowing reviews Däubler wrote about his work), it seems reasonable to ask if Hoffmann might somehow be connected with Klee’s concern with art as making or wanting to become visible.60 And in-

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deed Hoffmann’s text on about the graphic art of Jacques Callot suggests an additional interpretation of Klee’s statement—­we might read it as pushing against Lessing’s assertions that poets can represent the invisible in “poetic paintings” with a high degree of “illusion” and that visual artists cannot.61 Klee’s emphasis on making (or, in the letter to Lily, becoming) visible as an essential capacity of art is a means of countering Lessing’s insistence that in painting (and “by ‘painting,’” he explains in his preface, “I mean the plastic arts in general”), “everything is visible and visible in but one way” (6, 66).62 And Hoffmann does offer certain resources for a conception of graphic art as “making visible.” To develop this interpretation, we have to return once again to Laocoon. In it, Lessing argues that the comte de Caylus does not pay enough attention to the difficulties that the distinction between visible and invisible beings and actions entails for painting. The antiquary and amateur Caylus is attacked for his Tableaux tirés de l’Iliade, de l’Odyssée d’Homère et de l’Énéide de Virgile (1757), a book of short descriptions of how particular moments of action in Homer and Virgil might be translated into history paintings, presented as a resource for painters.63 Lessing devotes his twelfth chapter to Caylus’s failure to deal satisfactorily with the problem that, while Homer speaks of things both visible and invisible, such a “distinction cannot be made in painting, where everything is visible and visible in but one way.” Lessing argues that Caylus’s neglect of this problem leads him to devise descriptions of tableaux that are “extremely confused, incomprehensible, and self-­contradictory” (66–­69). Lessing scorns the device Caylus recommends to painters to signal to the beholder that an object “must be thought of as invisible”: “a thin cloud veiling the side of the object that is turned toward the other persons in the pictures.” The cloud, argues Lessing, is borrowed from Homer, but in Homer’s poetry, the cloud is “nothing more than a poetic expression for rendering a thing invisible”; painting a “real cloud” is to take Homer’s figure of speech far too literally (68).64 Thus this device runs against Lessing’s distinction between the “arbitrary” signs of poetry and the “natural signs” of painting (40–­41). Such a painted cloud, writes Lessing, is a “true hieroglyphic [eine wahre Hieroglyphe]” which, rather than making the cloud-­swathed person invisible, “says to the spectators: you 84 CHAPTER TWO

must imagine to yourselves that he is invisible.” It is, Lessing continues, “no better than the scrolls that issue from the mouths of figures in old Gothic paintings” (68–­69). Even worse, the significance attached to this hieroglyphic cloud shifts. Caylus recommends it both for scenes in which something has been made invisible and for those in which something normally invisible has been made visible: “Not only,” concludes Lessing, is this cloud “an arbitrary and not a nat-

ural sign; but this arbitrary sign does not even possess the definite distinctness which it could have as such, for it is used both to render the visible invisible and the invisible visible” (69–­70).65 Lessing writes that the very terminology of “poetic paintings” and “illusion” that he and his contemporaries use is one of the main causes of the confusion he wishes to combat; many misguided rules of aesthetics, he continues, rest on “the identity of an arbitrary term,” treating “poetic paintings” as if they were “material paintings.” Here again, as with Caylus’s cloud, Lessing sees his opponents as failing to take a figure of speech as merely a figure. Much confusion, he writes, could be avoided if moderns retained the classical terminology of Longinus and Plutarch: enargia rather than “illusion,” phantasia (literally, “a making visible”) rather than “poetic painting” (207–­8).66 Against Caylus, Lessing wishes to stress that a “poetic painting” cannot necessarily be “converted into a material painting” but refers rather to “every trait” or “combination of traits by which the poet makes his subject so perceptible to our senses that we become more conscious of the subject than of his words,” thus approaching that degree of illusion which paintings are particularly capable of producing (74–­75).67 Because poets can create such “poetic paintings” of “objects other than those that are visible,” there exist “whole categories of paintings” that the poet can render but that “must necessarily be beyond the reach of the artist” (76). Hoffmann offers a very different way of conceiving relations between writing and art—­not plastic art in general but graphic art in particular—­that might have appealed far more to Klee. Hoffmann prefaces his Fantasy Pieces in Callot’s Manner with a few pages invoking Callot’s etchings as a model for his own writing, implicitly comparing the pages of his collection of fantastic tales (subtitled Pages [Blätter] from the Diary of a Traveling Enthusiast) with Callot’s “fantastic Blättern”: he begins by addressing Callot (“Why can I never see enough of your strange, fantastic Blättern, you bold master!”) and ends by suggesting that a poet or writer might well want to work “in Callot’s manner.” Hoffmann here reverses the sequence of the passage in Laocoon that seems to have particularly bothered the young Klee, discussed in chapter 1, in which Lessing insists that the sculptor of the Laocoon group must have followed Virgil, and not vice versa.68 Hoffmann’s description of Callot’s Blätter, which he calls ironical and grotesque, emphasizes how figures, at first difficult to see, seem to him to emerge into visibility from the lines on the sheets, to take on animation and color with time: Why can I not get your figures, often only suggested by a couple of bold strokes, out of my mind?—­When I look for a long time at your overrich

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compositions, created out of the most heterogeneous elements, the thousands and thousands of figures come to life, and each strides forth powerfully and resplendent in the most natural colors, often out from the deepest background, where at first they are hard even to discern.69

Whereas Lessing maintains a sharp division between the “arbitrary signs” of the poet and the “natural signs” of the artist, the dash (Strich) Hoffmann sets after the question in which he speaks of Callot’s figures as often only suggested by “a couple of bold strokes [Striche]” implies a very different relation between the poet’s and the artist’s signs: Hoffmann seems to imply that both he and Callot work with lines or strokes (but Callot has one more at his disposal). He relishes how Callot’s prints, rather than offering themselves fully at a glance, offer more and more to see the longer he looks; while Lessing writes in the sixth chapter of Laocoon of poetry’s ability to deal with “forms which, though varied or great in number, may exist simultaneously without concealing or damaging each other, as would the objects themselves or their natural signs,” Hoffmann enjoys the teeming, swarming quality of Callot’s etchings (see, for instance, the Temptation of St. Anthony, which Hoffmann describes, fig. 2.7), the great multitude of incidents and details they offer, and praises the artist’s ability “to press together in a small space an abundance of objects which emerge beside each other, even within each other, without confusing the eye” (ibid.).70 For Hoffmann, Callot’s etchings exceed the “rules of painting” (4) but provide a model for the “poet or writer, in whose inner romantic spirit-­realm the figures of ordinary life appear, and who represents them now in the glow which flows around them there, as if in strange and wonderful finery” (5).71 The suitability of Callot’s etchings as a model for the poet who wishes to present figures as they appear in an interior mental space seems to depend on the way in which Callot’s figures are visibly made up of a few deft strokes of the échoppe, but take on color and animation as the engrossed beholder looks on—­the reciprocity of the seemingly incomplete representation and its imaginative expansion, as discussed in chapter 1, is in play. For Hoffmann, the expansion that Callot’s etchings encourage is the product of Callot’s particular “manner,” his boldness, 86 CHAPTER TWO

which manifests itself in the way in which the beholder easily sees how a figure is made up of a few elegantly tapered, fluid strokes, which seem at once “reflexes of all the fantastic and wonderful apparitions that the magic of his exuberant fantasy called up,” and require the beholder’s own Phantasie to work to complete them (4).72 The “fantastic” quality of Callot’s prints seems to lie in a sort of analogy between the Phantasie of the artist and that of the beholder. As Roth-

Figure 2.7  Jacques Callot, The Temptation of St. Anthony, 1630. Etching, 45 × 67 cm.

stein remarks of the aesthetics of the non finito, “Viewer and artist commune in a creative intuition mediated by the imitative inadequacy of material signs.”73 That very “inadequacy” here is the result, it seems, not only of Callot’s manner but also of the black-­on-­white of his prints, which requires Hoffmann to supply “the most natural colors.” This analogy between Callot and Hoffmann, then, seems to underlie Hoffmann’s extension of that analogy in the title he gives his collection, Fantasy Pieces in Callot’s Manner. Hoffmann’s description of Callot’s etchings builds on eighteenth-­century discourse on the aesthetics of the graphic arts that linked certain kinds of prints and drawings not to seeing but to imagining.74 In a short fragment, Lessing, too, writes of how certain prints (but not all of them) present objects for the

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beholder to imagine, rather than see, and can thus pleasingly represent disgusting objects—­a loophole, it seems, in his argument in Laocoon, in which he argues that the sculptor must diminish Laocoon’s scream, as recounted in Virgil, to a sigh, because Laocoon’s wide-­open mouth and distorted features would be painful and disgusting to behold as a fixed and visible sculpture (17, 23).75 In this fragment, Lessing contrasts Rembrandt’s etchings to the meticulous engravings of Johann Georg Wille (a major contributor to the “dot and lozenge” systematization of engraving technique in the eighteenth century) and discusses the suitability of the “Rembrandtesque manner” for “low, droll, and disgusting objects.” When we look at Rembrandt’s prints, writes Lessing, we guess with pleasure a thousand things, which are no pleasure to see clearly. The tatters of a torn jacket, expressed by the fine and precise burin of a Wille, would offend rather than please; but here they really do please in the wild and undiligent manner of a Rembrandt, because in this case we only imagine them, whereas we really would see them in the other case.76

The distinction Lessing makes between “imagining” (sich einbilden) and “really seeing” here is also important in his discussion of the visual arts in Laocoon itself; the pregnant moment that the painting should depict is “that which gives free rein to the imagination [Einbildungskraft]”: “The more we see, the more we must be able to imagine. And the more we add in our imaginations, the more we must think we see” (19). However, in his Laocoon, Lessing does not draw distinctions between various artistic techniques, as he does in this fragment, in which he extends his comparison between Wille and Rembrandt by citing his friend Moses Mendelsohn’s response to it: “If, even with high and noble objects, sketches often please us better than finished paintings, it is for this reason: what an industrious brush would have achieved, we add in our minds to sketches.”77 Unlike Lessing’s treatise, his fragment presents certain manners and techniques as representing objects in such a way that the beholder imagines or thinks them, rather than sees them. In the aesthetics of the non finito at play in both Hoffmann’s foreword and 88 CHAPTER TWO

Lessing’s fragment, “ideal presence” conjured by the viewer’s imagination is heightened by the self-­display of graphic traits, by a bold or a rough manner that calls attention to its own making (needless to say, Rembrandt’s and Callot’s “manners” in no way resemble each other, except in that each calls attention to itself as a manner).78 One might perhaps speculate that the way in which certain kinds of prints are understood as appealing to the imagination rather than to ac-

tual vision and thus as maintaining a kind of alliance with literature—­to represent in the manner of an enargic poem rather than a more “complete” painting, and thus to legitimately overstep some of the limits Lessing places on the plastic arts—­might have to do as well with the intimacy between words and printed pictures so embedded in the history and technology of printing. The coupling of printed image and inscription, some lines of prose or verse identifying or commenting on the image above, appears again and again in Western printmaking, from the sixteenth-­century emblem book to the legend printed below Callot’s Temptation to nineteenth-­century prints both “reproductive” and “original.”79 Even prints after Chardin’s genre subjects in the mid-­eighteenth century were thus accompanied. Pierre Filloeul’s 1737 etching after the Nuneham House of Cards (fig. 2.8), for instance, bears the following inscription: “You are wrong to mock this adolescent / And his useless creation / Subject to ruin at the first breeze / Old men, in the very age when you ought to be wise / Yet more ridiculous castles / Often issue from your heads.”80 What is particularly striking about this manner of presenting the work of Chardin is that it seems so utterly at odds with the kind of reception invited by the painting thus reproduced. As Thomas Crow comments, “The ultimate connoisseur’s artist in his original works, Chardin is pulled into another receptive space by means of the prints made after them. The reticence so carefully built into the images is there overruled by the

Figure 2.8  Pierre Filloeul, The House of

Cards, after Jean-­Baptiste-­Siméon Chardin, 1737. Etching with some engraving, 27.3 × 31 cm. INV. 1922,0410.287. British Museum, London. © The Trustees of the British Museum / Art Resource, NY.

very compulsion to moralize that Chardin had so artfully spared his primary clients.” The print made after Chardin’s Morning Toilette, Crow continues, turns it “into a vanitas emblem, and this is only a mild instance of the relentless textualization of the pictures, a filling-­in of their de-­textualized materiality by means of trivializing appended verses—­trivializing in the sense that they erase the specificity of the images vis-­à-­vis their seventeenth-­century antecedents.”81 Klee’s early etched Inventions (1903–­5) place themselves emphatically in relation to such emblematic prints.82 For instance, the tightly worked Aged Phoenix (1905; fig. 2.9), which he described in a letter to Lily as an “allegory of inadequacy,” is inscribed with an interpretation of the grotesque bird-­woman (“Aged phoenix as a symbol of the inadequacy of human things [including the highest] in critical times”) that echoes even the vanitas thematics so prevalent in such prints.83 Yet we have already seen how in 1912, Klee criticized Albert Welti’s Begräbnis, an etching underscored by a moralizing couplet, again sounding the note of vanitas: “He wrote a sentimental saying beneath it,” writes Klee, “and there the half-­kitsch was.” It is clear that during the later 1910s and early 1920s, Klee was fascinated by the possibilities offered by titles inscribed underneath his images, as we saw in the discussion in chapter 1 of Carpet of Memory. But I want to examine now the even closer relation between inscription and image proposed by the 1926 pen drawing (fig. 2.10) in which Klee revisited the key phrase of the first line of the essay on graphic art that he had drafted almost a decade earlier. In this drawing, a schematic head and shoulders, composed of repetitive, ornamental elaborations arranged into eyes and nose and an indistinct mouth, appear to emerge from a surrounding field of parallel lines, which seem to play simultaneously on hatching, the repetitions of doodling, and the lines of lined paper that guide handwriting, keeping it from sliding down the page as the words sichtbar machen slide here. Above the head float a few tiny shapes—­interlocking squares, concentric circles, a semicircle. The words sichtbar machen—­“to make visible”—­stretch to the right, rendered in repeating parallel lines. The s of sichtbar begins nested on the horizontal lines of the field around the head as if these were the lines of lined paper, and its form mirrors the reversed s lying on its side that plays the 90 CHAPTER TWO

role of the head’s eyes. Klee seems to wish to demonstrate here, quite programmatically, that the figures of “drawing” and of “writing” are different not in their form or their substance but rather in what the viewer does with them; centered above a “nose” and “mouth,” we read the figure as “eyes,” but preceding the letters “ichtbar,” we see its mirror reversal as “s.” The surrounding syntax causes us to read the twinned figures so differently that it takes a moment to realize

Figure 2.9  Paul Klee, Aged

Phoenix (Greiser Phönix) (Inv. 9), 1905, 36. Etching, 27.1 × 19.8 cm. Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern. © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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that they are indeed twinned; the picture puns on the connection between eyes that see and what they can see (what is sichtbar). The similarity of writing and graphic art, this drawing seems to want to suggest, underwrites graphic art’s capacity to make visible—­and it is the manner in which this occurs, the process of “making visible,” that seems above all to interest Klee here.

Seeing and Speculating

Figure 2.10  Paul Klee, make visible (sichtbar machen), 1926, 66. Pen on paper on cardboard, 11 × 30.3 cm.

Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, Livia Klee Donation. © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

In this next section, I will argue for the importance of Klinger’s essay “Painting and Drawing” (1891) for Klee’s art, particularly Klinger’s way of placing Graphik outside the limits set by Lessing for the plastic arts. Klinger follows up, so to speak, much of what we have already seen in eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­ century texts elaborating on the aesthetics of the non finito to suggest that certain works of graphic art should be seen as demanding that the viewer, in a sense, complete them. But Klinger’s discussion is far more systematic and detailed than anything else we have seen along these lines thus far: what had earlier been a common observation becomes in Klinger a full-­fledged strategy for negotiating with modernist opticality—­as Klee would do many years later, in relation to a very different set of interlocutors, by means of his revision of abstraction as graphic, a strategy that can be seen building on Klinger’s, distinct as it is from it. A couple of objections might be raised right away to this argument. First, we have plenty of evidence, in Klee’s writings of the first decade of the twentieth century, of what he thought of the older artist: he couldn’t stand him. In a 1902 92 CHAPTER TWO

letter to Lily, Klee wrote of Klinger’s monument to Beethoven in polychrome marble, bronze, and ivory, completed that year as the centerpiece of the spectacular Gesamtkunstwerk that was the Vienna Secession’s fourteenth exhibition: “I hate this brutal striver more than ever! . . .  Words are insufficient to express my repugnance.”84 More directly relevant for the issues under consideration here is Klee’s condemnation of Klinger’s etching First Future—­a tiger between two

sheer rock cliffs, said to represent the inescapability of death—­from his Eva und die Zukunft cycle (1880): Klee cites Schiller (“Let plastic art breathe life, / From the poet I demand spirit”) to criticize such “Klingerian philosophy,” which Klee calls impure, an “incursion into other forms [Übergriff in fremde Gattungen],” in another 1902 letter to Lily.85 Here Klee echoes—­as he often does in his comments on the artist—­the contemporary critique of Klinger among supporters of modernism, led by Julius Meier-­Graefe.86 Nor does Klee praise Klinger’s essay, which he read in December 1905, describing it in his journal as “of rather dubious value” and objecting to Klinger’s restriction of painting’s subject matter to the beautiful, arguing that “beauty, which perhaps is not to be separated from art, has to do not with the object, but rather with the artistic representation.”87 However, as Marcel Franciscono has argued, it seems that Klinger’s essay nevertheless helped set the framework through which Klee articulated his artistic struggles in the years around 1905, his attempts to negotiate between the demands of pictorial form and what he understood as his own predilection for working in terms of “poetic ideas”: the very terms of his struggles, as he understood them, between “art” and “poetic idea,” were a “legacy.” This opposition, handed down from eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­century aesthetics, became still more prominent in the years around the turn of the century, given, writes Franciscono, “their most famous recent formulation” by Klinger, “an artist whose work Klee did not much like but whose ideas he could hardly escape, given his predilections.” Further, Franciscono argues that Klee’s temporary solution of 1906, his attempt to develop both “pure art” and Graphik but in isolation from each other (discussed above, p. 45), was inspired by Klinger’s essay.88 But in arguing for the importance of Klinger’s articulation of the relation between painting and drawing not only at the very early stage in Klee’s career Franciscono discusses but also later in the 1910s and 1920s, I might seem to be slotting Klee all too easily into a traditional conception of graphic art as a privileged medium for fantastic subject matter, tracing too direct a line between Klinger and Klee. This is a thorny issue, and requires careful thinking about Klee’s reception and a broader exposition of Wilhelmine debates, in which Klinger’s essay played an important role, about modernism, graphic art, and the role of imagination in the viewing of art. In his Aesthetic Theory (1970), the philosopher and critical theorist Theodor W. Adorno briefly takes up the question of the relation between “fantastic art,” the genre that built on Hoffmann and Poe, and the modern art that, he says,

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some uncomprehending art and literary historians see as its continuation.89 The two examples Adorno gives of twentieth-­century artists whose works, he argues, have been misconstrued in relation to nineteenth-­century traditions of the fantastic are Klee and Franz Kafka. “Fantastic art [Phantastische Kunst],” he maintains, “presents something nonexistent as existing”; the effect its “fictions” produce “is the presentation of the nonempirical as if it were empirical.” The modern art of Klee or Kafka, on the other hand, “is so burdened by the weight of the empirical that its pleasure in fiction lapses.” For example, “Kafka’s power is that of a negative feel for reality; what those who misunderstand him take to be fantastic in his work is ‘Comment c’est’” (19). The so-­called fantastic elements in certain modern artworks have an entirely different origin and relation to reality than those they seem to parallel in earlier “fantastic art,” argues Adorno.90 Adorno then broadens his argument into a general methodological principle: “Nothing is more damaging to theoretical knowledge of modern art than its reduction to what it has in common with older periods. What is specific to it slips through the methodological net of ‘nothing new under the sun’; it is reduced to the undialectical, gapless continuum of tranquil development that it in fact explodes” (19). A prominent example of precisely this assimilation of Klee’s work to just such an “undialectical, gapless continuum of tranquil development” through an appeal to earlier “fantastic art” is provided by Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, Alfred Barr’s enormously influential 1936 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.91 The exhibition sought to establish a continuous line of development from Hieronymus Bosch through 1930s surrealism, all of which Barr viewed as the results of a perennial “interest which human beings have in the fantastic, the irrational, the spontaneous, the marvelous, the enigmatic and the dreamlike.” For Adorno, the damage that such a mode of presentation does to “theoretical knowledge” of the work of Klee is obvious; what is strange in his work becomes simply another instance of a continuous human interest in the irrational. As Adorno writes, “Only literary historians would class Kafka and Meyrink together, and it takes an art historian to class Klee and Kubin together” (19).92 In other words, for Adorno, viewing Klee’s work as of a piece with that of his first important supporter, Alfred Kubin—­an artist who saw 94 CHAPTER TWO

himself as a follower of Max Klinger, particularly with regard to Klinger’s treatment of the fantastic as a privileged subject of the graphic arts—­suppresses what is important in Klee’s work so as to slot it into a spurious “tradition,” reassuring for those who wish to chart unbroken lines of influence.93 And yet—­keeping firmly in mind Adorno’s critique of the art-­historical construction of a tradition of the fantastic reaching unbroken into the twentieth

century—­the question I wish to address is just this: what is the relation between Klee’s work of the late 1910s and early 1920s to what is sometimes called “fantastic art”? For I would argue—­like so many art historians before me—­that there is some relation, but also that this relation resembles not at all that between two points along a continuum of art partaking in an immutable human interest in the fantastic.94 In order to get at this relation with any hope of not getting caught by the “methodological net of ‘nothing new under the sun,’” however, one must begin with a more historically precise description of the “fantastic art” that Klee may or may not have to do with than is to be found in either Adorno or Barr. Adorno’s account identifies “fantastic art” with the slippery concept of “fiction”; Barr makes it simply part of human nature as such. I suggest that we set aside both Barr’s “fantastic art” and Adorno’s “phantastische Kunst” in favor of a term that looks similar, but in fact frames the inquiry quite differently: Phantasiekunst, which might be translated as “art of the imagination.” Like fantastic and phantastisch, Phantasie is etymologically derived from the Greek word for appearance, for a spectral apparition, for the faculty of sensuous perception (particularly vision) and for that of imagination (particularly in the sense of picturing to oneself something not present to the senses), for the image which is thus perceived or imagined (the word Lessing would prefer to “poetic painting”), all ultimately derived from the Greek verb for “making visible.”95 But whereas the phrases “phantastische Kunst” and “phantastische Malerei” (fantastic painting) have been used frequently since the mid-­twentieth century to refer to sections of the trajectory proposed by Barr, the term Phantasiekunst, along with the related term Phantasiemalerei (painting of the imagination), is almost never used nowadays and has a much more restricted sense.96 It is the word late nineteenth-­and early twentieth-­century proponents used to describe the work of Max Klinger, Arnold Böcklin, Hans Thoma, Franz von Stuck, and others—­a programmatic term, standing for a particular conception of painting, deployed on behalf of a particular cultural politics in debates about the place of art in rapidly modernizing German society around the turn of the century. This conception of art precipitated out of German reactions against French impressionism in the 1880s and 1890s. Its advocates diverged from theories of modern painting, emerging with mid-­nineteenth-­century realism, that emphasized painting’s antiliterary, antinarrative self-­sufficiency.97 By contrast, proponents of Phantasiekunst sought to advance an art that would be somehow “modern” and yet conceive of its function as “the awakening of some content of consciousness in the viewer  . . . through the stimulation of his imagination [Phantasie].”98

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The conception of graphic art put forward by the proponents of Phantasiekunst is relevant for understanding Klee’s work of the late 1910s and early 1920s, particularly the ways he related his art to literature and to writing. His early training as an artist took place very much within the ambit of Phantasiekunst, in the Munich studio of Franz von Stuck.99 One can find accounts of Klee’s development as an artist that assert that his early work can be seen as the overcoming of these influences, while others argue that he never did overcome them entirely.100 I wish to make a different kind of argument, however. First, I argue that relations between images and texts occupy a crucial place in Phantasiekunst—­that Phantasie names the beholder’s ability to “translate” image into text and text into image. Second, I argue that Klee’s work thematizes at times the relation in Phantasiekunst between reading and viewing graphic art and the related idea that graphic works address the viewer’s imagination. I will begin with an overview of Phantasiekunst in the 1880s and 1890s, looking in particular at Der Kunstwart (Guardian of Art), the influential arts magazine that theorized and publicized Phantasiekunst. Next I turn to Klinger’s “Painting and Drawing,” a crucial text for Phantasiekunst.101 In this essay, Klinger, drawing a sharp distinction between painting and the graphic arts, compares viewing prints and drawings to reading texts, and argues that both activities demand the involvement of Phantasie in a way that viewing paintings does not. Then I examine a much later painting of Klee’s, The Vocal Fabric of the Singer Rosa Silber (1922; fig. 2.15), not as an example of, but rather as a meditation on, Phantasiekunst and the relation between reading and viewing on which Phantasiekunst depends. In 1887, the poet and journalist Ferdinand Avenarius founded an influential and widely read semimonthly cultural review called Der Kunstwart.102 In the last twenty years, scholars have illuminated the network of organizations and publications, of which the Kunstwart was a chief node, that sought to intervene in new conditions of mass production and, crucially, mass consumption so as to harness both to create a unified culture that would bind together the social classes, in line with the aims of the bourgeois reform movement of Wilhelmine Germany. The Kunstwart has been most incisively analyzed in relation to the 96 CHAPTER TWO

reform of consumer goods that it promoted. It was the Dürerbund, the cultural-­ political organization founded by Avenarius in 1902, with the closest of ties to the journal, which, together with the German Werkbund and a number of retailers’ associations, published in 1915 the Deutsches Warenbuch (Book of Commodities), featuring, as the catalogue’s introduction announced, a selection of exemplars of such goods (e.g. sugar bowls and coffee pots) that could “exert a

significant influence on culture in general.”103 Although it has received less attention than the Kunstwart’s project of reforming the household object (and its users), in part by harnessing the powers of mass production, the review also aimed to reform the art object (and its viewers), in part by harnessing the powers of mass reproduction.104 More specifically, one of Avenarius’s chief objects was to promote what he termed—­in a programmatic article in the first issue, on the condition of the arts in Germany—­the “art of imagination [Kunst der Phantasie].”105 Combating a dangerous “weakening of Phantasie in the recent past”—­which Avenarius blamed, very much in the mode of Romantic cultural criticism, on a too exclusive focus on reason and science in rapidly industrializing German society—­ was one of the great concerns of Der Kunstwart.106 Against this danger, the journal propagated the “art of imagination”—­the work of Böcklin, Klinger, and Thoma, above all—­as the means of preserving Phantasie and the potential ground for individual and national spiritual renewal, the means of a Schillerian “aesthetic education” of the German people.107 This art was meant to “embody ethical, humanistic ideals within a liberal national framework,” as Beth Irwin Lewis has written.108 The German bourgeoisie of this period found Avenarius’s conception of the importance of Phantasiekunst extremely appealing; the extraordinary popularity of Böcklin during this period, when “no good bourgeois household could go without reproductions of Böcklin’s pictures,” owed much to Avenarius’s efforts.109 Through the publication of art reproductions suitable for hanging (“Masterpieces for the German House” as well as a selection of “Artist-­Portfolios”), calendars, and books, the Kunstwart’s program furnished the interiors of a large number of bourgeois German homes in this period (fig. 2.11).110 As Theodor Heuss, who wrote for the journal, recalled, “At that time, in the homes of clergymen and teachers, the establishments of postal secretaries and judges, one could tell by the wall decoration, by the choice of furniture, by what was in the bookcases, whether a Kunstwart-­subscriber lived there.”111 The “art of Phantasie” was proposed as a new and specifically modern German art.112 Like the supporters of French impressionism and symbolism in Germany before the turn of the century, Avenarius and Albert Dresdner, the journal’s primary art critic, railed against the academies and the “history paintings, genre pictures, costume pieces, and anecdotal pictures” that filled their exhibitions, and supported the secessions in Berlin and Munich. However, the nationalist Kunstwart proposed Phantasiekunst, rather than impressionism or symbolism, as the mode of painting that should overcome the academies, a viewpoint it held with increasing vehemence after the turn of the century as the journal became

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Figure 2.11  Advertisement for the series

of “Artist-­Portfolios” published by the Kunstwart. Insert in the Dürer-­Portfolio (Munich: Kunstwart-­Verlag, G. D. W. Callwey, 1902).

increasingly conservative, particularly after the 1905 publication of The Case of Böcklin, Meier-­Graefe’s impassioned polemic against Phantasiekunst and the Böcklin cult (discussed in chapter 1).113 While the Kunstwart sometimes praised French impressionist institutional innovations and expansion of painting’s range of technique, it did so in a grudging and largely tactical manner. It criticized impressionism as an all too technical matter, accusing it of an “emptiness of content”: “As the predominant art principle, it kills ..  .  Phantasie,” warned Dresdner.114 The Kunstwart viewed the cultivation of Phantasie, the “enrichment of this inner world,” as threatened by the emphasis on opticality and formal 98 CHAPTER TWO

self-­sufficiency in both impressionist paintings and the discourse supporting them.115 It polemicized against the increasingly powerful notion of l’art pour l’art (“The means of expression for the means of expression’s sake—­what nonsense!”).116 Thus the Kunstwart’s support for Phantasiekunst may be seen as a reaction to the threat its writers believed antiliterary modernist painting posed to Phantasie, understood as the ground of subjectivity itself. Accordingly, the

Phantasiekunst the Kunstwart sought to promote over and against impressionism and its legacy in later nineteenth-­and early twentieth-­century painting must be seen not as the preservation of an earlier state but rather as itself a new phenomenon, marked by modernism in its reaction against it. As Birgit Kulhoff emphasizes, the Kunstwart played a special ideological role for the lower strata of the cultivated, educated bourgeoisie (Bildungsbürgertum), the teachers and clergymen Heuss mentions, and parts of the new middle class of white-­collar employees hoping to rise socially through education. As Avenarius wrote in an announcement enclosed in the Kunstwart’s first issue, his aim was “to create a magazine that delivers to the educated person all of that knowledge of  . . . artistic life that he—­as an educated person—­must know.”117 In other words, not only does the Kunstwart imply an educated reader in its address, but it itself aims to deliver “that knowledge” that defines the reader as an educated person; the journal appears quite explicitly to view itself not only as addressing but as constituting the Bildungsbürgertum in its address. Moreover, the art of Phantasie it advocated can be conceived as doing something similar—­not merely addressing itself to the Phantasie of the educated viewer but actually constituting this Phantasie by means of this address. The great popularity of the journal, and of Phantasiekunst itself, during a period of time when, on the one hand, the Bildungsbürgertum felt itself under threat and, on the other, growing numbers of white-­collar employees (Angestellten) desired cultural embourgeoisement, indubitably owed much to this promise of shoring up or bestowing bildungsbürgerlich identity. The bourgeois domestic interior—­filled, as Heuss described it, with art reproductions (“the wall decoration”) and books offered by the Kunstwart (“what was in the bookcases”), as well as furniture chosen according to the journal’s advice—­became not merely a signal to inhabitants and visitors of educated status, but itself an apparatus for the production and cultivation of Phantasie, the ultimate proof and goal of education (Bildung).118 The establishment of relations among media and translations from one medium into another (poems about paintings, paintings based on poems, illustrated books, the integration of titles into the prominent frames of paintings, and so forth) take on so much prominence in Phantasiekunst that I believe one must speak of such art as a system of relations—­among texts, prints both reproductive and original, and paintings—­rather than as a shared tendency exhibiting itself through multiple media. Phantasiekunst takes place, so to speak, between the wall decoration and the bookcases in the interiors that housed the Kunstwart’s readers. Given the Kunstwart’s explicit rejection of the impressionist development of an aesthetic of medium-­specificity as meaningless “nonsense,”

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Figure 2.12  Max Klinger, The Isle of the Dead, after Arnold Böcklin, 1890. Etching and aquatint in black ink

on ivory wove paper, laid down on ivory wove plate paper (chine collé), 41.8 × 69.4 cm (image); 61.3 × 77.4 cm (plate); 67.6 × 87.4 cm (sheet). Gift of Jack Daulton, 2000.111, The Art Institute of Chicago. Photography © The Art Institute of Chicago/

it is only logical that in Phantasiekunst, interrelations among media should proliferate—­often in the form of an artwork in one medium presenting itself as a version of an artwork in another, such as Klinger’s etching after (fig. 2.12) or Max Reger’s musical interpretations of Böcklin’s Isle of the Dead (fig. 2.13). If, for 100 CHAPTER TWO

Avenarius and Dresdner, an aesthetic of “the means of expression for the means of expression’s sake” is nonsense, the possibility of the translation of an artwork from one “means of expression” into another becomes precisely the guarantor of meaning and significance—­a non-­medium-­specific content accessible through imagination.119 Indeed, the ideal experience of an artwork is, for Phantasiekunst, an immersive “forgetting” of the artwork’s material construction in a given me-

Figure 2.13  Arnold Böcklin, The Isle of the Dead, 1883. Oil on wood, 150.0 × 80.0 cm. Alte Nationalgalerie,

Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.

dium, such that it becomes, in effect, a multimedia, multisensory experience: as Böcklin famously wrote to Marie Berna, who commissioned the second of Böcklin’s five versions of Isle of the Dead, “You will be able to dream yourself into this world of shadows, until you believe you feel the light, mild breeze that ruffles the ocean.”120 Phantasie names the capacity that allows such immersion, such “dreaming-­in.” Within the aesthetics of the Kunstwart, Phantasie is what makes possible such virtual multimedia experiences, and hence cross-­media translations, of artworks. One could say, then, taking a standpoint outside that of the Kunstwart, that cross-­media translations produce or generate a human capacity for Phantasie as an effect of works of art. This is something that Meier-­Graefe picks up on in The Case of Böcklin—­he calls Böcklin’s work “illustration without a book” and “aimed to translate certain ideas to the viewer and to prompt him to continue the poetry-­writing.”121 This notion of the artwork within Phantasiemalerei makes it eminently repeatable and reproducible, photomechanically and otherwise—­ again, the Isle of the Dead is the paradigmatic example, from the five versions that Böcklin himself painted to Klinger’s etching of the painting to the pho-

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Figure 2.14  Böcklin-­Mappe, published by the Kunstwart (Munich: Georg D. W. Callwey im Kunstwart-­

Verlage, n.d.).

tomechanical reproduction included in the 1.50-­Mark Böcklin-­Portfolio published by the Kunstwart, which sold one hundred thousand copies between 1900 and 1911 (fig. 2.14).122 And thus it is only consistent that Meier-­Graefe criticizes not only Böcklin’s paintings but also the usual way of enjoying them, as in his plea to the reader to test his descriptions by visiting Böcklin’s paintings in person in the Nationalgalerie: Don’t check against photographs! As the practice of enjoying a picture by the convenient means of reproduction has become ever more common, this false estimation of Böcklin, who enjoys in particular the favor of the photograph-­ enthusiast, cannot be pointed out too often. . . . The more a painting draws on its 102 CHAPTER TWO

specific means—­that is, the richer, the more painterly it is—­the worse it fares when reproduced by means of this mechanical reduction. Böcklin, on the other hand, profits by this translation.123

The Kunstwart, on the other hand, sought to harness mass reproduction, not to rail against it as an all too convenient “mechanical reduction.” Indeed, the

transformation of the artwork into the mass-­produced image is underwritten by Phantasie, understood by Avenarius and Dresdner as the antidote to the ills of industrialization. “Unless all appearances deceive, we are now entering a flourishing period of the most German of all painting—­Phantasiemalerei. The Griffelkunst (‘stylus-­ art’) of the pencil and the etching needle that Klinger advocates so well, also in his writing, has a special importance for it,” trumpeted Avenarius in 1892.124 Klinger, in his essay “Painting and Drawing,” published the previous year, coins the term Griffelkunst, derived from the word Griffel, or stylus, “the shared tool of all the reproductive techniques and the symbolic word for pen and pencil.”125 He proposes to unite under this new term drawing and the graphic arts when used as ends in themselves, as “an art in itself,” rather than as the means of preparing for or disseminating something else (210); he also uses the familiar word “drawing” (Zeichnung) in the same sense (208). Klinger begins his essay by discussing difficulties of terminology; he wishes to include some but not all kinds of drawing and some but not all kinds of printmaking. He argues that no hand-­drawing before the invention of printing should be included; the particular aesthetic mode of which he speaks could only develop with printmaking, although pictures that are not prints can certainly partake in it. Preparatory drawings are out as well; Klinger excludes at the outset Raphael’s drawings, thus distinguishing Griffelkunst from traditional conceptions of disegno (Raphael’s compositional sketches are a locus classicus of drawing as design, as the conceptual work of the artist, the skeleton on which the material flesh of painting hangs). Klinger contrasts a Raphael drawing with a “Blatt by Dürer,” which, unlike the former, “represents that drawing which forms an art for itself”: drawing or printmaking is only Griffelkunst when it is autonomous, and the purpose of Klinger’s essay is the formulation of the “specific aesthetics and specific artistic interests” of Griffelkunst as distinguished from those of painting (ibid.). Avenarius, however, stresses the “special importance” for Phantasiemalerei of this Griffelkunst. How is it that this conception of Griffelkunst, which has “long been admired as an aesthetic declaration of independence for the graphic arts and drawing”—­a “declaration of independence” from the aesthetics of painting—­is so particularly important for Phantasiemalerei?126 As Avenarius indicates, Griffelkunst, as both practiced and theorized by Klinger, is a very important part of the multimedia apparatus that is Phantasiekunst. Alongside Böcklin’s work, Klinger’s, in painting, sculpture, and above all graphic cycles—­the subject of Avenarius’s book titled, tellingly, Max Klinger as a Poet (1917)—­was seen as the most important of Phantasiekunst. At the core

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of the Klingerian notion of Griffelkunst is the similarity Klinger asserts between reading a text and looking at a print or drawing; this assertion of similarity, both in the graphic cycles and in “Painting and Drawing,” is the crux of Klinger’s importance for Phantasiekunst. Klinger’s theorization of Griffelkunst appears to solve a very grave problem for Phantasiemalerei and Phantasiekunst as a whole—­that of reconciling the apparatus of Phantasie, which depends on translation between media, with the compelling arguments for an aesthetic of medium-­specificity, which the writers for the Kunstwart seldom seem to have been able to dismiss entirely. Klinger’s essay draws a sharp distinction between the aesthetics of painting and the aesthetics of Griffelkunst. Painting, he argues, is the appropriate place for an aesthetics of self-­enclosed autonomy: It is essential for pictorial representation to avoid excessively fantastic, allegorical, or novelistic elements, which would lead the mind of the viewer into speculations [Spekulationen] lying beyond the picture itself. It is that self-­sufficient repose that marks the greatness of an artwork and that attracts us in the works of pictorial masters. This repose can only be reached through the complete perfection of the representation in terms of form, color, expression, and total mood.127

For Klinger, however, this does not apply to Griffelkunst—­he uses the word “picture” (Bild) very narrowly to designate easel painting (“a picture is a picture; a drawing is a drawing,” he writes).128 In writing about the aesthetics of Griffelkunst, he describes something entirely different from the completeness and formal autonomy that he sees as the highest aim of painting. He describes instead the many gaps that Griffelkunst leaves for the Phantasie of the viewer; “speculations lying beyond the picture itself ” are not out of place in the viewing of Griffelkunst, although they would detract from the aesthetic experience of a painting.129 Because of this, certain kinds of subject matter that are barred to painting are accessible for Griffelkunst; Klinger asserts “that there are pictures in the Phantasie that are not artistically representable for painting, or only un104 CHAPTER TWO

der certain conditions, but that can nevertheless be represented through drawing” (224). Revisiting Lessing’s terms, he writes, “Like the poet, the draftsman can show life and form, even where he can no longer see them” (229). Thus, when Klinger criticizes how the German art public views paintings (like those of so many contemporary artists and critics of the most diverse orientations, his criticisms and ideas for reform are to be understood against

a backdrop of nationalist concern about the state of the arts in Germany), he speaks of a mode of looking encouraged by paintings partaking in the aesthetics of drawing: German art in the middle of this century unfortunately attempted to apply the aesthetics of drawing outright to painting. That attempt bears a good part of the responsibility for the lack of understanding of form in the public today, which still has a certain inclination towards this “tradition.” This attempt was also only possible in a people with as strong an inclination to poeticize as ours has. Especially fertile ground was prepared for it by the fact that our whole artistic struggle upwards at the end of the last and beginning of this century was called forth not by artists but instead by poets and writers. (234–­37)130

“That which one generally calls ‘thought,’ ‘idea’ in a picture,” writes Klinger, has “nothing to do with the representation [Darstellung] itself ” but is there to stimulate “associations of ideas [Ideenassoziationen].” For the most part, such “thoughts” are “calculated for a public that, uncertain about artistic value, wants to have something to fabulate about, to ‘understand’” (214).131 Names (of the persons depicted in an image) and titles (of the pictures themselves) are often singled out by Klinger as the starting points of these “associations,” as what allows these viewers something to “fabulate” about: “For the artist, the ‘idea’ lies in the development of form in accordance with the position of the body, in its relation to space, in its combinations of colors, and it is a matter of complete indifference to him, whether this is Endymion or Peter.  .  .  . For the time being, however, our taste today demands to know first, whether that might not be Endymion” (ibid.).132 For Klinger, what must be avoided is the application of the aesthetics of Griffelkunst to painting, as exemplified for him by mid-­nineteenth-­century German art—­or vice versa.133 The great usefulness of his theorization of Griffelkunst for Phantasiekunst in general is that it appeared to offer a workable compromise between increasingly prestigious formalist aesthetics (soon to be given an influential organ in the journal Pan, cofounded by Meier-­Graefe in 1895) and the aesthetics of Phantasie: the former has its proper place in discussions of painting, the latter in discussions of graphic art, and a transgression of this division of the field is a violation of what is proper to each medium. As I will discuss later in this chapter, the poet and critic Charles Baudelaire viewed mid-­nineteenth-­century German painting as an aesthetic aberration following from a misunderstanding of the function of the plastic arts vis-­à-­vis literature: unlike “pure art according

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to the modern conception,” the art of painters such as Peter Cornelius and Wilhelm von Kaulbach was “a plastic art with pretensions of replacing the book.”134 Klinger’s compromise, by contrast, allowed him to distance himself from and criticize Cornelius and Kaulbach without rejecting media translation and “literary” elements in the plastic arts tout court (237). His “Painting and Drawing” allows aspects of formalist aesthetics to enter into the system of Phantasiekunst while attempting to restrict this aesthetics to a particular and limited area, that of easel painting; within his terms, any expansion of formalist aesthetics beyond easel painting may be seen as the overstepping of the aesthetics of one medium into another. Klinger’s essay presents a very complicated economy of media relationships, within which drawing is, paradoxically, the self-­contained and particular medium of intermediality. He cites the sharp differentiation of poetry from painting in Lessing’s Laocoon, but deemphasizes Lessing’s opposition between the spatial and the temporal (216).135 Instead, he draws a comparison between poetry and this third term of Griffelkunst, which he introduces into Lessing’s binary, through their common demand that the Phantasie of the reader or viewer complete what they leave out, building on the well-­established link between graphic art and the aesthetics of the non finito: In his “Laocoon,” Lessing excludes from those subjects, whose representation is fully achievable artistically by painting, all points where persistence in the highest affects, in the ugly, horrifying and disgusting would be unnatural. . . . These points are permitted to representation through poetry, drama, and music, indeed indispensable to them, because in these arts the Phantasie is not bound just to these points, even if they force themselves forward with great power and intensity. . . . The simultaneous activity of our Phantasie when we become aware of what is unpleasant in and of itself, the prevention of its taking effect alone, is thus the essential factor for making it artistically representable. Now, drawing possesses such factors in that it, for instance, lacks color, one of the indispensable parts of the total impression that nature makes on us. We are required to recreate the absent colors to fill in the black-­and-­white represen106 CHAPTER TWO

tation, just as we recreate [nachschaffen] tone and rhythm to fill in the words when we read. (Ibid.)136

In Klinger’s theory of graphic art, the practiced reader’s impression of a virtual auditory sensuousness, a “voice between the lines,” in silent reading becomes a figure for what the viewer does when looking at drawings and prints.137 The

defining quality of Griffelkunst, for Klinger, is the involvement it requires of the viewer’s Phantasie. Griffelkunst “leaves Phantasie great latitude to complete the representation with color; Griffelkunst can handle the forms that are not at the very center of the matter—­no, even those at the center—­with such freedom, that these too must be completed by Phantasie; Griffelkunst can isolate the object of representation to such an extent that Phantasie must even create space itself ” (ibid.). This in turn allows Klinger to differentiate sharply between the capacities of Griffelkunst and painting to represent images of Phantasie, asserting that “there are Phantasie-­images that are not artistically representable by means of painting, or only conditionally so, that these very images nevertheless are accessible for representation by means of drawing, without its artistic value thereby losing anything”—­and, furthermore, that this differentiation is “confirmed by the investigation of the technical means of Griffelkunst” (224).138 How are these conceptions of Griffelkunst and Phantasiekunst relevant for Klee? Are they relevant at all for his work after his induction into the avant-­garde? To answer these questions, let us examine Klee’s Vocal Fabric of the Singer Rosa Silber (Das Vokaltuch der Kammersängerin Rosa Silber) (1922; fig. 2.15). The work originally consisted of watercolor and pen on a small piece of plaster-­clotted muslin with rough, irregular edges, mounted on a piece of card stock that was itself tinted with watercolor and bore the title of the work in Klee’s handwriting; its mode of presentation was thus typical of Klee’s Blätter. But it was not long after the work left Klee’s hands that much of the card mount was cut off, leaving only a thin border extending a few millimeters beyond the edges of the piece of fabric; the first published reproduction of the work, in a 1926 catalogue highlighting Ludwig Justi’s acquisitions for the Nationalgalerie in Berlin, shows the mount already cut.139 The portion of the card stock that was cut away included the title.140 As discussed in chapter 1, Werckmeister attributes the sudden critical and financial success of Klee’s 1917 Sturm exhibition to what he terms Klee’s “new concept of illustrative painting,” in which titles play a major role.141 “Apparently Klee’s most recent works were successful because they either featured illustrative figurations or bore descriptive and yet enigmatic titles suggesting mysterious contents,” he writes, citing Ship-­star-­festival (1916; fig. 2.16) and Stars above evil houses (1916; fig. 2.17) as examples, whereas “the only two works from 1916 that were not sold  . . . bore nonsuggestive, neutral titles.”142 Werckmeister might be said to view the relation of the title on the mount of these pictures to the picture as a whole as contributing to the exhibition’s success according to

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Figure 2.15  Paul Klee, The Vocal Fabric of the Singer Rosa Silber (Das Vokaltuch der Kammersängerin Rosa Silber),

1922, 126. Watercolor and ink on plastered fabric mounted on board, with watercolor and ink borders, 62.3 × 52.1 cm. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Stanley Resor. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY. © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Figure 2.16  Paul Klee, Ship-­star-­festival (Schiffsternenfest),

1916, 62. Watercolor, pen, and pencil on primed linen on cardboard, 24.6 × 16.9 cm. Private collection, Germany. © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Figure 2.17  Paul Klee, Stars above evil houses (Gestirne

über bösen Häusern), 1916, 79. Watercolor on primed linen on cardboard, 19/20 × 21.2/22.2 cm. Merzbacher Kunststiftung, Küsnacht. © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Figure 2.18  “Berthalda. After the oil painting by Hans

Makart.” (“Berthalda. Nach dem Oelgemälde von Hans Makart.”) Die Gartenlaube: Illustrirtes Familienblatt, no. 25 (1887): 777.

something like the mechanism that Klinger speaks of in a footnote to a section of his essay in which he criticizes the public’s taste for so-­called ideas in pictures: I am convinced that all those unavoidable heads of pretty girls—­Ada—­ Hermine—­Lydia—­would completely disappear from the illustrated magazines if it were no longer allowed to place proper names under them as captions [fig. 2.18]. I have observed that just such a sheet will leave an art lover completely cold if it is simply titled “Study”—­but that if it is called “Clara” it suddenly becomes an object of the greatest interest. The lack of a proper idea prevents the well-­brought-­up, in any case, from unwinding the self-­spun little novellas that they are in the habit of attaching to every such sheet.143

That Klee deployed this device of inscribing what Werckmeister calls “mysterious titles” on the mounts of these fragmentary-­looking watercolors in a way that not only encourages what Klinger calls “unwinding  . . . self-­spun little novellas” but also thematizes and reflects on this much-­criticized mode of looking is suggested by the title he inscribed on the mount of one watercolor-­and-­ pen work of 1916 included in the Sturm show—­Concentrated Novel (fig. 2.19). In quite a few cases besides the Vocal Fabric, the inscribed mount was viewed by later owners or dealers as an extraneous flourish, not part of the work itself and an impediment to its proper, “nonliterary” appreciation, and therefore trimmed down or removed entirely. The title of the Vocal Fabric, however, although no longer visibly present as part of the work, has not ceased to affect its description and interpretation. Its musical connotations have encouraged several commentators to view the picture as a kind of translation of music into painting, the finding of equivalents in one medium for the effects of another. Such an interpretation makes the work appear to be an attempt to make a visual analogue to music, which would fit in well with the many early twentieth-­century attempts to model painting on music, such as Kupka’s Amorpha, fugue in two colors (1912) or Klee’s own Fugue in Red (1921) of just the previous year.144 Thus Will Grohmann, for instance, called it a “harmony of soprano colors.”145 Similarly, Renée Riese Hubert writes: “In The 110 CHAPTER TWO

Vocal Fabric of the Singer Rosa Silber different musical intensities are translated by color transparencies, opaquenesses, surfaces, and textures.”146 K. Porter Aichele offers the most elaborate interpretation along these lines, drawing analogies between the Vocal Fabric and Richard Strauss’s opera Der Rosenkavalier (1911). She argues that the title alludes to the silver rose which Octavian gives to Sophie in Strauss’s opera, that the painting as a whole is “an homage to Strauss in recogni-

Figure 2.19  Paul Klee, Concentrated Novel (concentrierter Roman), 1916, 74. Watercolor and pen on paper on

cardboard, 13.4 × 20 cm. Private collection. Photo © Christie’s Images / The Bridgeman Art Library. © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

tion of their shared esteem for Mozart,” and that it corresponds in many ways to the opera’s music, offering visual equivalents for the latter’s auditory effects: “In addition to being the chromatic equivalents of Strauss’s soprano voices, Klee’s subtle gradations of roses and blues correspond to the rapture and silver rose motifs, which are the melodic threads of the presentation duet. The pastel palette also evokes the light, silvery sounds of the harp and celesta that color the tonal background of the vocal exchange.”147 Reflecting on these interpretations of the Vocal Fabric, one might see it not merely as seeking in general terms to model itself on music but, more precisely, as a kind of retrospective summation of Phantasiekunst as a system of media

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translation. For here we find not only a direct analogy between painting and music—­an analogy that early twentieth-­century abstract painting often put to work to circumvent verbal language—­but also a combination of painting and text that generates the effects of a third medium, music, even appearing to be a translation of a particular piece of music into painting. And not only does the text of its title encourage us to view the work as the translation of musical effects, but the Vocal Fabric also seems to engage the terms of Klinger’s discussion of graphic art. Many features of this painted Vocal Fabric encourage us to see it as taking on the characteristics of Griffelkunst: Klee has left much of the white of its ground unpainted, relating it to the treatment of the ground in graphic art rather than in painting,148 and filled small rectangular areas of the picture with repeating patterns—­various styles of hatching, crosshatching, and stippling—­ recapitulating the highly conventionalized means of rendering tonality and color developed by printmakers.149 Its intimate scale (only 24.5 by 20.5 inches), the way that the support is glued to a piece of card, the fact that the title was once inscribed beneath that support, and the way that title encourages “speculations lying beyond the picture itself ” on the part of the viewer all relate it to Griffelkunst. Elaborating on the interpretations cited above, we might see the Vocal Fabric as thematizing the analogy between reading a text and viewing a graphic Blatt that plays such an important role in Klinger’s theorization of the graphic. Klinger compares the way that graphic conventions such as hatching call upon the viewer’s Phantasie to “recreate” the absent colors to the way the reader’s Phantasie “recreates” the auditory qualities of the absent voice in silent reading: drawing requires this “activity of our Phantasie,” which places it alongside poetry, because “we are required to create the absent colors to fill in the black-­ and-­white representation, just as we create tone and rhythm to fill in the words when we read.”150 We might then see this Vocal Fabric as staging this analogy: we might view the hatched and dotted areas as melting away into the colors they represent, the colors Phantasie generates—­the diaphanous washes of pink, yellow, and blue filling small, rectangular areas of the picture that rhyme with the hatched and dotted areas. We might, like the commentators cited above, 112 CHAPTER TWO

see these pale colors as suggesting musical effects. We might see the colored vowels as bodying forth the “tone and rhythm” of a beautiful female voice (Kammersängerin is an honorific title for a female singer). We might, in short, see Klee’s painting as a late work of Phantasiekunst—­as a functioning system of media translations, demanding the involvement of the viewer’s Phantasie and thus attesting to the continuing relevance and power of Phantasie. Although

most of the documents on Phantasiekunst that I cited above date from the late 1880s through the first years of the twentieth century, it should by no means be assumed that critical support for Phantasiekunst disappeared thereafter. In 1920, the conservative Munich-­based critic Georg Jakob Wolf, for instance, whose hostility toward Klee was instanced in chapter 1, published a popular book titled German Painter-­Poets, which constructs a “tradition” from Runge and Friedrich, Richter and Schwind, through Böcklin and Thoma, and begins with an attack on the merely sensuous, optical nature of impressionism and its neglect of “inwardness and the illustration [Veranschaulichung] of soulfulness.”151 I do not wish to suggest that such an interpretation of the Vocal Fabric would be entirely wrong. Klee’s painting does, I would argue, take on these terms of Phantasiekunst; it thematizes this analogy between the involvement of Phantasie in reading and the viewing of works of graphic art. Phantasiekunst is, in a sense, the subject of this painting; this painting is not, however, an example of Phantasiekunst. (Wolf, as we saw in the previous chapter, would never have confused Klee for a Phantasiekünstler.) As Adorno urges in his discussion of Klee and “fantastic art,” “In the relation of modern artworks to older ones that are similar, it is their differences that should be elicited.” One crucial difference between a Klinger print and this Klee Blatt is that the first assumes the media translations of Phantasie, whereas the latter takes up these translations as its subject. Another great difference lies in the mode of presentation, particularly what one might call its tense, as in verb tense; still another lies in the relation between these translations and the materials that make up the work. It is to these differences that I now wish to turn. What is this Vokaltuch that we have been referring to thus far as the Vocal Fabric? The word is Klee’s coinage; although the Museum of Modern Art translates it as “vocal fabric,” it might also be translated as “vowel fabric” (Vokal means both “vocal” and “vowel”). This punning double reference to both the vocal and the vowel—­to both the sound of the singer’s voice and the five lowercase vowels on the lower part of the piece of cloth, each neatly painted in a different color—­ sets up the problem of the activity of Phantasie, the capacity that might be able to transform these vowels into imagined sounds, to conjure a beautiful voice out of the letters, out of these arbitrary signs. The entire title is structured by such double references: even the invented singer’s name, Rosa Silber, is marked by ambiguity—­it can be read as an ordinary name (Rosa is a common first name and Silber is a common last name in German) or as referring to some of the colors we see (rosa means “pink,” silber means “silver”). Still another ambiguity enters the picture if we ask what the relation might be between the two parts of

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Klee’s invented compound word, between Vokal (“vocal” or “vowel”) and Tuch (“cloth”). The Museum of Modern Art’s translation misleadingly clears away this ambiguity as well. The phrase “vocal fabric” is used occasionally in music criticism in English to refer to the texture or quality of a voice, whereas Klee’s compound seems never to be used in German to refer to anything except this very work. The English “vocal fabric” would lead us to read Vokaltuch as the fabric of the voice—­the qualities of the voice hypostatized as a fabric or cloth, or if we wanted to take this figure of speech as literally as possible, a piece of cloth made out of the voice. This is the way that the interpretations of the painting cited above read the relation of Vokal to Tuch in the title: the cloth is music’s visible materialization. However, other German compounds with Tuch do not necessarily work in this way—­some imply instead that the cloth touches the other part of the compound (like Kopftuch, “head scarf”), or acts upon it in some way (like Geschirrtuch, “dishcloth”), or absorbs and collects it (like Schweisstuch, “sweat cloth”), rather than being made out of it. If we read the relation of Vokal to Tuch along these lines instead, and viewed this piece of cloth as touching, acting upon, or collecting the vocals or the vowels of the singer Rosa Silber, we can begin to develop another reading of the Vokaltuch as a whole—­much stranger than that pursued by the citations above, but at least as well supported by the evidence. The size and shape of this piece of cloth are just about right for a handkerchief; the inscription of the singer’s initials on the upper part of the cloth might be seen as a monogram, such as might be embroidered on a handkerchief. This makes sense if we read the relation between Vokal to Tuch as one of contact or proximity—­we might see this cloth as something like a handkerchief, held close to the singer’s mouth to be sneezed or coughed or even sung into. Similarly, if we read this relation as the collection or absorption of vocals or vowels by the cloth, just as a Schweisstuch is a piece of cloth that collects or absorbs sweat, we might see the support of this painting as a kind of handkerchief that collects the singer’s vocals or vowels, as if these were bodily fluids.152 If we bring these suggestions together—­if we see this piece of cloth simultaneously as the watercolor’s support and as a handkerchief, if we see the cloth as something that came into contact with and absorbed the singer’s 114 CHAPTER TWO

voice or vowels—­we might postulate a connection between this Vokaltuch and the famous Schweisstuch or sudarium (from Latin suder, “sweat”) of Veronica, the miraculous image-­bearing handkerchief. One of several Christian legends of so-­called acheiropoetoi (“images not made by human hands,” derived from the Greek: a = without + cheir = hand + poiein = to make) of the Holy Face miraculously imprinted on a piece of cloth by contact,

the sweat cloth of St. Veronica became the best-­known image of its kind in the Western church by the thirteenth century.153 The most common version of the legend tells of Christ’s encounter, on the road to Calvary, with a pagan woman named Veronica. She took pity on him and wiped the sweat and blood from his face with her handkerchief; Christ, in gratitude, left a perfect image of his face on the cloth. This miraculous relic, also called the Veronica—­signifying both the original owner and, through a play on words, the “true icon”—­became the “most important prototype for all the so-­called Holy Faces produced in the North” in the late Middle Ages.154 Joseph Leo Koerner argues that the sudarium—­the image as imprint, as originating in the “contact of original with likeness,” of Christ’s face with the handkerchief—­was an important model of visual representation for Albrecht Dürer, both in his prints of the sudarium itself and in his self-­portraits which invoke the relic.155 Koerner argues further—­building in part on arguments made by art historians in Germany in the 1920s—­that the Veronica played a special role in German painting during the century before Dürer.156 As he demonstrates, paintings of the sudarium in the early fifteenth century often strive to establish a comparison or even an equivalence between the surface of the painting itself and the cloth surface of the “true icon” represented within the painting, usually presented to the viewer and held parallel to the picture plane by St. Veronica. Speaking of the Master of Saint Veronica’s Saint Veronica (circa 1400) in the National Gallery in London (fig. 2.20), Koerner writes: Instead of allowing the picture plane to vanish into the illusion of a represented scene  . . . the Cologne master keeps the eye fixed on the tooled surface of the panel, on its material presence. And since the absolute “foreground” of the image is constituted by the vera icon itself, the whole work of art becomes consubstantial with its magical subject, aspiring thereby to the status of the relic itself.157

I would suggest that Klee’s Vokaltuch involves a similar play between its own “magical subject” (this vocal or vowel cloth that catches the singer’s voice) and the material presence of its surface—­which Klee can push still further than the fifteenth-­century master by creating an analogy between subject and surface on the level of material, as two pieces of cloth, emphasizing the very fabric, as it were, of his support, displaying the warp, weft, and frayed edges of this piece of gauze in marked contrast to the usual treatment of a painting’s cloth support. Thus the title of Klee’s watercolor pervades the way that we would interpret its very materiality to an unusual and indeed extreme degree.158 Given the title,

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Figure 2.20  Master of Saint Veronica,

Saint Veronica, ca. 1400. Oil on wood, 34 × 44 cm. National Gallery, London. Photo Credit: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY.

the painting becomes—­rather like the Carpet of Memory discussed in chapter 116 CHAPTER TWO

1—­a “pseudo-­exemplification,” to borrow once again Haxthausen’s apt term.159 In the Vokaltuch, it seems, Klee invokes this tradition of depictions of Veronica’s sweat cloth in part as a model of consubstantiality between depiction and thing depicted, which serves Klee here as an alternative to dominant modernist models of painting’s material immanence. The work is, on the one hand, this piece of plaster-­clotted cloth painted with watercolor which presents its material

Figure 2.21  Oskar Kokoschka, Veronica with

the Sudarium (Veronika mit dem Schweisstuch), 1909. Oil on canvas, 120.6 × 80.7 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest. © 2014 Fondation Oskar Kokoschka / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ProLitteris, Zürich.

makeup as something to relish and makes no reference to even the shallowest illusionistic space; the title, however, asserts that this very piece of cloth is this magical object, the Vokaltuch of the singer Rosa Silber. Other references to Veronica’s sweat cloth are to be found in early twentieth-­ century art in the German-­speaking lands, often making self-­conscious reference to the treatment of the subject in Germany in the late Middle Ages; the Austrian painter Oskar Kokoschka’s Veronica with the Sudarium (1909), for instance, seems to invoke the legend as a model of portraiture as direct, unmediated expression (fig. 2.21). None, however, are so deeply counterintuitive as Klee’s invocation of the Schweisstuch in his Vokaltuch: sweat and blood may indeed mark a piece of cloth, but sound does not. This conceit, however, allows Klee to pose the question of the relation of the arbitrary written sign and the sensuous qualities of the voice, and of the mode of reading that would allow the movement of the former to the latter through the involvement of Phantasie. Perhaps what allowed this question to be posed was precisely the attack in the 1920s on the conception of reading as an at least notionally auditory experience (which Klinger, on the other hand, takes as self-­evident), when a number of important figures in the typographical avant-­garde insisted on reading as a purely

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optical experience: “On the printed page words are seen, not heard,” insisted El Lissitzky in Kurt Schwitters’s journal Merz the year after Klee made the Vokaltuch.160 It is fitting that Klee suggests that his watercolor may be understood as something along the lines of a relic of this mode of reading letters as voice and, more broadly, of reading as media translation, and of the conception of Phantasiekunst that depends on such reading. This Vokaltuch is a vivid representation of art as media translation, of Phantasiekunst—­as, in a sense, the citations above which interpret it as a translation of musical effects attest—­but it is, so to speak, a representation of it in the past tense, as something no longer present. The question of Klee’s relation to “fantastic art” changes if we consider the latter in more historically specific terms, if we inquire about the relation of his work to the particular apparatus of Phantasie in good bourgeois homes throughout the German-­speaking lands around the turn of the century: the kinds of pictures understood to stimulate, as Avenarius puts it—­or, as I would suggest, produce—­Phantasie in their viewers. As I suggest through this example, much of Klee’s work of the late 1910s and early 1920s can be understood neither as a continuation of the Phantasiekunst of his early artistic training, nor as its rejection and overcoming; his ambivalence regarding Meier-­Graefe’s and Scheffler’s critical attacks on Phantasiekunst, discussed in chapter 1, ruled out both continuation and rejection. Instead, Klee invented ways to reflect on Phantasiekunst and on the relations between text and image on which Phantasiekunst depends. This chapter has argued that Klee’s revaluation of the graphic works through the terms in which art theory and criticism understood graphic art, through the ways in which it was connected to writing, and through the kind of speculation it was seen as provoking in viewers. To close this chapter, I want to show how this line of argument provides a new way of interpreting three of the most frequently noted characteristics of Klee’s art, each especially prominent in the later 1910s and early 1920s: its “hieroglyphic” signs, its use of children’s drawing as a model, and the way in which many of Klee’s pictures present themselves as something like fragments of illustrated fairy tales. I argue that each of these features is not only closely connected to Klee’s graphic abstraction, sharing in its 118 CHAPTER TWO

logic, but also that each involves taking up and playing with the negative term of an art-­theoretical opposition. Small “hieroglyphic” signs begin to crop up in Klee’s watercolors in 1915, such as the schematic heavenly bodies along the upper edge of Der Niesen (1915, 250; fig. 2.22).161 Such crescents, eyes, hearts, six-­pointed stars, birds, simple triangles, circles, crosses, and so on attain great prominence in his Blätter of

Figure 2.22  Paul Klee, Der Niesen, 1915, 250. Watercolor and pencil on paper on cardboard, 17.7 × 26.0 cm.

Hermann und Margrit Rupf-­Stiftung, Kunstmuseum Bern. © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

1917–­18. These little “hieroglyphs,” on account of their very simplified, schematic mereness, have given Klee’s commentators great trouble. Figures such as the crescents in J.D. (1917, 103; fig. 1.2) seem to exist on the same level as the letters with which they are interspersed, to mean as conventionally—­such repeatable signs seem to mock the viewer’s expectations not only of likeness but of visual richness and complexity. Making the problem even more acute, many of these hieroglyphs—­such as the cross or the six-­pointed star—­seem to gesture toward a profundity that seems utterly irreconcilable with the way Klee uses them. The crescents seem both as arbitrary as the letters J and D and as nonsensical: there is a period after the D, which not only makes the larger circular form in the watercolor read as a larger period as well as a counterpart to the crescent (a sun, say, or a full moon), but also makes the letter read as an abbreviation, like the E of Landscape with Gallows, emphasizing that we do not know what the

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letter “stands for.” The hieroglyphs seem similarly cryptic. Commentators tend to insist either that these little hieroglyphs do encode profound meanings—­or that they fraudulently do not, or they prefer to skirt the issue. Thus Werckmeister sees them as cynical lures for the art public’s projective fantasies of deep meaning, in line with his broader account of Klee’s work of the later war years; Jim M. Jordan, on the other hand, but again in line with his own account of Klee’s “Expressionist period,” views Klee as deploying signs laden with religious and occult associations (such as the six-­pointed star or the crescent) so as to create pictures that are indeed iconographically legible as bearing mystical significance, open-­ended as he stresses these images are.162 I would like to attempt a different approach; I believe that they may be understood better as a kind of experimental materialization of an art-­theoretical concept, taken to an extreme and then put into playful practice. Baudelaire’s witty unfinished essay “L’Art philosophique” (1859), which takes Alfred Rethel’s cycle of wood engravings, Another Dance of Death (1849), and Paul Chenavard’s mural program for the Panthéon, exhibited at the Universal Exposition of 1855, as its prime examples, diagnoses its subject as “a reaction against the school of l’art pour l’art.” The art of Chenavard and “the German school” (besides Rethel, Baudelaire mentions Overbeck, Cornelius, and Kaulbach)163 is a didactic plastic art that, with its “claim to replace the book,” lies far outside the modern conception of pure art, writes Baudelaire. He calls it a “rehabilitation of hieroglyphic art.” Indeed, he continues, if its practitioners only had the courage to draw the logical conclusions from their own aesthetic principles, they would “return to all the innumerable and barbaric conventions of hieratic art.” A rigorously self-­consistent “philosophical art” would become a primitive, infantile hieroglyphic writing: Thus philosophical art is a return to the imagery necessary to the childhood of peoples, and if it were rigorously faithful to itself, it would force itself to juxtapose as many successive images as are contained in whatever sentence it wanted to express. Still, we are entitled to doubt whether the hieroglyphic sentence would be 120 CHAPTER TWO

clearer than the typographic sentence. . . . The more art wants to be philosophically clear, the more it degrades itself and reverts to the condition of a childish hieroglyph.164

In a sense, Klee’s Blätter try out Baudelaire’s hypothetical description of what would happen if this philosophical “monstrosity” of aesthetic error were to be

“rigorously faithful to itself,” this extravagant notion of an art becoming a matter of sentences of childish hieroglyphs—­and doing so for the sake of rigorous self-­consistency. Drawing on “primitive art,” children’s drawings, and the figure of the hieroglyph, with its long wake of theories and fantasies leading back through the German Romantics to the Renaissance, Klee makes pictures that seem to approach the condition of such a hieroglyphic writing, even in their successiveness.165 In the drawing Mot:

(1915, 215; fig. 2.23), for

instance, he plays with the conceit of a picture that would enact Baudelaire’s scenario on the level of the word rather than the sentence. What if, asks Klee, one treated the linear signs that make up the picture as “abstract things such

Figure 2.23  Paul Klee, Mot:

,

1915, 215. Pen on paper, verso pen, on cardboard, 19.2 × 13.5 cm. Inv.#WV-­ No. 1550. Sprengel Museum, Hannover. Photo Credit: bpk, Berlin / Sprengel Museum, Hannover / Art Resource, NY. © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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Figure 2.24  Paul Klee, Hieroglyph with the Parasol

(Hieroglyph mit dem Sonnenschirm), 1917, 96. Pencil on paper on cardboard, 19.4 × 14 cm. Private collection, Switzerland. © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Figure 2.25  Paul Klee, Hieroglyph with Fish and

Bird (Hieroglyph mit Fisch und Vogel), 1917, 142. Pencil on paper on cardboard, 14/14.6 × 21.5 cm. The Harry B. and Bessie K. Braude Memorial Collection. © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Figure 2.26  Paul Chenavard, La Palingénésie

sociale (esquisse), exhibited in 1855. Oil on canvas, 303 × 380 cm. Musée des Beaux-­Arts de Lyon, envoi de l’Etat, en 1875, Inv. X921-­a. Photo credit: © Lyon MBA / Photo Alain Basset.

as  . . . letters”?166 He plays with the idea that the elements of the picture, strung out successively, would make up a word—­the title, a scratchy nonsense word of mock hieroglyphics. In 1917 and 1918, this kind of conceit pervades Klee’s Blätter, which he often explicitly figures as “hieroglyphs” in his titles, such as the Hieroglyph with the Parasol (1917, 96; fig. 2.24), the Hieroglyph with Fish and Bird (1917, 142; fig. 2.25), or the Landscape Hieroglyph with Emphasis on Sky-­Blue (1917, 104; fig. 1.3). Critics often used the term as well; Wilhelm Hausenstein, for instance, commenting on Klee’s essay on graphic art, writes that Klee’s “means” becomes “hieroglyph, rune, also stenograph—­condensed type, abbreviation.”167 In Baudelaire’s account (which Klee likely read in 1907),168 it is the eagerness of the artists he discusses to deliver their didactic themes of history and morality

Figure 2.27  François Armbruster, Philosophie de l’Histoire, par Paul Chenavard, ca. 1880–­1900. Société

anonyme de l’imprimerie A. Rey. Archives municipales de Lyon, 30 II 584. Photo credit: Gilles Bernasconi / Archives municipales de Lyon.

that leads them to “the error of philosophical art.” Such themes have no interest for Klee in the late 1910s—­rather than elaborate but, ultimately, eminently decipherable subjects such as Chenavard’s representation of the past, present, and future of religion in his Social Palingenesis or Philosophy of History (figs. 2.26, 2.27), Klee’s “philosophical art” is indecipherable (Hausenstein describes it as glossolalia, a “babble in tongues as on Pentecost in the Bible, when each, without knowing the other’s language, nevertheless spoke the other’s language”).169 For Klee is interested above all in the aesthetic effects of this kind of emblematic art. 124 CHAPTER TWO

One could call it l’art philosophique pour l’art philosophique. Klee’s early etching cycle of Inventions, in contrast, are l’art philosophique tout court—­emblematic in their organization, with motto-­like titles and, in some cases, subscriptio-­like explanations, they are interpretable moral allegories (criticisms of bourgeois sexual mores, the absurdity of human ambitions, and so forth).170 On one etching of 1904, he even altered his original inscription—­

“Pessimistic Symbolism of the Mountain” (Invention 11, fig. 2.28)—­crossing out “Symbolism” and writing “Allegory”; he signed the Blatt, as was his habit at the time, with a rebus-­like signature of a little cloverleaf (Kleeblatt) and his initials. But in the later Blätter, however, Klee appears to embrace Baudelaire’s assertion that allegorical interpretation can never finally be controlled by the artist. “In the translation of works of philosophical art, meticulous attention to detail is required,” Baudelaire writes, for “everything is allegory, allusion, hieroglyphs, rebus.”171 Yet even such minute attention cannot guarantee the interpreter’s textualizing “translation” of such a work; he finds Jules Michelet’s interpretation of Dürer’s Melencolia engraving, for instance, “dubious.” “Even to the mind of a philosophical artist, the accessory objects present themselves not with a literal and precise character but with a poetic, vague, and indistinct character, and often it is the translator who invents intentions,” Baudelaire concludes.172 In Klee’s Blätter of the late 1910s, what seems to interest Klee above all is the picture’s appearance as “allegory, allusion, hieroglyphs, rebus,” and the kind of successive, reading-­like viewing, detail by detail, that such a picture solicits from its viewer. He is not interested in fixing the interpretation, as he was in the Inventions, but instead offers the picture as an occasion for the “translator’s” inventions. The programmatic July 1917 diary entry, discussed in chapter 1, in which Klee presents himself as at first not intending any of what “philosophy” saw in his pictures—­“at the beginning, I was astonished at all that they saw”—­makes this particularly clear.173 As different from the Inventions as Klee’s later Blätter look, they are not only a rejection but also a radicalization of the allegorical etchings.174 I want to turn now from the allegorical interpretation that “hieroglyphic” artworks provoke (a key aspect of what we might call their “describability,” to return to the terms of the discussion of Benjamin’s writings) to Baudelaire’s characterization of the hieroglyph as childish. Now, Klee’s interest in children’s art—­as in, for instance, his 1912 declaration that the “primal beginnings [Uranfänge] of art” should be sought in the nursery as well as the ethnographic museum—­is well established, and his art has long been compared to that of children.175 As Franciscono writes, Klee’s interest must be placed in the broader context of the celebration of the naïveté of children’s art originating in nineteenth-­century Romanticism (as in the work of the Nazarenes and Runge), and usually linked to interest in other forms of “primitive” art. But what Klee saw in children’s art shifted over his career.176 The question of how Klee’s art relates to that of children comes up very early in his reception. Take, for instance, the comments of Hans Bloesch (Klee’s child-

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Figure 2.28  Paul Klee, Pessimistic

Symbolism of the Mountain (Pessimistische Symbolik des Gebirges) (Inv. 11), 1904. Etching, 14.6 × 6.9 cm. Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern. © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

hood friend and one of the coeditors of the Bug) in “A Modern Graphic Artist,” the very first essay published on Klee’s work. First, Bloesch imagines how 126 CHAPTER TWO

uncomprehending viewers might insult Klee’s work by comparing it to that of children, but then turns the insult around: “That is how a child who’s never looked thoroughly at a picture book draws.” Here, I believe, we find the central point of the new art, which seeks a way in Klee. He and painters striving towards similar aims  . . . see in the still uninflu-

enced art of children and of primitive peoples a guide for their own creative work.177

Kandinsky, in his essay “On the Question of Form” (1912), elaborates a related vision of the value of children’s drawing as a “guide” for the artist. He speaks of the child as seeing in a manner untainted by practical instrumentality: the “inner sound of the object” expresses itself in every children’s drawing, because the child “looks at each thing with unaccustomed eyes and still possesses the unclouded ability to take in the thing as such.”178 It is indeed this vision of children’s drawings as products of an innocent and direct perception of things, uncorrupted by the traditions of the art of the museums, that appealed to Klee at the time of his first contacts with Marc and Kandinsky, as we can see in his review of the first Blaue Reiter exhibition. In 1911–­12, the Blaue Reiter group’s interest in children’s art (which Kandinsky and Gabriele Münter collected) renewed Klee’s own. But, very soon afterward, the importance of this art for Klee shifted. It appears that later in 1912, he seized upon a very different theory of children’s art in the monumental work The Development of Drawing Talent (1905) by the superintendent of Munich’s schools, Georg Kerschensteiner, and began to make use of it in his work, first in his drawings and later, beginning in around 1915, in his watercolors.179 Kerschensteiner had little patience with those who idealize the drawings of young children as particularly spontaneous or expressive or fresh. His book—­ based on his study of a collection of thousands of Munich schoolchildren’s drawings made with as little pedagogical interference as possible—­argues that the drawing of the “uninfluenced” child progresses naturally from the primitive “stage of the schema” to a mixed, intermediate “stage of incipient feeling for line and form” and finally that of full spatial representation, “representation according to appearance [erscheinungsmäßigen Darstellung].”180 And the initial schematic stage—­far from representing either spontaneous, inborn creativity or innocent, direct vision—­is the “writing down [Niederschrift] of conceptual characteristics,” the repetition of quite arbitrary “symbols” (17). Kerschensteiner goes out of his way to deny, against earlier researchers in the field, that schematic drawing is expressive: “The schemata not infrequently convey what appears to be the expression of a psychological mood. . . . [The English psychologist James] Sully believed he recognized in this some intention on the drawing child’s part. The material in front of me has convinced me that this is not the case  . ..  whether the child is representing a funeral procession or a snowball fight, the schema for the human figure is exactly the same” (ibid.).181 Schematic

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drawing is conceptual rather than visual—­“only a writing down of what the child knows of an object” (16)—­and reflects the child’s lack of understanding of things and particularly of their interrelation, the child’s underdeveloped perceptual faculties. Kerschensteiner blames contemporary German culture for retarding children’s development beyond the schematic phase by overemphasizing verbal competence at the expense of the child’s faculties of perception and mental representation (Vorstellung): At first language hurries on far ahead of the development of mental representation. The child speaks words long before he has grasped the meaning of them, and he knows the name of an object, of which he is conscious of perhaps only one single perception. The pride of parents in teaching their children to speak early and the efforts of schools to teach them to read and write early do the rest, so that language hurries on still farther ahead of experience. . . . For the educated person of the present day has perhaps learned to think, but seldom to see. Doubtless the conscious part of most of the child’s mental representations consists only of isolated characteristics of the object. . . . Connected with this too is the fact that children’s drawing is nothing more than a writing down of the characteristics of an object’s component parts; the child describes the object, but does not represent it. (476)182

Kerschensteiner particularly blames “so-­called instruction in perception [Anschauungsunterricht]” for this state of affairs. Far from developing the child’s powers of perception, he writes, such instruction in fact keeps the child from moving beyond description to representation: as it “is itself often nothing more than a description of the object, usually using an artistically rather dubious picture, which almost always only enumerates the parts of the thing without making clear how they connect,” it “well-­nigh keeps the child at this low point” (477).183 Thus the child’s schematic drawing merely transcribes the few characteristics it knows of the thing it may well be able to name, but has as yet barely perceived, by means of some arbitrarily chosen figure. For instance, “for representing people, the oval representation of the trunk does predominate, but 128 CHAPTER TWO

[the child] expresses the trunk almost as frequently by means of other bounded figures and finds the strangest imaginative forms, such as squares, rectangles, triangles, biscuit-­shaped, bottle-­like, bell-­like, heart-­shaped, vase-­shaped figures and so on” (16).184 As Werckmeister has argued, “After having gone through his own art education as a child and youth, Klee could never regard direct translation of seeing

into drawing as spontaneous. He must have sensed that the ‘development’ which Kerschensteiner declared to be a natural one, was in fact an indoctrination by discredited artistic ideals.”185 Indeed, Klee takes up in his art this schematic drawing as described by Kerschensteiner—­his “hieroglyphs” are “childish” schemata.186 Let us look at two of Klee’s drawings that thematize this quite explicitly. One of his first drawings to incorporate a “hieroglyph,” The Child and Its Star (1912, 141), might be understood to play on Kerschensteiner’s understanding of the schema as childish (as well as Baudelaire’s characterization of the hieroglyph as the same): this very rough, crude drawing presents the schematic six-­pointed star toward which the slightly less schematically rendered child gestures as the child’s own scrawled creation, as Klee’s title emphasizes. Or take the pen drawing that Klee titled, tellingly, Camel (and Camel-­Schema) (1920, 56; fig. 2.29), which presents two camels side by side. The “Camel-­Schema” at the usual scale of and in the style of his “hieroglyphs,” and indeed referring back to one of the first watercolors in which Klee used a “schema,” (1915, 39; fig. 2.30) is little more than a four-­legged triangle. The form of this little “schema” suggests that Klee may well have been alluding to the Kantian origins of Kerschensteiner’s use of the term schema, for when Kant introduces schemata to interpose between the realm of concepts and that of sensuous phenomena, two of the examples he elaborates are that of an empirical concept, such as that of a dog, “in accordance with which my imagination can specify the shape of a four-­footed animal in general, without being restricted to any single particular shape that experience offers me,”187 and that of a pure sensuous concept, such as that of a triangle. The “Camel” is a larger and most amusingly elaborated dromedary, with eyes, muzzle, and humps. Part of this drawing’s wit lies in its suggestion that the “Camel” is really no less schematic than the “Camel-­Schema”—­it is only a more complex schema, enumerating more of the animal’s parts (one might say more generally that Klee’s art is marked by a skepticism about whether one ever really moves beyond this infantile stage of schematism, whether what might appear to be “representation” may not prove to be only a more elaborate schema). Klee suggests this in part by playing on Kerschensteiner’s repeated description of the schematic stage as “writing down [Niederschreiben]”; the larger camel’s schematic anatomy relates to the two horizontal lines stretching across the paper as a rather florid capital letter relates to the lines of a lined sheet of paper. Klee is not alone in revaluing the “schema” around this moment. Although Kahnweiler’s writings on cubism are not, so far as I can tell, in dialogue with

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Figure 2.29  Paul Klee, Camel (and Camel-­Schema)

(Kamel [und Kamel-­Schema]), 1920, 56. Pen on paper on cardboard, 20.5 × 23 cm. Private collection, Germany. © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Figure 2.30  Paul Klee, , 1915,

39. Watercolor on paper on cardboard, 20.0 × 23.0 cm. Kunstmuseum Bern. © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Kerschensteiner’s analysis of children’s drawings, it is nevertheless illuminating to see how he uses the concept of the “schema” to describe what it was that Picasso learned from the Grebo mask, which the dealer-­theorist describes as follows in his 1920 book The Rise of Cubism: A completely flat plane forms the lower part of the face. . . . Whereas the nose now comes forward simply as a narrow board, two cylinders projecting out about eight centimeters form the two eyes, a somewhat shorter hexahedron the mouth. . . . The form is still closed here, but it is not the “real” form, but instead a taut form-­schema of primal plastic power.188

At the end of “Kahnweiler’s Lesson,” his groundbreaking analysis of the structuralist activity of cubism through Kahnweiler’s theorization of the relation between Picasso’s cardboard-­and-­string Guitar (1912; fig. 2.31) and the Grebo mask in Picasso’s collection (fig. 2.32), Yve-­Alain Bois reflects on Kahnweiler’s limits. Bois notes that Kahnweiler’s understanding of the arbitrariness of the sign stops at the conventionalist understanding of the arbitrariness of the connection between sign and referent; he does not take Saussure’s crucial step, does not move on to the structuralist understanding of the arbitrariness of the connection between signifier and signified.189 “I have mentioned,” Bois writes, Kahnweiler’s idea, expressed unflaggingly in his texts, that cubism is a writing (implying, thus, a reading). Unfortunately, he extended this metaphor to all of painting (defined as “formative writing”), and in terms of an obsolete linguistic conception. Not only did he commit a substantial error in his estimation of nonalphabetic writing and of the possibility of a pure pictogram, a concept now abandoned by historians of writing, but again, as corollary, he stopped at an Adamic conception of language, in spite of his vivid understanding of the sign’s differential nature.190

One might speculate—­given Klee’s reformulation of his drawing in 1912 as a kind of “schematic” writing-­like activity (implying a reading), his conventionalist play with the arbitrariness of the connection between sign and referent, and his great interest in the idea of the pictogram—­that perhaps he drew some of the same conclusions as Kahnweiler from the cubist work that he saw that year “in Kahnweiler’s shop (Derain, Vlaminck, Picasso)” and elsewhere.191 Or, then again, perhaps not—­as Hausenstein writes regarding the similarities between Picasso’s work and Klee’s, “Here are, at the most, confirmations, elective

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Figure 2.31  Pablo Picasso, Maquette for Guitar (variation), Paris, October 1912. Cardboard, string, and wire

(restored), 65.1 × 33 × 19 cm. Gift of the artist. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY. © 2014 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Figure 2.32  Grebo mask, from Ivory Coast or Liberia. Wood, paint, vegetable fibers. MP 1983.7, Musée

Picasso, Paris. Photo: Beatrice Hatala. © RMN-­Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY.

affinities; not origins.”192 One might in any case say that Kahnweiler’s interpretation of cubism—­including the ways in which it is not structuralist—­can help us to see how Klee played with what one might call the scriptural character of his understanding of graphic art. 132 CHAPTER TWO

But there is another aspect of how Klee relates his art to that of children that needs to be brought out here, besides his revaluing of the schematic quality of the drawings of young children as described by Kerschensteiner. We can begin by examining how Klee speaks of his own early childhood drawing in his December 1919 autobiographical text for Hausenstein, how Klee emphasizes how his drawing related to illustration:

Like many Biedermeier women from good families, my maternal grandmother drew, painted, and knitted flowers and other things of which one might well be fond. Very early she awoke in me pleasure in drawing and coloring. My first childhood drawings are illustrations of fantastic ideas and stories. A model in nature was not considered. Flowers, animals, partly clothed, children, churches, watering cans, horses, carts, sleighs, garden pavilions appeared. French illustrated broadsheets with popular verselets served as a model for free copying. I still remember Azor et mimi [sic] and Cadet Roussel very fondly.193

The way that Klee writes to Hausenstein in 1919 of his childhood pleasure in “drawing and coloring” resonates strongly with his recent Blätter and, as we shall see, with his “Graphic Art” essay published the next year. He describes his own childhood drawings in such a way as to make it clear how he meant his recent work to be seen as picking up certain aspects of his own infantile activity; not only would Hausenstein have little trouble connecting many of the motifs that Klee writes he favored in his childhood with the artist’s recent work, but also many of Klee’s Blätter of the late 1910s might be said to have been “drawn and colored” (see, for instance, Concentrated Novel [1916, 74; fig. 2.19]) rather than painted. This was hardly the first time Klee had made such a connection; in 1911, he had literally incorporated a group of drawings he had done between the ages of four and eleven into his oeuvre, signing, dating, titling, and numbering them, mounting them on board, and entering them into his oeuvre-­ catalogue.194 Nor was it the last—­a few years after he wrote this paragraph, a photograph of his studio at the Weimar Bauhaus (fig. 2.33) shows, hanging on the wall, one of these mid-­nineteenth-­century Épinal broadsheets of captioned pictures illustrating the doings of Azor the dog and Mimi the cat (fig. 2.34).195 One might see Klee’s practice of finishing his Blätter with an inscribed mount not only as relating to the interplay of image and text so prominent in the history of Western printmaking in general, but also as carrying over into art the role of the caption in illustrations, often a sentence from the narrative illustrated. As is well known, Klee engaged in a number of book illustration projects proper in the 1910s, from the 1911–­12 illustrations for Voltaire’s Candide, to the lithographic drawings of 1912 likely conceived as illustrations for Goethe’s Faust, to the pictures Klee made in response to the critic Däubler’s request for illustrations for Däubler’s own poem Mit silberner Sichel, to the illustrations commissioned for Curt Corrinth’s novel Potsdamer Platz (1919).196 But it is not only, or even chiefly, in these projects that we find Klee creating a connection between

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Figure 2.33  Paul Klee in his studio at the Weimar Bauhaus, 1924, possibly photographed by Felix Klee. 6.4 ×

8.2 cm. Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, Schenkung Familie Klee. © Klee-­Nachlassverwaltung, Bern.

inscription and image that recalls that of illustration.197 In fact, in the vast majority of Klee’s Blätter of the late 1910s—­and there are parallels here with what I argued earlier regarding what Klee’s art does with “l’art philosophique”—­no particular narrative is illustrated; rather, what is important for Klee appears to be the structure of such illustrations, and the impression that the title, nonsen134 CHAPTER TWO

sical as it might appear, might seem so because it is a fragment of a story. If Klee writes for Hausenstein a sort of origin story for his art in this reminiscence of childhood drawing and coloring after mid-­nineteenth-­century illustrated broadsheets, inspired by a grandmother whose own artistic activities he describes as typical of “Biedermeier women,” this seems in part to echo and displace elements of a discussion of the situation of modern art in the Blaue

Figure 2.34  Mimi et Azor. Épinal broadsheet, 29 ×

18.6 cm. Private collection, Switzerland.

Reiter almanac, which had been published by Kandinsky and Marc in 1912 (not long after Klee joined the group—­he had one small ink drawing of 1910 included in the almanac) and went into a second edition in 1914. The discussion in question is Marc’s short text “Two Pictures,” in which Marc compares a page from a Biedermeier children’s picture book with Kandinsky’s painting Lyrisches (1911), which are laid out on facing pages of the almanac (fig. 2.35).198 The text as a whole is a justification of the principle underlying the almanac’s heterogeneous mixture of reproductions of works of artists associated with the Blaue Reiter (such as Kandinsky, Marc, Klee, and Arp), admired contemporaries (such as Picasso, Matisse, and Henri Rousseau), Bavarian and Russian “folk art,” children’s drawings, fifteenth-­and sixteenth-­century German woodcuts and book illustra-

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tions, masks and sculptures from the collection of the ethnographic museum in Munich, and still more sundry items. The logic, as Marc explains, is this: We  . . . do not fear the trial by fire of putting our works, which point to the future and are still unproven, next to works of older, long proven cultures. We believe that nothing can illustrate our ideas better than such comparisons. The genuine persists next to the genuine, however different its expression may be.199

From which principle follows the comparison of the “two pictures” that is the main substance of the article, the book illustration and the Kandinsky: To the right a popular illustration from Grimm’s fairy tales from the year 1832, to the left a 1910 picture by Kandinsky. The first is genuine and entirely inward like a folk song and was understood by its time with the most perfect naturalness and love, for in 1832 every apprentice tradesman and every prince still possessed the same artistic feeling out of which the little picture was created. (36–­37)200

The argument that Marc wants to make is that although both pictures possess the same kind of inner authenticity, the viewer does not experience the Kandinsky with the same “self-­evidence” as the “fairy-­tale picture [Märchenbild]” because in 1912, the nation lacks a style, a common “artistic feeling” shared by all social classes, such as existed, claims Marc, in the Biedermeier era (37).201 In the absence, writes Marc, of such a collective style—­a consequence of the general character of the present as an age of spiritual transition—­a “chasm between genuine art production and the public” is inevitable (ibid.). The alienation of the artist from the public that became the unavoidable condition of “serious art” beginning in the mid-­nineteenth century entails that all serious artworks are “the works of individuals” and appear “ghostly.” When the transition is over and the new era has begun, they will appear “natural,” like the Märchenbild (35–­36).202 Although Kandinsky did go along with it in the end, he was less than thrilled 136 CHAPTER TWO

by Marc’s juxtaposition, putting his reservations as follows in a letter to Marc: “It’s a good idea because it would look nice. Not good, since it would spray a fairy-­tale perfume on my pictures in general.”203 In Kandinsky’s On the Spiritual in Art, published the year before the almanac, we can read quite clearly the reasons why he would find this “fairy-­tale perfume” objectionable, for in his book, he speaks of the necessity of a “fight against fairy-­tale atmosphere.”204 In a section

Figure 2.35  Franz Marc’s essay “Two Pictures,” in Der Blaue Reiter, ed. Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc,

2nd ed. (Munich: Piper, 1914). Courtesy Marquand Library of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University. Photo credit: John Blazejewski / Princeton University.

on the effect of the interactions between a “warm red tone” and a variety of “natural forms” (a sky, a garment, a tree, and so on) to which this color might be applied, Kandinsky warns that a red horse in a picture might well prevent the viewer from experiencing the spiritual effects of color: “Finally, a red horse is a very different case. The sound of these words already transports us into another atmosphere.” Such “‘unnatural’ objects,” writes Kandinsky, 137

can easily take on a literary tone by making the composition work as a fairy tale. This last result transports the viewer into an atmosphere which he is happy to let prevail, since it is like a fairy tale, and where he then 1. looks for the story, 2. remains insensitive or little sensitive to the pure effect of color. In any case, the direct, pure inner effect of color is no longer possible in this case:

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the external easily outweighs the inward. . . . Therefore a form must be found, that firstly excludes any fairy-­tale effect and secondly in no way impedes the pure effect of color. (119–­22)205

Thus the painter must avoid anything that might cause an “external and externally associated narrative effect” (122–­23).206 The new painting of inner feeling must, according to Kandinsky, fend off the fairy tale as well as decoration (47). Klee, however, sees what Kandinsky terms the “unartistic effect” of the fairy tale (120) as a given of graphic art. To return once again to one of the crucial passages of the “Graphic Art” essay, The essence of graphic art easily and rightly tempts to abstraction. The shadowy and fairy-­tale-­like quality [Märchenhaftigkeit] of the imaginary character is given and expresses itself with great precision at the same time. The purer the graphic work, that is, the more weight is laid upon the form-­elements underlying the graphic representation, the more the armature for the realistic representation of visible things is lacking.207

This passage appears to be Klee’s apologia for the fairy-­tale-­like quality of much of his work of the previous years. For in his Blätter of the later war years, he could indeed be said to mine this Märchenhaftigkeit through combinations of titles and pictures that present “incomplete” fairy stories, fragmentary hints of only suggested narratives that may work on the viewer with an irresistibility that Kandinsky compares to the “unartistic” compellingness of film.208 But we must take heed of the very peculiar way in which Klee justifies this aspect of his work. The fairy-­tale-­likeness of the imaginary character of graphic art is, Klee asserts, given—­implying that regardless of the artist’s intentions, the graphic work is not so much seen as imagined, and thus has a fairy-­tale-­like quality. For Klee, it seems, there is continuity between the kinds of seeing-­as that a work of graphic art asks of its beholder by virtue of its black-­and-­white “shadowy quality” (the effect of color on the soul of the viewer with which Kandinsky was concerned is made irrelevant), the metaphoric interpretations of 138 CHAPTER TWO

individual “form-­elements of graphic art,” and the spinning of a Märchen out of those elements. Klee seeks to demonstrate this continuity in the next section of the essay, the “little trip into the land of better understanding” discussed in chapter 1, in which a “wave motion” is a “river” and a “zigzag line” a “flash of lightning on the horizon.” (Here Klee seems to parallel Klinger’s claim that the features of Griffelkunst that demand the involvement of the viewer’s Phantasie

make literary or speculative viewing appropriate for a graphic Blatt—­but crucially, Klee locates this viewing on the level of the form-­element as well as that of the Blatt as a whole.) And this givenness of the shadowy and fairy-­tale-­like imaginary character appears to be the reason Klee gives for what he sees as the justifiable tendency toward “abstraction” inhering in the essence of graphic art. It appears that for him, this “fairy-­tale-­like quality,” far from being the exterior, “non-­artistic” element that it is in painting according to Kandinsky, must be acknowledged and explored by graphic Blätter. This is a strange justification. We have already looked at Hausenstein’s comments on Klee’s passage on the “little trip”: “This is what is called cultivation of pure form, even absolutism of the means. . . . The absoluteness of the means visibly turns into the expression of a representational—­or in any case of a meaning.”209 Less peculiar justifications were certainly readily available. For instance, Paul Westheim, editor of Das Kunstblatt, defended Klee in 1920 in the Frankfurter Zeitung against those who saw his art as all too neoromantic as follows: “I’d just like to ask the people who are against Romanticism, who want to forbid the artist spirit and fantasy and imagination, this one question: What do you have against the fairy tale? . . . Why then shouldn’t the painter be a Romantic, a dreamer and fabulator?”210 But these are not the terms of Klee’s justification; instead, he appears to take a certain way of viewing a picture that was defined as fastening on what is exterior to the picture, on the “unartistic” and “external,” as Kandinsky says (or, in Klinger’s words, “speculations lying beyond the picture itself ”), and claiming that this mode of viewing is, as it were, unavoidable for, indeed intrinsic to, pure works of graphic art. More broadly, positioning his art as graphic (even when it is not what we would ordinarily include in that category) allows Klee to mine just this possibility of turning art’s outsides in, moving what other artists and critics saw as external to the plastic arts into the core of his own work.

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3

A Refuge for Script

Klee, in conceiving of his art as graphic, found a form that allowed him to hold in suspension the contradictions thrown up by his ambivalence toward an entire series of articulations of modernism—­in part by inviting the viewer of his work to speculate, a way of engaging with pictures that was, as we have seen, controversial. In this chapter, I will explore another aspect of the kind of viewing that Klee’s work was understood to solicit: its privateness. That his art was seen in this way is not happenstance: it in fact responds in important ways to the aims and structure of his art, to crucial differences between his work and that of his contemporaries. In criticism of Klee’s art in the 1910s and early 1920s, this issue of privateness looms large, and it is initially through the contemporary criticism that we will find our way toward that which provoked it. The latter part of the chapter addresses Klee’s attempts to make his pictures occasions for a particular kind of private experience, analogous to a certain mode of reading, at a time when this mode was under attack in avant-­garde circles including some of his Bauhaus colleagues, by way of an examination of Klee’s grid paintings of the 1920s—­works that, although they appear to be among the least graphic, least linear, and least “literary” he ever made, in fact

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continue, in a new form, his concerns as I have developed them in chapters 1 and 2. No contemporary critic thought harder about the way Klee’s art seems to address itself to the beholder as a private individual than Wilhelm Hausenstein; for no one else was it such a problem, rather than something to simply reject, accept, or disregard. But his thinking is comprehensible only within the larger context of German avant-­garde understandings of how artworks address their viewers. In the 1910s and 1920s, conservative critics demanded art that was generally comprehensible under current conditions; many of Klee’s detractors claimed that his art did not possess the kind of public meaningfulness required of art, that these colorful objects might at times be pleasurable to look at, but amounted to an infantile gibberish. Take, for instance, a scathing review of Klee’s work published in a Düsseldorf newspaper in 1920, which likened his art to a willfully unintelligible pig Latin hardly suitable for public exhibition: “It would be as well if the happy ‘private collectors’ of these gimcracks felt the need to keep [them] to themselves.”1 Many in the expressionist avant-­gardes, on the other hand, demanded art that would point the way to a future collective and a future comprehensibility. For instance, in “Two Pictures,” published in the Blaue Reiter almanac and discussed in chapter 2, Marc compares Kandinsky’s painting with the Biedermeier fairy-­tale picture to prophesize the coming of a new epoch, in which the Kandinsky would no longer appear “ghostly” but instead would look “natural” to its viewers. He further suggests that in this new epoch, artist and people will again be united by a shared style, such as allowed an artist to create works in harmony with the artistic instinct of his people until the mid-­nineteenth century, Marc claims.2 In another article in the almanac, he states that the German avant-­garde groups aim to create “symbols ..  .  that belong on the altars of the coming spiritual religion and behind which the technical producer disappears.”3 As Haxthausen writes in an illuminating article on the concept of expressionism in Hausenstein’s criticism, for critics of the 1910s such as Hausenstein, Wilhelm Worringer, Adolf Behne, and Paul Fechter, expressionism functioned 142 CHAPTER THREE

as a “theory of the avant-­garde”: changes in art since the late nineteenth century were seen as signs of an impending epochal transformation of culture and society as a whole, a transformation that would overcome the “alienation between artist and society” through “an anonymous, collective art, integrated with the praxis of life.”4 While Marc spoke of that which would unite artist and people as religion, socialism played this role for Hausenstein, who wrote in 1911

that he could discern the anticipations of a new collectivity in the painting of Hans von Marées and Cézanne: “Today, at a time when socialism is only on the verge of emerging, in which nearly everything is still lacking in the economic substructure, already today the best sons of the bourgeoisie are anticipating a monumental painting style which appears to point to the public of the future.”5 Hausenstein registers no tension between these two versions of collectivity; indeed, in 1914 he asserts that, pace Marx, socialism will create the conditions for a new religiosity.6 But as I mentioned in chapter 1, by the end of 1919, after the fall of the revolutionary Bavarian Republic, after, in Hausenstein’s words, “the feudal-­clerical thug fired the shot that cut down” its first head of government, the socialist Kurt Eisner, and in the midst of a commercial boom in what seemed to him a disgustingly debased parody of art in the expressionist style, Hausenstein looked back with bitter disappointment on his earlier hope that the new painting anticipated a coming organic community that would be its proper public.7 His furious denunciations of expressionism in 1919 and 1920 provoked Paul Westheim, Gustav Hartlaub, and Kasimir Edschmid, among others, to protest that Hausenstein was allowing the low-­quality work of pseudoexpressionist “copyists, followers, and dependents” to discredit an essentially still vital movement.8 Hausenstein was unmoved by this defense; as far as he was concerned, it was clear that the expressionist prophecy was false, that there was no new collectivity on the horizon, and that projects toward a collective style were consequently illusory. For him, it was in this light that the importance of Klee’s art became clearest: The critics declare that what Klee paints and draws is incomprehensible. As if what was created in a time that, for instance, pursued organization in a counterorganic way, in the manner of the rulers between 1914 and 1918, could be generally comprehensible. . . . It is unimaginable that the people who were capable of building Gothic cathedrals ever cried for organization. They possessed collectivity. But we have entered the epoch of the anarchic and of disgregation. Truly, the subjective is not the highest. But it is in this suspicious moment the only thing. . . . It is unthinkable that art, if it is to have the significance and beauty of logical consistency, could in [this epoch] appear otherwise than as Klee’s drawing, the limits of which lie in the span of the excess of his subjectivity.9

As Haxthausen remarks, Saint-­Simon’s distinction between “organic” social epochs (rationally organized collectivities that give each member a specified

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role) and “critical” social epochs (characterized by disintegration, disorder, and the linked phenomena of a market economy and individualism), which Hausenstein borrowed in his 1913 study, The Naked Person in the Art of All Eras and Nations, an attempt to ground Worringer’s stylistic-­cum-­psychological categories sociologically, structured his understanding of expressionism’s failure as well.10 Hausenstein’s postwar denunciations of expressionism coincided with his sharpened interest in Klee, culminating in the publication of Kairuan, because both were in part motivated by his reading of the present as a “critical” epoch and his conviction that art aspiring toward the “organic” was at best misguided. Klee fascinated him in part because he saw Klee’s art, in its “subjectivity” and concomitant incomprehensibility, as the product of a modernity he considered an “exile of individuation”: thus Klee’s art had “the significance and beauty of logical consistency.”11 Hausenstein’s interpretation of the relation between Klee’s art and the present led to certain tensions in his personal relationship with Klee. When a group of students at the Stuttgart Art Academy, led by Oskar Schlemmer, agitated in 1919 for Klee to be hired to replace Adolf Hölzel, who had resigned his position there in March, Klee gave Hausenstein’s name to Schlemmer to pass on to the faculty as a reference. But Hausenstein—­in accordance with his interpretation of Klee’s work, at the expense of Klee’s desire to obtain the security of a teaching position—­wrote a short item in the paper arguing that Klee should not be hired by the academy: the idea of such an appointment would be “mistaken, for it entirely misses the truest value of Klee’s work, its absolute subjectivity and irrationality.”12 He saw Klee’s art as the most interesting and suggestive of its time precisely because there was so little in it that could be taught, he felt; it was “opposed to everything didactic.”13 When Hausenstein writes that “the people who were capable of building Gothic cathedrals” never “cried for organization,” in implicit but obvious contrast to the expressionists, he alludes to a figure frequently deployed in statements of aspiration to a new collective style, particularly the belief that the forging of such a style would be made possible above all by a new architecture that would serve as an all-­encompassing framework for the other arts, giving 144 CHAPTER THREE

them a place in a structure of public and religious meaning, anchoring them so that they would cease to circulate as placeless private commodities.14 This vision may be traced back to German Romantic conceptions of the history of art: at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Friedrich Schlegel saw painting as having become vain and insignificant when the adornment of places of worship ceased to be its chief task.15 The idea that a decline such as that described

by Schlegel might be reversed by a new integration of painting and architecture was often voiced in expressionist circles in the 1910s, and the cathedral was its chief metaphor.16 Bruno Taut, for instance, wrote in Der Sturm in 1914 that he viewed the frequent discussion of the “construction” of abstract paintings in architectural terms as pointing toward the integration of painting and architecture, as exemplified by the “Gothic cathedral,” which “encompassed all artists, who, suffused with wonderful unity, found in the architectural structure of the cathedral a resounding collective rhythm.”17 He ended his manifesto with a call for the building of a new “stupendous structure . . . in which everything—­ painting and structure—­all together will form great architecture and wherein architecture once again merges with the other arts,” featuring, perhaps, “the light compositions of Delaunay in large glass windows” and paintings by Marc and Kandinsky.18 Marc’s own articulation, cited above, of the aim of the artists of the German avant-­garde as the creation of “symbols  . . . that belong on the altars of the coming spiritual religion” draws as well on this idea of a sacred edifice as the ultimate context for the new art. In the postwar period as well, the cathedral continued to serve this rhetorical function as a collective Gesamtkunstwerk that would give the arts meaning—­ most consequentially in Walter Gropius’s April 1919 broadsheet advertising the program and principles of the Bauhaus, which features Lyonel Feininger’s woodcut of a Gothic cathedral and announces the reunification of the arts and crafts in a new architecture (fig. 3.1). The students, writes Gropius, will be taught by means of, among other activities, the “mutual planning of extensive, Utopian structural designs—­public buildings and buildings for worship—­aimed at the future.”19 The very format of Klee’s work frustrated attempts to place it within any narrative of abstract art ultimately finding its meaning through integration with architecture. Although the easel painting’s lack of connection to architecture was frequently bemoaned, the graphic Blatt, which Klee’s work proposes as a kind of alternative to the easel painting, has even less to do with architecture, as the critic Waldemar Jollos wrote in 1917 regarding Klee’s work exhibited at the Galerie Dada: 145

Perhaps Klee’s art is an end on its own, perhaps he avoids the dangers that abstract art holds by means of the modesty of his format. He pleases like a butterfly that, enlarged, would seem only grotesque. . . . Going beyond him, abstract art must—­becoming conscious of its inner law—­turn away from the picture, find expression in architecture.20

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Figure 3.1  Lyonel Feininger, cover of the Program of the State Bauhaus in Weimar (Programm des Staatlichen

Bauhauses in Weimar), 1919. Woodcut printed in black ink on green wove paper: image, 30.2 × 18.6 cm; full sheet (open), 32 × 39.3 cm; half sheet (folded), 32 × 19.7 cm. Harvard Art Museums/Busch-­Reisinger Museum, Gift of Julia Feininger, BR56.235. Photo: Imaging Department © President and Fellows of Harvard College.

The “modesty of his format”—­his art of Blätter—­made it difficult to see Klee’s work as working toward, or even as aware of, abstract art’s future fulfillment in architecture. In a letter to Lily of May 27, 1917, Klee speaks of the relation between picture and architecture with reference to the medieval cathedral, commenting on a stroll he took through the one in Augsburg: 146 CHAPTER THREE

A walk through the cathedral  . . . persuaded me anew of the splendor of this architecture and seized me deeply. Only the pictures on the altars don’t correspond. They entirely lack the ardor of color. Now we can do that better, only we have no architecture for it. . . . We don’t want to build cathedrals at all, at best cloisters, that is in accordance with the times [zeitgemäß].21

Klee’s commentary here on the relation between the medieval cathedral and the modern situation of painting and architecture diverges quite astonishingly from the prevalent discourses on the topic.22 Most surprising of all is his assertion that “we” (“we” artists, it seems, who can now better achieve “the ardor of color”) don’t want to build cathedrals, when so many expressionists did speak of wanting to do just that, as Klee knew perfectly well. Both before and after Marc’s death in 1916, Klee very often elaborated his own ideas by opposing them to those of his friend, with whom he disagreed sharply on a great many subjects.23 Here, he seems at first to try out Marc’s notion that contemporary artists aspire to create “symbols” for “the altars of the coming spiritual religion” when he suggests that the “ardor of color” achieved in present-­day pictures might make them appropriate for altars, but there is no architecture suitable for them. But then, instead of going on to call for the erection of a new cathedral that could serve as their architectural frame, as one might expect, he turns around to say that “we” don’t want to build any such thing. Klee proposes the cloister as a counterterm to the cathedral, claiming that the former, unlike the latter, is “in accordance with the times.” At first, both seem equally anything but: Klee’s counterterm preserves the cathedral’s medieval and Christian connotations. But, in Romantic art and literature, the secluded apartness of the cloistered monk sometimes served as a medievalizing figure for the isolation of the modern subject. One might think, for instance, of the Rückenfiguren (back figures) in the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich, whose separation from the landscapes upon which they gaze is reinforced by their costume—­sometimes a monk’s habit, sometimes the “garb of a bourgeois city dweller.”24 In this letter, Klee appears to invert expressionist rhetoric such as Taut’s and Marc’s by asserting that the current time is that of the isolated individual figured by the Kloster (from the same Latin root—­to shut, a shut-­up place—­as the English cloister) rather than of the collective figured by the cathedral.25 There are parallels between Klee’s letter and what Hausenstein would write a few years later in Kairuan, in that Klee seems to regard the cathedral as in principle more desirable than the cloister (we do not want to build cathedrals but “at best” cloisters)—­but, he implies, untimely, not to be achieved now, recalling Hausenstein’s justification, cited above, for his interest in the extreme “subjectivity” of Klee’s art: “Truly, the subjective is not the highest. But it is in this suspicious moment the only thing.” Klee goes on in this letter to make a cryptic proposal: “When I am old, very old, then perhaps there will be a couple of rooms of purely spiritual [geistig]

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architecture by me with some sculptures, the necessary furnishings, and half a hundred pictures.”26 The way in which we are to understand this architecture as geistig is particularly unclear. But it does appear that here Klee is proposing some sort of space set aside for sculptures and pictures, in which they do not serve another purpose, religious or otherwise; given the absence of such a purpose, the “necessary furnishings” would seem to be necessary for contemplating the sculptures and pictures—­one thinks of the chair Klee speaks of in “Graphic Art,” the chair that prevents “tired legs” from disturbing the Geist during prolonged viewing.27 His push against the expressionist idea of the cathedral, it seems, is determined in part by an insistence on the autonomy of art. Klee’s understanding of the cloister as more “in accordance with the times” than the cathedral fits well with an aspect of his understanding of art that he articulated clearly in the 1910s. He appears to have consistently viewed modern art under the sign of the individual, writing the following, for instance, in his 1912 review of the Moderne Bund exhibition: “Art is not a science, advanced step by step by many industriously researching members; it is, to the contrary, the world of differences. . . . Modernity is a facilitation of individuality; in this new field, repetitions, too, change into new first persons [Ichformen].”28 And yet Klee was neither blind to nor content with the way in which a modernism conceived in these terms tends to make the artwork into a luxury commodity. He wrote in a long letter to Alfred Kubin shortly after the violent suppression of the Soviet Republic of Bavaria about the possibilities for artists such as Klee and Kubin—­ practitioners of what they themselves viewed as a highly individualistic, even idiosyncratic art—­in a collectively organized community: However unlasting this communist republic seemed from the beginning, it nevertheless was an occasion for testing subjective possibilities of existing in such a community. It was not without positive results. Naturally an accentuated, individualistic art is not suitable for collective consumption, it is a capitalist luxury. But we are nevertheless something more than curiosities for rich snobs. And what in us somehow aims beyond that, at eternal values, would be better supported in a communist community.29 148 CHAPTER THREE

Klee is interested in testing “subjective possibilities of existing” in such a situation, which he sees as potentially supporting that which in individualistic art exceeds its commodity status and aims at “eternal values”; however, he does not consider it part of his project to bring about a new collectivity by making artworks that seek to detach themselves from the individual artist as maker of

the work, or that gear themselves to collective reception. Just a little more than a month after his letter to Kubin, he is mildly ironical in a letter to Lily about the Zurich Dadaists’ efforts toward the anonymous artwork; he credits them with “a somewhat programmatic, but deeply serious and ethical will,” but notes the contrast between their discussion of the “anonymity of the artwork of the future” and the dandyish eccentricity of dress of one of the participants.30 To move from Klee’s views in the 1910s on art, the collective, and the individual back to Hausenstein’s, it should be noted that Hausenstein, although he sees the “subjectivity” of Klee’s work as fitting for the present historical moment, also sees it as truly problematic, so “subjective” as to threaten to remove itself altogether from the public sphere of art. Unlike most critics, he viewed what he saw as the idiosyncrasy, privacy, and willful autonomy of Klee’s art as intimately connected to historical conditions, from the conditions of urban commodity capitalism to the negation of the individual in industrialized warfare. What fascinates him about Klee’s art is that he sees it as unboundedly, extravagantly “subjective”—­in a way that Marc’s or Kandinsky’s, as he understands it, is not—­ and that this quality, in his view, is at once the mark of historical conditions on Klee’s work, the sign of its rigorous consistency in responding to social conditions (fulfilling, as it were, art’s duty of meaningfulness in relation to history), while at the same stroke nullifying art criticism by refusing public meaning. Hausenstein may, he feels, judge Klee’s work very positively, but he can do so only as an individual; he cannot give his judgment compelling force. A key passage of Hausenstein’s review of the Graphic Exhibition of the New Munich Secession in March 1918 runs as follows: This judgment is intended to be an entirely personal one; it obligates no one. In giving my assessment of Klee in particular, I remain conscious of the fact that I am neither able nor willing to give a generally valid norm of judgment; his drawing is so subjective and so full of fundamentally problematic features that it is impossible to measure it against objective and general criteria of art. Perhaps there will come an occasion to attempt as an experiment to convey in a special study Klee’s extremely acute manner, to which one can almost only have a personally accentuated relation, to a broader (if never a wide) circle.31

In the lecture “On Expressionism in Painting” that Hausenstein gave in Berlin just four days before the publication of this review, he made this point even more strongly, warning his audience that the “subjectivity [of Klee’s art] is

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so elusive that it threatens to be the end of the inalienable concept of artistic publicness.”32 It seems that Hausenstein feels that Klee’s work undermines the moment of universality that defines aesthetic judgment (“the inalienable concept of artistic publicness”); in Kant, the judgment of taste (“this is beautiful”) is to be distinguished from the mere assertion “this is agreeable to me” by its demand for universal assent. Aesthetic judgment must be both subjective and universal: Whether a dress, a house, or a flower is beautiful is a matter upon which one declines to allow one’s judgment to be swayed by any reasons or principles. We want to get a look at the Object with our own eyes, just as if our delight depended on sensation. And yet, if upon so doing, we call the Object beautiful, we believe ourselves to be speaking with a universal voice, and lay claim to the concurrence of every one, whereas no private sensation would be decisive except for the observer alone and his liking.33

Hausenstein, in his first description of Klee’s drawings, in The Plastic Art of the Present (1914), wrote that “one has the feeling of a depravity sublime to the point of childishness, which however remains not a moment in the material, but instead immediately transforms itself into artistic perception and knows how to write down the most wiped-­away experience with a handwriting of nameless, yet nevertheless precise, eroticism.” At the end of his description, he wrote that “concepts such as decadence are meaningless here: in the end, the formal intensity and sharpness overcomes all disintegration.”34 By 1918, Hausenstein is unsure that anything does or indeed could counterbalance the moment of “disintegration” that he had seen in Klee’s art since he began writing about it—­and he seems to have begun to question whether his own pleasure in Klee’s work is truly an aesthetic judgment, whether his pleasure is not rather merely, in Kant’s terms, a “private sensation.” For Hausenstein, this is not just a problem with the kind of pleasure he experiences in relation to Klee’s art but a problem with Klee’s art itself—­his pleasure in Klee’s drawing is “completely personal” because Klee’s drawing is “so subjective.” This problem, however, becomes one 150 CHAPTER THREE

of the chief interests of Klee’s art for Hausenstein in 1918 and 1919, for it puts in particularly stark terms the most pressing issue for him at the time: the fact that expressionist art had not brought about the socialist collectivity he had hoped for. If, in 1911, Hausenstein felt that he could discern anticipations of the collective “public of the future” in the work of Marées and Cézanne, he voices grave doubts about both the artistic and the historical significance of expres-

sionism already in his March 1918 lecture on the subject (“I have traveled the road of expressionism as a participant, and do not believe I have been behind its advance guard; but I have not seen in it the giants who in other epochs were named Grünewald, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Delacroix”).35 At this moment, his interest in the Blätter of Klee, which eminently did not anticipate a monumental painting style pointing to a future public, intensifies; he seems to have been particularly interested in the way that these Blätter seem to address not a public but a private person. And it is this that, in Kairuan, Hausenstein will recoup as Klee’s “consistency.” Thus far in this book, I have focused largely on Klee’s Blätter, the pages or sheets that especially predominate in his work between his conscription and his demobilization, elaborating on how the viewing they solicit has been and might be conceived—­as speculative, as akin to reading, as addressed to a private person. But Klee’s work changes after his return to his wife and son in Munich at the end of 1918; he turns much of his attention to oil painting. An autobiographical text that Klee prepared in 1919 for Hausenstein, who was at work on his monograph, ends with this shift: “December 1918 furloughed until discharge. Discharged in February 1919. Now I dedicate myself to painting with more leisure and on a broader basis and cultivate the small oil painting.”36 Beginning in 1919, oil paintings take up a larger share of Klee’s work; many, though by no means all, fit easily into the conventions for the presentation of easel paintings, neither mounted nor inscribed. Yet commentators who compare his pictures to pages refer not only (or, in some cases, at all) to his Blätter in the strictest sense but also to his oil paintings on board or canvas. For Clement Greenberg, for instance, it is characteristic of Klee’s work in general that Klee understands his pictures as pages, as the critic writes in his discussion of the differences between Klee and Picasso. Picasso’s paintings, writes Greenberg, “move about in actual physical space”—­“take place among other events and other objects”—­whereas “Klee’s live in a more fictive medium and require of the spectator a greater dislocation, a greater shift.”37 Picasso’s painting, he asserts, is architectural, monumental, public; Klee’s is the opposite: “Klee’s private lyricism is more sympathetic to those who live in industrial countries  .  .  . where the scope of art is essentially private.”38 Summing up the matter, Greenberg writes: “The difference is that [Picasso] sees the picture as a wall, while Klee sees it as a page.”39 Joseph Leo Koerner uses this analogy as well.40 But for Koerner, it is not simply that Klee sees the picture as a page, but that Klee figures the picture as

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a page to investigate the book as a metaphor and object in crisis in modern culture. Modern culture, writes Koerner, is the crisis of the book, which, “no longer  . . . capable of holding the totality which is its claim  . . . becomes an object among other objects, mute and material.”41 Koerner sees this crisis as registered in Klee’s art, above all in the way Klee deploys the material “thingness” of the book and of writing.42 To close this last chapter, I will build on Greenberg’s and Koerner’s sense of Klee’s paintings as page-­like, while examining a group of works that may seem farther than any other from the graphic modality and relations to language and to “literature” that I have argued are central concerns of Klee’s art in the later 1910s: the series of grids that he began in 1923, often called, although not by Klee himself, “square pictures,” most of them oils, and unusual within his oeuvre in their degree of abstraction.43 Although watercolors and oils structured as a loose grid of squares and rectangles can be found in Klee’s work beginning in 1914 in works such as (1914, 192) and Aquarell (wie 1914 85) (1914, 94), it was only in 1923 that the grid became something like a “genre,” as Jürgen Glaesemer says, in Klee’s oeuvre.44 They are extraordinarily compelling works, and many commentators have felt them to be exceptional.45 And, at first glance, they would appear to be a very bad fit for the account of Klee’s work that I have been developing here, or at the very least, to suggest that by the early 1920s, Klee’s mode of what I have been calling graphic abstraction gives way to abstraction of a more familiar kind, that creating analogies between reading and looking at an artwork is no longer his aim. But I will seek to demonstrate that Klee’s grids continue some of the concerns and interests of his wartime Blätter as I have elaborated them—­although, importantly, not in unaltered form. Although there is a shift in the relation between painting and drawing in Klee’s work in 1919, as he turns to oil painting and, at right around the same time, develops the technique of oil-­transfer drawing, the grids both continue and transform some of the concerns of the earlier Blätter, while responding to a new set of interlocutors at and around the Bauhaus, particularly the typographical avant-­garde, and especially as concerns intertwined questions of privateness and publicness, reading and seeing. 152 CHAPTER THREE

I want to bear down on the line of inquiry Koerner opens up in his argument that Klee figures his paintings as pages to speak to a crisis of the book in modern culture (exemplified for Koerner by Stéphane Mallarmé’s Un Coup de dés and James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake), considering Klee’s paintings as sustaining a dialogue with the book as both a metaphor and a particular kind of material object. I propose, however, that we should think about the way Klee’s oeuvre engages

with the book as it was being rethought in his more immediate context while keeping Koerner’s larger questions in mind. What Koerner does not mention is that both book and page were under a great deal of pressure at the Bauhaus, where Klee taught for a full decade, from 1921 to 1931, while making many of the paintings Koerner describes as page-­ like.46 Proposals for the transformation of reading and writing circulated at the Bauhaus and beyond that would either displace or fundamentally alter the page as Klee’s art would appear to conceive it. The book was no longer necessarily seen as the chief and characteristic home of the printed page; attention shifted to unbound, ephemeral forms of printed matter—­the poster, the brochure, the newspaper. Nor was the printed page necessarily seen as the chief and characteristic home of writing. Writing was reconceived in relation to other surfaces—­ film screen, shop sign, neon light, and indeed the wall, the countermodel, according to Greenberg, to Klee’s painting-­as-­page. The typographical avant-­ garde aimed to remake reading into a public, collective activity, into something very different from the silent absorption of solitary individual readers, their noses in their books. They asked whether writing were necessarily a matter of horizontal lines of letters to be read left to right, top to bottom—­and, going still further, whether writing might become no longer a matter of letters at all, but of photographs and pictographs, potentially accessible to all rather than only to those literate in the language of a given text. In short, the page was called into question at and around the Bauhaus, both as a surface for writing, for conventional signs to be read in a particular and codified order, and as a space, discontinuous with its surroundings, for private contemplative reading. The manifesto-­like “Topography of Typography” that El Lissitzky, both a major figure in the typographical avant-­garde and a major influence on the Bauhaus, published in Kurt Schwitters’s Merz journal in 1923 concludes as follows: “The printed sheet [Bogen]  . ..  must be overcome. THE ELECTRO-­LIBRARY.”47 A future was imagined in which the page would no longer have those qualities for the sake of which Klee seems to adopt it as a model for his art. How, then, should we understand the relations between Klee’s work and these reimaginings of the book and the page circulating around him? 153

“Everything indicates that the book in [its] traditional form is nearing its end,” writes Walter Benjamin in One-­Way Street, his 1928 booklet of his “aphorisms, jokes, dreams.”48 In its first section, Benjamin states that “significant literary effectiveness” will result from the cultivation of “inconspicuous forms” such as “leaflets, brochures, newspaper articles, and posters” rather than “the preten-

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tious, universal gesture of the book”; as Frederic Schwartz has explained, One-­ Way Street—­printed as a brochure with a photomontage cover and sans-­serif headings over each short section—­positions itself as one of these “inconspicuous forms,” attesting to Benjamin’s engagement with the theories of the typographical avant-­garde regarding the future of reading.49 Benjamin devotes a section of his own pointedly untraditional book to speaking of the crisis of the book and his utopian predictions of a future for writing outside its bounds. He describes the mass media—­advertising, newspapers, and film—­as saturating everyday urban life with a writing outside the book that interferes with the modern subject’s vision in such a way as to diminish his or her ability to enter into the book: “Before a contemporary finds his way clear to opening a book, his eyes have been exposed to such a blizzard of changing, colorful, conflicting letters that the chances of his penetrating into the archaic stillness of the book are slight.”50 When “script [Schrift]—­having found, in the book, a refuge in which it can lead an autonomous existence—­is pitilessly dragged out into the street,” its character changes, writes Benjamin. In film and advertising, writing loses its autonomy. The bodily orientation of reader to text changes; readers hold books horizontally before them, but newspapers vertically—­and “film and advertising force the printed word entirely into the dictatorial perpendicular.” Writing gains a new “picture-­likeness” (Bildlichkeit), a new visualness, which Benjamin predicts will soon lead to a new “picture-­writing” (Bilderschrift).51 He implies that this picture-­writing’s audience will be the collective, not the individual. Basic to Benjamin’s thinking here is a contrast between two modes of reading, one formed by and geared to the printed book, the other to the film or advertisement. His brief sketch of the differences between the two roughly anticipates the well-­known polarity between two modes of approaching artworks that would later structure his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility”: “contemplative immersion [Versenkung],” on the one hand, which Benjamin describes as the asocial behavior of the adherent of the bourgeois cult of art, and, on the other, the state of “distraction” in which the collective absorbs a work into itself. Both versions of this contrast can be linked, as Schwartz has argued, to an opposition widespread in constructivist circles in 154 CHAPTER THREE

Germany in the 1920s between two different ways of encountering both texts and works of art: repeatedly, we find a contemplative mode of reading and of viewing criticized as passive, bourgeois, solitary, and old, and contrasted with another mode celebrated as active, proletarian, collective, and new.52 Benjamin’s speculations on the situation of writing in the 1920s are particularly pertinent to Klee’s art, both because his great interest in Klee is, as I

argued in chapter 2, closely bound up with his interest in the relations between language and pictures and because his thinking in One-­Way Street responds to the publications of Klee’s Bauhaus colleague László Moholy-­Nagy, among other prominent figures of the typographical avant-­garde, on the future of reading and writing. As I will seek to demonstrate in the rest of this chapter, seeing Klee’s Bauhaus-­era work in relation to Moholy’s publications and, more broadly, the typographical avant-­garde’s reimagining of reading and writing, brings out important aspects of Klee’s concern with linear, temporal viewing, with the “movement” that is a central motif of his teaching and concern of his art during these years. Even before Walter Gropius, the founding director of the Bauhaus, appointed Moholy as master of the preliminary course (Vorkurs) in the spring of 1923—­a crucial decision, part of the school’s reorientation toward International Constructivism—­the book was already an object of interest there. Both Johannes Itten, the previous master of the Vorkurs, and Lothar Schreyer, master of the theater workshop until 1923, had produced printed works that played with the picture-­likeness of written words.53 When Klee began teaching at the Bauhaus in 1921, he was to lecture on design theory (Gestaltungslehre) and to take over the bookbinding workshop. This workshop was discontinued in 1922, due to both personal friction between Klee and the workshop master and the difficulty of fitting bookbinding into any program of modernization.54 But it was only when Moholy came in 1923 that a radical transformation of reading, writing, and the book was theorized at the Bauhaus, as the school became one of the major nodes of the quickly developing bundle of avant-­garde practices and discourses that often called itself the New Typography. This was the title of a short article that Moholy published in the first book he designed, the catalogue accompanying the school’s exhibition in the summer of 1923, and, five years later, of Jan Tschichold’s “handbook” that sought to spread the principles of avant-­garde typography to a broad swath of practicing printers.55 A brief overview of the broader project for the “modernization of reading” that went under the name of the New Typography will help to contextualize Bauhaus discussions of typography and underline how important and widespread such discussions were.56 The New Typography, as it was variously elaborated in the 1920s by such exponents as Lissitzky, Schwitters, Tschichold, Moholy, Herbert Bayer, and Joost Schmidt (the last three all prominent figures at the Bauhaus), among many others, was both a project for remaking reading and writing as well as, especially in the latter part of the decade, an attempt to establish a new profession.57 Its

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advocates wished to see typography transformed by developments in a number of fields, including modernist painting, avant-­garde precedents such as futurist parole in libertà and Dadaist publications, and the new mass media (film, photographically illustrated newspapers, and advertising were all of great interest).58 Moholy’s Painting, Photography, Film (1925; revised edition 1927), the eighth volume in the school’s series of Bauhaus Books, is an attempt to show what the book of the future would be like—­the book transformed by its incorporation of photography and of the effects of film and advertising into something very different from the sheltering “refuge” for the autonomy of script that is the traditional book, according to Benjamin.59 The New Typographers sought to work out the typographic consequences of positions and values established in other areas of avant-­garde practice. They wanted, for instance, to create a more immediate relation between reader and text, and not only by seeking to make texts in the existing language visually clearer and more penetrating. They also proposed to reform writing itself, in two seemingly antithetical directions: the aim was either an entirely phonetic alphabet (linking writing more directly with the sounds of speech) or the alphabet’s replacement by a new pictographic writing.60 For instance, the use of all-­lowercase type (Kleinschreibung), prominently featured in the stationery Bayer designed for the Bauhaus in 1925, may appear to be merely a modish mannerism, but it was often understood as a measure toward an orthographic reform that would bridge the chasm between writing and speech, for the latter knows no distinction between upper and lower case, writes Moholy.61 As for conceptions of a new pictography, Moholy suggests in his “New Typography” (1923) that the integration of photography into typography might be seen as completing what the ancient Egyptians had begun in their hieroglyphics; Otto Neurath’s “picture statistics,” which he presented to an enthusiastic audience of Bauhäusler in 1929, represent an alternative and highly ambitious project of constructing a pictographic writing to educate the public.62 And, as has already been mentioned, the typographical avant-­garde sought to make printed matter that would refuse a contemplative mode of reading as withdrawal; Tschichold opposes to “earlier books,” created for “leisurely reading well distanced from the 156 CHAPTER THREE

world,” the “book of today’s active man.”63 Related to both the last point and to the project of a new pictography is a New Typographic model of how modernized reading works, which emphasizes its opticality. The first and third of the eight proclamations that make up Lissitzky’s “Topography of Typography” stress this point: “On the printed page words are seen, not heard” and “Economy of expression—­optics not phonetics.”64

Such an insistence on reading as purely optical, as not requiring on the reader’s part any notional translation from the visible forms of letters into sounds, runs throughout New Typographic writing. According to Tschichold, the typographical avant-­garde must design text for a purely optical mode of reading because of the historical transformation that reading has already undergone. He sees reading as already modernized under the pressure of the greatly increased quantity of printed matter that assails the “modern consumer of printing,” as having already shifted from a slow and at least notionally auditory activity to a fast, purely optical one, to which the design of such characteristically modern forms as the illustrated paper is already adapting and to which all other typography must adapt as well.65 Johannes Molzahn, summing up the aims of the New Typography, proclaimed: “Stop reading! Look!”66 Much of this typography, preparing for the picture-­writing to come, aimed to make reading more like looking—­moving away from the old typography’s scripting of the reader’s gaze, left to right and top to bottom, away from the arbitrariness of the letters of the alphabet, toward a new “reading” that would be as free, natural, and universal as vision was understood to be. I argue that some of Klee’s paintings of this period may be understood as, in part, a highly ambivalent response to this project. Some push in the opposite direction, pushing seeing toward a temporal “reading” in a definite, scripted order. This might be seen, on the one hand, as akin to the kind of control of the viewer’s gaze for which the New Typographers strived—­but also, on the other, as an attempt to retrieve certain features of the kind of reading that the New Typographers considered obsolete. In 1923, Klee initiated his series of all-­over grids of colored rectangles. The first one he registered in his oeuvre-­catalogue (fig. 3.2) sets out the rules of the series.67 A smallish piece of paper is coated with black paint, against which the colored quadrilaterals covering the surface glow. To borrow a phrase from Rosalind Krauss’s classic essay on the recurrence of the grid in modernist painting, Klee’s grid functions as a “mapping of the space inside the frame onto itself ”: its rectangular center, with smaller units, brighter colors, and a more complex mirroring pattern than the periphery, reads as a painting within a painting.68 Self-­enclosed as the work may appear, its vertically oriented rectangles echoing the shape of the paper support, the very grid structure that allows it to seem to speak of nothing but the patterned relations among its parts also raises obvious questions of its relation to its context. As Leah Dickerman has recently written, “It is certainly the thorough working-­over of the logic of the grid that

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Figure 3.2  Paul Klee, Friendly look (freundlicher Blick), 1923, 54 (detail). Oil on paper on cardboard, 31.7 ×

22.2 cm. Private collection. © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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gives overarching shape to the products of the Bauhaus.”69 Moreover, the grid was something of an emblem for the changes in the school’s direction that the 1923 exhibition announced to the public—­the emulation of De Stijl and constructivism, the aspiration of designing for mass production, the reimagining of the artist as engineer. The proliferation of grids and squares in the objects on

Figure 3.3  Paul Klee, Picture-­

architecture red yellow blue (Bildarchitectur rot gelb blau), 1923, 80. Oil on primed cardboard, original frame, 44.3 × 34 cm. Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern. © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

display was so marked that it became a target of mockery. In a Kunstblatt item on the 1923 exhibition, Paul Westheim complained: “Three days in Weimar and one can never look at a square again for the rest of one’s life.”70 Might Klee’s series of “square pictures,” begun in 1923, have something to do with the realignment that Westheim ridiculed as the “squaring” of the Bauhaus? One of Klee’s early grids of 1923 implies that the grid is at least in part and at times a reference to the work of others around him: the oil painting that Klee called Picture-­architecture red yellow blue (Bildarchitectur rot gelb blau) (fig. 3.3) must be seen as relating itself somehow to the grids of De Stijl painting, a

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pressing presence at the Bauhaus, especially as Theo van Doesburg was living in Weimar between 1921 and 1923, giving private lessons to Bauhaus students and doing whatever he could to move the school closer to his ideas.71 The very title of Picture-­architecture red yellow blue seems a clear enough allusion to De Stijl’s two-­ step operation, as Yve-­Alain Bois has explained it, of “elementarization” (“the analysis of each practice into discrete components and the reduction of those components to a few irreducible elements”) and “integration” (“the exhaustive articulation of those elements into a syntactically indivisible, nonhierarchical whole”).72 Klee’s title refers telegraphically to De Stijl’s understanding of the most thoroughgoing self-­purification of painting (including the elementarization of color, its reduction to the primaries, “red yellow blue”) and of architecture as allowing their integration (Picture-­architecture).73 As Dickerman points out, much of the work done at the Bauhaus likewise follows these procedures of elementarization and integration; the grid was everywhere at the school around 1923 because it could sustain both. It served as “a structural tool allowing for the creation of spaces that integrated disparate mediums into overarching designs,” as exemplified by a photograph of Gropius’s office on the occasion of the 1923 exhibition (fig. 3.4), arranged and framed in such a way as to make the Bauhaus objects with which it is furnished appear not so much as discrete things but rather as moments, as it were, in which an invisible three-­dimensional grid underlying them all takes on substance.74 And yet the same simple structure could serve just as well as a mode of self-­reference and self-­analysis for painting (and for other mediums as well—­see, for instance, Gertrud Arndt’s carpet on the floor).75 The grid’s ability to speak at once of integration and of autonomy might be seen, then, as at least apparently resolving the well-­known contradictions of the place of easel painting at the Bauhaus. On the one hand, during the school’s first years, the structure of the curriculum together with the selection of the faculty members (many early hires were painters with links to the Sturm gallery) implied that easel painting was the preeminent source of that experience with color and form that would inform the work produced in the workshops. Yet easel painting was not itself a formal subject of instruction at the Weimar 160 CHAPTER THREE

Bauhaus (there were, however, workshops devoted to stained glass [Glasmalerei] and wall-­painting—­two ways of integrating painting, broadly conceived, into architecture), and Gropius spoke of it in his programmatic statements as an unfortunate result of the isolation of the arts from one another that the Bauhaus aimed to overcome.76 This was a tension that Klee must have felt in his relations with his colleagues as well as in his place in the curriculum; Schlemmer writes

Figure 3.4  Walter Gropius,

Director’s Room in the Weimar Bauhaus, 1923, in Neue Arbeiten der Bauhauswerkstätten, Bauhausbücher 7 (Munich: Albert Langen, 1925). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY. © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-­ Kunst, Bonn.

in a 1921 letter of the “head-­shaking” that Klee’s appointment provoked at the Bauhaus among those who considered him “a l’art pour l’art type with no conceivable practical contribution to make.”77 One might be tempted to conclude that the grid served Klee as a way of resolving this contradiction, of at once asserting the autonomy of painting and integrating it into a larger architectural framework, parallel to many other uses of the grid at and around the Bauhaus at the same moment. However, though he

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is indubitably alluding to these uses, to see the grid as working for Klee in this way would be to miss the tone of his allusion. In no way can his painting be seen as a straightforward, or straight-­faced, attempt to adopt van Doesburg’s theory or practice of painting, or work at the Bauhaus that absorbed De Stijl principles of elementarization and integration.78 The range of rich browns Klee plays against the “red yellow blue” of his title, the unevenness of his paint application, emphasized by the black underpainting, which shows through the thinly painted areas, the wobbly irregularity of the grid itself, the clunky frame Klee chose (and he took a great deal of care with his frames)—­all undermine elementarization and work against integration. The combination of these by no means accidental characteristics with the way the painting and title together display ostentatiously some of the most obvious features of van Doesburg’s practice (the primary colors, the grid, the aim of uniting picture and architecture) might lead us to read the work as a caricature of De Stijl and of work at the Bauhaus that adopted those features.79 Klee’s painting seems to be an imitation that undermines or negates what it imitates, but perhaps the word caricature does not quite capture its ambivalence; it tries on De Stijl painting and suspends it at the same time. But Klee’s grids respond not only to the paintings around him in Weimar in 1923. At the same time—­and this is where the connection with the New Typography comes in—­they precipitate out of Klee’s own probing of the problem of “picture-­writing” back in the mid-­1910s, concerns perhaps reactivated in 1923 by Moholy’s use of the concept of “picture-­writing.” Both Moholy and Klee see what Moholy calls “primeval picture-­writing” as the original form of writing, and both Moholy’s typographic project and Klee’s painted grids may be understood as revising, in very different ways, their conceptions of this originary writing.80 I do not wish to argue that the square pictures are a direct response to Moholy’s 1923 text—­the chronology is unclear and Klee, unsurprisingly, wrote nothing about his views on the New Typography.81 Yet Moholy’s text can illuminate what is at stake in these works. In his 1923 statement, Moholy speaks of the changes the New Typography will bring about—­exactness of communication, collective rather than individ162 CHAPTER THREE

ual reception, the full incorporation of photography—­by sketching a historical development from “primeval picture-­writing” to present-­day alphabetic writing and beyond to the “new typographic language.” Moholy compares the photographs that will be integral to this new language to hieroglyphs, “the inexact primeval picture-­writing of the Egyptians”; but, writes Moholy, while each reader interpreted the old hieroglyphs differently, according to “tradition and

personal aptitude,” the photographs of the new language will enable entirely exact expression, substituting for those “still individually interpretable concepts and expressions” remaining in present-­day language.82 Klee’s square pictures of 1923 also relate to the hieroglyph—­but very differently. As vertically oriented all-­over grids of colored rectangles stretched tightly over the surface, they revisit the compositional form of his solution to the problem of “picture-­writing” five years earlier. In 1916, most likely before his March induction into the military, Klee began making what he called “watercolored writing” or, later, “color-­writing”—­ watercolors organized around lines of verse, in which the armature of the letters delineates areas to be “colored in” with watercolor (figs. 3.5, 3.6, 3.7).83 The first,

Figure 3.5  Paul Klee, High and brightly shining stands the moon (Hoch und strahlend steht der Mond), 1916, 20.

Watercolor, gouache, and ink on paper on cardboard, 26.50 × 33.50 cm. Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Beyeler collection. Photo: Robert Bayer, Basel. © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Figure 3.6 Paul Klee, Lightly skims my boat. . . (Leicht schwimmt mein Schiff. . .), 1916, 25. Watercolor and pen

on paper on cardboard, 7.5 × 24.5 cm. Kunstmuseum Basel, Depositum der Emanuel Hoffmann-­Stiftung. Schenkung der Erben aus dem Nachlass von Vera und Jakob Oeri-­Hoffmann, Basel. © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Figure 3.7 Paul Klee, To the roar of the water and the beat of the drums, ha, I composed the rowing song. . . (Beim

Rauschen des Wassers und Trommelklang, Ha, hab ich gedichtet das Ruderlied . . .), 1916, 26. Watercolor and pen on paper on cardboard, 7.2 × 24.8 cm. Location unknown. © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

exhibited at Klee’s 1917 show at the Sturm Gallery, were built around excerpts 164 CHAPTER THREE

of German translations of Chinese poems; his initial conception of the series revolved around the fantasy of the Chinese character as a true pictogram, melding the symbolic and iconic, seen as much as read.84 The series crystallizes around the problem of translating the Chinese pictogram, as it was understood by nineteenth-­and early twentieth-­century European scholars, into German.

These Chinese poem-­pictures of 1916, these attempts to translate the pictogram, are small watercolors with handwritten titles on their mounts. These titles are remarkably long—­good-­sized excerpts of poems, up to three full sentences long—­and the words of these poem-­titles are then repeated within the watercolors. The watercolor transcribes its title, which transcribes the watercolor, and so on ad infinitum. We see this, too, in the later “color-­writing” Once emerged from the grey of night (1918; fig. 3.8). The German translations Klee used for the watercolors of 1916 all came from Hans Heilmann’s 1905 anthology, which began with a lengthy prefatory lament about the utter failure of the translations to approach the beautiful multivalence of the Chinese character, which is, wrote Heilmann, drawing and writing at once.85 Heilmann freely admits that he cannot read Chinese himself (“I do not belong to the fortunate four hundred in Europe and America who can enjoy Chinese poetry straight from the source”), but instead translates earlier French and English translations (liv–­lv); his account of Chinese writing is likewise derived from earlier European studies (liv). To assert the pictographic nature of Chinese writing and posit a “painterly, illustrative element” in the original poems that the translations necessarily leave out, Heilmann cites the philosopher Han Fei’s story of the origin of Chinese writing: “Man saw the things around him. . . . In order to secure them in his possession and in the pleasure of memory, he painted their outlines.” The drawing (Zeichnung), writes Heilmann, of the visible object comes to signify “spiritual and abstract concepts” by analogy, enters into combinations with other such pictures, becomes part of a system of communication and thereby a sign (Zeichen) (xxv–­xxvi). The interplay between the character in its aspect as Zeichen and its primordial, never quite superceded, aspect as Zeichnung allows “beauties that no other language can offer” (xxxiii).86 Bound up with the purported pictographic legibility of the Chinese Zeichen-­ as-­Zeichnung, and somewhat easier to translate, if one is willing to jettison the conventions of German typography, is the way the space of the page itself becomes significant. Heilmann demonstrates this by showing how the semantic and grammatical “antithetical parallelism” of one short excerpt from a Chinese poem is brought out when one translates the characters but, leaving out the prepositions and articles that must be added to make the translated words into a proper German sentence, retains the order of the writing in the original. He translates it twice, including the syntactical connectors in parentheses and using standard German typography in the first but not in the second version:

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Figure 3.8  Paul Klee, Once emerged from the grey of night. . . (Einst dem Grau der Nacht enttaucht . . .), 1918, 17.

Watercolor, pen, and pencil on paper on cardboard, 22.6 × 15.8 cm. Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern. © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

(By the) mountain (the) sun quickly (in the) west sets, (By the) lake (the) moon slowly (in the) east rises . . . Second line:

First line:

lake mountain moon sun slowly quickly east west rises

sets (xxviii–­xxix)

This exercise begins to formulate the page as an ordered, nonarbitrary space. Of course, the German typographic norms for poetry, to which the first translation keeps, are also a set of rules for organizing words on the page, but the significance of the space of the page in the second translation is of another order. It goes so far as to allow one to predict fairly accurately what a word might be simply from its position on the page in relation to the other words (if the word east were covered up, the reader could provide it anyway; if the word mountain were covered up, the reader could at least come up with a fairly restricted range of possibilities—­river, hill, sea, mountain, plain, desert, and other nouns which may be understood as somehow opposed to lake). Naturally the same rules of “antithetical parallelism” may be found in the first translation, but standard German typography works in such a way that other factors, such as the length of the words, throw off any correlation of space and semantic rules (west ends up positioned directly above rises rather than east), although that of the grammatical structure of the line and these rules remains. One sees in this example that such an attempt to translate Chinese—­understood as a synaesthetic language in which all aspects (the graphic form of the characters, their position on the page, the tones of the spoken language) are understood as motivated signs rigorously correlated to one another (xxxii)—­into German, understood as lacking such correlations, may result in a spatial mapping of the grammatical and semantic relations of the poem. The correlations between different levels of the original, which Heilmann both describes and admits he cannot read, mean that a Chinese poem must be understood as its own analysis, for the patterns of relations among speech sounds, ideogrammatic characters, grammatical structures, and so forth systematically describe one another. Is it possible to translate these kinds of internal self-­analytical relations? In the chronologically ordered anthology of poems, Heilmann does not even try to do so; however, attempts to translate such relations are a major concern of

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Figure 3.9  Gottfried Böhm, Illustrative

Translation of Li-­Tai-­Pe’s “Porcelain Pavilion” (Illustrative Übersetzung von Li-­Tai-­Pes Porzellan-­Pavillon). In Hans Heilmann, Chinesische Lyrik vom 12. Jahrhundert v. Chr. bis zur Gegenwart (Munich: Piper, 1905), li.

his introduction (xxxiv). Besides the exercise in mimicking the spatial arrangement of Chinese characters cited above, Heilmann offers another model for the translation of these untranslatably iconic aspects of Chinese verse: “illustrative translation” (li). Gottfried Böhm, in his 1873 German translation of the Livre de jade, Judith Gautier’s anthology of French translations of Chinese poems, had, as Heilmann says, “the charming idea .  .  .  of typographically illustrating the motif ” of Li-­Tai-­Pe’s “Porcelain Pavilion” (l) (fig. 3.9).87 The “porcelain pavilion” of the title stands in the middle of a lake, the shining surface of which mirrors upside-­down the bridges, the pleasure pavilion, and the company inside; Böhm 168 CHAPTER THREE

tries to suggest the “illustrative element” of Chinese writing through utterly different means by shaping his translation into a horizontally oriented diamond which functions as a schematic visual representation of the pavilion and its reflection (li).88 The repetitions of words and syntactic parallelisms between the beginning and the end of the poem then read in the iconic register thus established as objects and their reflections.

I would suggest that Klee formulated his six “watercolored writings” of 1916 (two are built around excerpts from Wang Seng Yu’s “The Lonely Wife” and four from Wu-­ti’s “Rowing Song” in Heilmann’s German) initially as a strategy for negotiating the problem of translating the Chinese pictogram as formulated in Heilmann’s essay.89 In the notes Klee later made for his Bauhaus courses, he speaks of a common origin of writing and drawing à la Han Fei: in the first lecture for his course “Theory of Pictorial Form,” he grounds the foundational importance of line in part in “the prehistoric times of peoples, when writing and drawing still coincided.”90 Besides Heilmann’s volume, Klee’s interest in an originary unity of writing and drawing may have been reinforced by another book in his library, From the Tally Stick to the Alphabet (1915), a short illustrated survey of the history of writing systems (including systems of picture writing from many different cultures) by Karl Weule, director of the Museum für Völkerkunde in Leipzig, who spoke of drawing as the origin of writing: “At the beginning, we find drawn representations of objects or even of entire events.”91 Weule describes the history of Chinese writing as making visible the long process of simplification, schematization, combination, and systematization that follows, turning the picture into a sign.92 Let us now examine just how Klee seeks to recreate something of this primeval unity of writing and drawing that he, like Heilmann and Weule, would likely have understood as still at least faintly visible in Chinese. The first in his watercolor series—­High and brightly shining stands the moon. I have blown out my lamp, and a thousand thoughts arise from the bottom of my heart. My eyes overflow with tears (fig. 3.5)—­shares with Once emerged the curious relation of repetition between title on the mount and words within the watercolor.93 Other common traits relate the works to each other as versions of a shared project. In both, the ink lines of the letters set the bounds of the colors to either side. A horizontal interruption of the paper surface a few centimeters wide runs across each. Certain characteristics of the writing within each watercolor link them as well—­ only capital letters are used, the form of each of which has been subjected to a systematic geometrical simplification based on the rectangle that would enclose it, regular and visible in Once emerged but not in High and brightly shining. Most letters are roughly as tall as they are wide, the U is indistinguishable from the V, the G looks like a lowercase g moved up so that the descender does not dip below the baseline, regular circles and semicircles compose the curvy parts of letters. This geometrical simplification is pushed more consistently in Once emerged than in High and brightly shining, but in both cases it stands out in sharp contrast to the visual qualities of the loopy handwriting Klee used consistently

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in his titles in these years, as well as to the versions of standard serif letterforms he usually used for letters within his paintings and drawings (the Vokaltuch, for instance). The simplification of the forms of the letters in High and brightly shining seems to attempt to make the letters of the Latin alphabet approximate geometric forms, to strip away the cues that usually make them read as letters rather than shapes. The O in Mond (moon) approaches a simple circle, understood as part of a set of basic shapes underlying both writing and painting; it lacks the thickening at the sides which marks, for instance, the O in the Vokaltuch emphatically as a letter rather than an indeterminately letter-­like or picture-­like shape. The O may be read either way, as the O of the word Mond or as itself a picture of the Mond. The first interpretation works because of its position relative to the other letters (which likewise approach the condition of triangles, squares, and semicircles, but remain legible as letters); the second because Klee fills in this circle (now functioning as line-­drawing) with a mild, pale, slightly grayish blue, and uses this same tint to fill a larger circle toward the upper left of the page which does not seem to be part of a word (though it may be an escapee from Hoch—­an O, or perhaps a C that has waxed round), pulling out the O of Mond from the letters next to it to function as shape. (In this respect, the O here resembles the s of the 1926 drawing “to make visible,” discussed in chapter 2, whose twin plays the role of a pair of eyes.) “The ideographic pictures of the writing address themselves to the eye,” writes Heilmann, “even before they become words. . . . Once they have become words, however, they do not cease but rather truly first begin to have a painterly effect.”94 Or, as we could say in this context, this O allows itself to be understood as a picture because the moony tint that fills it along with its place in the word Mond cue us to see it as a little picture of a moon. In High and brightly shining, potential conflicts between writing and the mode of resemblance cued by color are held in suspension. They are shown reconciled; the O of Mond is their overlap, an intersection that compels no either/ or choice. Likewise, in the composition of the watercolor, the spatial ordering of the words accommodates both the pictorial order of the landscape and the 170 CHAPTER THREE

demands of legibility; in this, it may be seen as an elaboration of Böhm’s Li-­ Tai-­Pe. The ordering of the words on the paper follows the European pattern of left to right and top to bottom with some deviations, but none that go so far as to threaten legibility. And yet the very different model of spatial recession, of foreground and background, of landscape painting, is simultaneously accommodated in such a way that the complementarity and mutual intensification of

words and “painterly effect” described by Heilmann appear to have been ingeniously translated from Chinese into German. Ingeniously seems the right word, because there is no sense here of a kind of general or systematic procedure ensuring that these very different ways of ordering the surface coincide; instead, one senses that one must rely on luck and wit, as in a good translation of a pun. The horizontal format of this “color-writing,” the pictographic Mond, the schematic “mountain” formed by the tilted baseline, and the elevation denoted by the word Hoch all tend to make the horizontal slice through the watercolor, the cut revealing the cardboard mount, into a horizon line. The background or “sky” section (the upper rectangle of paper) and the foreground or “earth” section (the lower rectangle) are separated from each other by a few centimeters of cardboard where the grammatical subject of the poem switches from der Mond (third person) to ich (first person), the entrance of the lyric I of the poem. This switch of grammatical person is not marked spatially in the poem as printed in Heilmann’s anthology (there is not even a line break—­only a semicolon).95 But in Klee’s version, a kind of semiotization of space—­which is, like Heilmann’s demonstration of antithetical parallelism, a correlation of grammatical structure and the space of the page, but unlike his, does not seek to approach the effects of Chinese poetry by a stricter, more literal kind of translation—­creates an analogical connection between the bottom of the page, the space below the horizon, as the space of the viewer, and the first-­person voice of the poem. The overlap between these orders is signaled again by the word Herzensgrund in this foreground space; von meines Herzensgrund, which would usually be translated as “from the bottom of my heart,” denotes the inmost seat of subjectivity and operates through the figure of ground, of base, of bottom (here, the bottom of the page), which Klee emphasizes by leaving a gap between Herzens and Grund. The word marks the way that the lyric I and the near space of the ground may figure each other, as they do here, where the foreground as the space of the I of landscape painting and the first person as the voice of the I of lyric poetry coincide. We have already seen both how Klee spoke of a primeval unity of writing and drawing, and how Heilmann described the Chinese language as preserving something of this unity. Klee’s “color-­writing” seeks to translate this language, drawing an image of this not-­yet-­differentiated state of the sign (Zeichen)/drawing (Zeichnung) using the German language and watercolor. However, in other works in Klee’s six-­part series based on Heilmann’s volume, and most strikingly in the last one he registered in his oeuvre-­catalogue, To the roar of the water and the beat of the drums, ha, I composed the rowing song. . .

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(fig. 3.7), the mediation between Zeichen and Zeichnung has taken on a different character than we find in High and brightly shining. This is most evident if we focus on the treatment of the parts of the watercolor not directly governed by the forms of the letters, on the organization of the colors between the words. In High and brightly shining, these are mostly elongated rectangles governed by the length of the words. The grayish rectangle immediately above the word steht, for instance, is bounded on one side by the vertical marking the left edge of the letter s, on the other by that marking the right edge of the horizontal bar of the second t; its vertical dimension is roughly the same as the height of the letters. As Heilmann presents it, there is nothing in Chinese analogous to the relation in European languages between letters and the words they form in combination. Each written sign is an indivisible unit; there are, he claims, 44,449 ideogrammatic characters, each of which is one monosyllabic word signifying one concept (Begriff).96 Although these characters may enter into compounds with one another, and these compounds may be analyzed, there is no way to parse one of these unitary ideograms. While Heilmann makes no proposals as to how this aspect of the language might be translated into German, Klee’s arrangement of the striations of color in High and brightly shining gestures toward such a translation by suggesting that the whole word, not the letter, functions as the basic unit here. In the four “Rowing Song” watercolor, however, the basic unit is no longer the word but the letter. Klee ordered these four into a sequence in his catalogue; if we view them in this order we see that they present an increasingly strict organization of the watercolor as a grid in which the letter serves as the module (the rectangle serving as the enclosing frame and guide of each letter’s geometric simplification becomes coextensive with the rectangular unit of an all-­over grid, a relation which does not obtain in the Wang Seng Yu watercolors). Where there is space between the words—­the strip to the right of Wellen in Lightly skims my boat. . . (fig. 3.6) or that between the first Trommel and Ruderlied in To the roar of the water—­the colors begin to take on the same organization into rectangles, made to the measure of the absent letters. In Klee’s later watercolor Once emerged (1918), this increase in regularity is extended further: the rectangle approaches 172 CHAPTER THREE

the square, the dimensions of which are held constant over the entire surface of the painting, and the rule of one letter to one module is maintained throughout, with the exception of the double-­wide ws. This shift from the word to the letter as a unit is also a shift from a recessive space on the model of landscape painting to a grid mapping the surface of the paper. Both shifts result from the adoption of a different strategy for the

movement between the Chinese poem and its painted German translation. While the first strategy, that of High and brightly shining, attempts to depict the de-­differentiation of Zeichen and Zeichnung understood as the origin point of both, preserved in Chinese and lost in German, the second, that of the “Rowing Song” paintings, makes the rectangular unit serve as the go-­between between colors and writing, to bring about a point-­by-­point transposition of one order into another. In a sense, Once emerged (fig. 3.8) pursues the second strategy still more consistently than the “Rowing Song” watercolors. But, importantly, Once emerged is based not on Heilmann’s volume but on a poem Klee himself wrote in German (the question of translation here is not between two different cultures and languages but instead folded into a single work). No longer projecting pictogrammatic reconciliation onto another language, Once emerged instead uses the rectangular units of a modular grid to mediate between writing and picture. As in some of the watercolors based on Heilmann’s book, color is at times keyed illustratively to the words (note the grays of Grau [gray] and the blues of Blau [blue]), but this is broken up by Klee’s consistent use of yellows to fill the triangle of the A wherever it appears (even in Blau). Rather than depicting a hieroglyphic unity of word and picture imagined as perfectly fulfilled elsewhere, the strict alignment of the grid of colors and letters in Once emerged tends to throw the difference between the two (between, for instance, the letter L and a squarish patch of color) back upon the viewer: reading and looking oscillate back and forth through a figure-­ground reversal, as either the scaffolding of the letters or the colors spanning it come to the fore. It is the very similarity of reading and looking that makes it so difficult to at once read the poem as a poem and view the watercolor as a watercolor. But Moholy’s 1923 article warns specifically against forcing letters into “a predetermined form such as the square,” as Klee does in Once emerged.97 Granted, if Moholy’s stricture is to be taken as aimed at a specific target, it would more likely be the alphabet designed by van Doesburg, which, based on a 5 × 5 grid, indeed seems more interested in adjusting the shape of the letter to the linear framework of the square (or sometimes rectangular) grid than in easy legibility.98 Moreover, some Bauhaus students used it, as in Fritz Schleifer’s poster advertising the 1923 exhibition (fig. 3.10)—­another index of the Dutch artist’s influence during his stay in Weimar.99 Nevertheless, forcing letters into “a predetermined form such as the square” is precisely the means by which Klee mediates between the letters of the words and the structure of the picture in Once emerged. And Moholy’s warning comes in the context of a more general

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Figure 3.10  Fritz Schleifer, Bauhaus Exhibition

(Bauhaus Ausstellung), 1923. Lithograph, 100.3 × 73.3 cm. Printer: Reineck & Klein, Weimar. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, gift of Jo Carole and Ronald S. Lauder and by exchange. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/ Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

point: “Readability—­the message must never suffer under an aesthetic assumed a priori.”100 Indeed, Once emerged sets up a conflict between readability and the viewing of the watercolor as an aesthetic whole. We might see Klee’s square pictures as returning to the grid of colored squares of Once emerged to go much 174 CHAPTER THREE

farther in this direction.101 In the square pictures, readability suffers to such a degree under an a priori aesthetic that there is, so to speak, no message to be read in them at all. Despite their relation to the text grid of Once Emerged, it may seem perverse to think of Klee’s square pictures as either readable or unreadable, so often has the

grid in early twentieth-­century painting been seen as a “barrier  . . . between the arts of vision and those of language.”102 But as we shall see, one of Klee’s first square pictures, Centrifugal Memorial Page (1923; fig. 3.13), strongly suggests that readability and unreadability are at stake in them. Jürgen Glaesemer and Eva-­Maria Triska’s standard accounts of the square pictures explain them by connecting them to Klee’s theoretical writings; indeed, Triska writes about them as exemplifying the close connection between Klee’s art and the body of theory he developed while teaching at the Bauhaus. The very convincing connections Glaesemer and Triska draw are indispensable but also insufficient, for they make Klee’s art and writings into a closed circuit. According to these accounts, the square pictures are to be understood in terms of the color “movements” Klee described in his Bauhaus lectures as well as in the second of the Bauhaus Books that Moholy designed, Klee’s Pedagogical Sketchbook (1925).103 In 1921, Klee developed a series of layered watercolor gradations that he saw in terms of such movement (fig. 3.11); the square pictures attempt to create similar “color-­movements,” but using oils, which, because of their relative opacity, require a different approach.104 In the square pictures, Klee spreads, as it were, the layers of the watercolor gradations over the surface—­the one-­square-­ beside-­the-­other of these paintings substitutes for the one-­layer-­on-­top-­of-­the-­ other of the watercolors.105 The relations between the colors are understood as establishing vectors—­dark to light, cool to warm—­of just the kind Klee describes in his lectures and Pedagogical Sketchbook.106 These paths are often complicated and enriched by those generated by the coded reversals and mirroring devices he likewise elaborated in his pedagogical writings (fig. 3.12):107 although seeing the mirrorings that generate the pattern of colors requires seeing the painting as a symmetrical whole, the painting then invites the viewer to play the game of checking the pattern, moving from counterpart to counterpart. Together, these systematic relations between the colored squares of the grid at least notionally lay down tracks for the viewer’s gaze, like the watercolor gradations or the graphic lines that Klee describes as movements for the viewer to retrace.108 As Klee writes in the Pedagogical Sketchbook: The work  . . . is, in terms of production as well as reception: movement . . . . In terms of reception, this is due to the limitation of the perceiving eye. The limitation of the eye is the impossibility of seeing even a surface of quite small dimensions sharply at the same time. The eye must graze away [abgrasen] the surface, grazing away and sharpening one part after the other. . . . The eye follows the paths established for it in the work.109

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Figure 3.11  Paul Klee, Crystal Gradation (Kristall-­Stufung),

1921, 88. Watercolor on paper, bordered with brush and pen, on cardboard, 24 × 31.3 cm. Kunstmuseum Basel, Kupferstichkabinett, Schenkung Marguerite Arp-­Hagenbach, Inv. Nr. 1968.407. © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Figure 3.12  Paul Klee, Theory of Pictorial Forming: I.3

Special Order (Bildnerische Gestaltungslehre: I.3 Specielle Ordnung). Pencil and colored pencil on paper, 33 × 21 cm. Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, Inv.Nr. BG I.3/93. © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

These accounts interpret Klee’s square pictures as laying down paths for the eye in this sense, by means of the color relations between the squares. Bois has called Klee’s concern that the viewer’s eye follow the artwork’s “paths,” his linear, temporal model of reception, “dogmatic, authoritarian.”110 Commenting on the passage just cited, he notes that Klee doesn’t even seem to trust his own model of viewing, for his paintings attempt to force it: using devices such as arrows and color gradations, Klee “tells you where to look, and in what order.”111 By drawing our attention to Klee’s controlling shepherding of the gaze, Bois puts us in a position to ask, from a perspective outside Klee’s own theoretical writings, why Klee is so invested in this model of looking as sequential “grazing,” one part after the other.112 It is significant, I think, that in an earlier version of this analogy, from his lecture notes, Klee writes that the eye “like a grazing animal, feels the surface, not only from top to bottom, but also from left to right, and in every direction, for which occasion is given.”113 The directions he specifically names—­top to bottom and left to right—­suggest, of course, the directions of writing and of reading in European languages. Also suggestive in this respect is the word he wrote in pencil at the top of Once emerged, along the uppermost of the ruled lines he drew on the cardboard mount for the inscription of the title: Bahn (track, path). Once emerged and the Centrifugal Memorial Page both suggest that Klee’s notion of “grazing,” his scripting of the viewer’s gaze, is modeled on reading. Although the Centrifugal Memorial Page (fig. 3.13) is unusual among the square pictures in that it is a watercolor on a white ground (most are oils on a dark ground), the reversed mirroring pattern and the emphasis on the painting’s central rectangle do place it in the series. But this Memorial Page (Gedenkblatt), unlike the other square pictures, is readable in places.114 Nested in its center are the lowercase letters ei, written in a hand-­painted imitation type—­which might be read as a word fragment, sound notation, or an all-­lowercase Ei (egg). Then, in two twinned yellow areas of the periphery, two names are written less tidily: “PAUL ERNST” (Klee’s given names) and “ANNA WENNE.”115 Then, almost entirely unreadable, there are the dark horizontal lines of newsprint, for as Klee’s title reinforces again, a page is quite literally the basis of this square picture. Only short phrases show through here and there—­“Liküre hochwertig!” (High-­quality liqueurs!), “Haut-­und Geschlechtsleiden” (skin and venereal diseases). To make this Memorial Page, Klee took a page of a broadsheet newspaper and made it very difficult to read, turning it upside down and painting it over, first with chalk ground and then with translucent watercolor.116 The unread-

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Figure 3.13  Paul Klee, Centrifugal Memorial Page (centrifugales Gedenkblatt), 1923, 171. Watercolor on primed

newspaper bordered with gouache and pen, strip below with watercolor and pen, on cardboard, 54.7 × 41.7 cm. Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Leihgabe Sammlung Ludwig, ML/Z 2011/214. Photo: Rheinisches Bildarchiv Köln, rba_c014440. © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

able newspaper’s organization provides the underlying matrix for the colored squares, the boundaries of which follow, in many places, the visible if illegible horizontals of the text and the verticals separating the columns. The painting compares the “paths” established by the pattern of squares—­indeed a centrifugal spiraling out from the center—­to the highly codified “paths” newspaper layout provides for its readers, guiding them along by cues such as the size and typeface of headlines, the downward movement of columns, and conventions correlating a story’s importance to its position on the page, along with the basic top-to-bottom and left-to-right of European languages. The painting’s interest in reading as a convention-­governed movement of the gaze, as a model for what Klee appears to conceive as the similar but more flexible movements of looking at a picture, comes out most clearly in the peculiar name Anna Wenne. This name—­apparently Klee’s invention—­appears in one other place in his work, a watercolor of the previous year called Display Window for Ladies’ Underclothing (fig. 3.14). Here, Anna Wenne’s name is written as a proprietor’s would be across this painting that calls itself a Display Window, a showcase for goods for sale and a surface for writing out on the street. The legibility of Anna Wenne’s name would suffer less than most from one condition of writing on a shop window—­that it may be viewed from inside the store, reversed. The reversibility of Anna Wenne’s name—­two palindromes (ANNA and ENNE) separated by the optical palindrome of the symmetrical letter W in the middle—­outdoes even that of Anna Blume, Schwitters’s imaginary muse, whose palindromic qualities he celebrates in his famous poem of 1919.117 Anna Wenne similarly invites readers to read her backward and forward, and thereby to reflect on reading as a movement, a movement with a direction. Her name asks in miniature what the Centrifugal Memorial Page urges as a whole: that the movement of reading be considered as a model for the kind of movement for which Klee wants his pictures to make paths. The Centrifugal Memorial Page takes up reading as a model for the kind of sequential looking the square pictures as a group solicit. And yet there is still another turn here, another inversion. For what kind of reading is suited to the newspaper? Or to the window display? Neither invites the kind of “leisurely reading well distanced from the world” that “earlier books” do, according to Tschichold.118 Many saw the newspaper page as an exemplary object of modernized reading; Tschichold, in fact, saw the newspaper as the school of such speedy and efficient reading. “Modern reading technique,” he writes,

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Figure 3.14  Paul Klee, Display Window

for Ladies’ Underclothing (Schaufenster für Damenunterkleidung), 1922, 125. Watercolor and ink on two pieces of paper, bordered with ink, on board, 41.9 × 27 cm. The Berggruen Klee Collection, 1984 (1984.315.29), Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY. © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

owes its nature to the way newspapers are set, their large and small lines, their different weights of types, the spacing of single words and whole passages, the making passages prominent by wide spacing and leading, and so on. The optical appearance of newspapers is evidence of today’s speed of life.119 180 CHAPTER THREE

While the newspaper support of Klee’s Memorial Page includes articles as well, most of what can in fact be read through the chalk ground and watercolor are small advertisements—­made to attract the passing glance, even less likely than the articles to be “read quietly line by line,” to borrow another of Tschichold’s descriptions of the outmoded form of reading.120 The shop window displaying lingerie, with its offer of “Fixed Prices [Feste Preise]” (which would have been

very enticing in 1922, as hyperinflation took hold), is, of course, advertising as well, aimed to snare the gaze of passersby.121 And yet, while these two related works both take up what would have been understood as the objects of a fast, purely optical, modernized reading—­one as support, one as motif—­it seems that both do so only to undermine such reading. Klee has made his Display Window, which consists of two separate, symmetrical, vertically oriented sheets of laid paper mounted on cardboard, in such a way as to resemble perhaps nothing so much as an open book, the two sheets facing each other like pages. The darker tone of the watercolor along what we would term the gutter, were we speaking of a book, as opposed to the outer edges, and the horizontal lines governing the articulation of the comical mannequins’ bodies, stockings, and drawers reinforce this suggestion. So, too, does the conjunction of the German and French words for “entrance” with the watercolored arrow beginning in the gutter and pointing to the bottom right-­hand corner, which reads as an invitation to enter this book-­like shop by turning the page, as if it were not fixed to the mount. And the transformation that the broadsheet underwent in becoming Klee’s Memorial Page makes it, of course, eminently unsuitable as an instrument of the clear, fast, efficient communication that the New Typographers prized; the newspaper is at once the Memorial Page’s support, model, and foil. More broadly, Klee’s square pictures of 1923 and the next few years might thus be viewed as so many “memorial pages”—­as memorials not only in the form of pages, but memorials to the page. They may be seen as a highly ambivalent response to reimaginings of reading at the Bauhaus that put a tremendous amount of pressure on the autonomy and privacy of the page of the book, of the kind that would be suitable for “leisurely reading well distanced from the world,” to borrow Tschichold’s words again, which had long served Klee as a model for the autonomy and privacy of his pictures. In a passage about the precarious situation of the autonomous object in Painting, Photography, Film, Moholy takes the book as the exemplar of such autonomy, speaking of “the controversial easel painting or separate optical structure (in the sense that a book is an autonomous structure with a justification for existence independent of nature or architecture).”122 The grids of Klee’s square pictures, refusing the immediate legibility demanded by the New Typographers, test painting as a place for a slow and sequential looking that is something like the “leisurely reading well distanced from the world” that the New Typographers saw as obsolete, and by extension as a refuge for private contemplation—­which some hoped, and some feared, would be less and less possible in relation to pages in books.

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Figure 4.1 Paul Klee, Old Sound (Alter Klang), 1925, 236 (X 6). Oil

on cardboard, 38.1 × 37.8 cm. Kunstmuseum Basel. Photo Credit: Bridgeman-­Giraudon / Art Resource, NY. © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Epilogue: Old Sound

In 1925, Klee made an oil painting in the form of a grid that he titled Old Sound (Alter Klang, fig. 4.1). Somewhat irregular rectangles of pale, somewhat “off ” colors—­grayed mauves, burgundies, salmons, greens—­are arrayed across a small, perfectly square piece of cardboard covered with a black ground. The center of the pattern of colored rectangles (the gray rectangle flanked by pinkish rectangles above and below, yellowish ones to the left and to the right) is shifted to the left of the center of the support, in contrast to the rough alignment of the center of the pattern and of the support in most of the grids examined in chapter 3. Like Picture-­architecture red yellow blue, also discussed in chapter 3, Old Sound might be understood as a caricature. Haxthausen has insightfully interpreted this painting’s title and simulated patina of age as together suggesting a sound physically caught and preserved by the painting: he writes that in giving the painting “the dark amber glow of old master paintings under aging layers of golden varnish, Klee playfully imagines that musical compositions are subject to the same process of physical decay as material objects, their sounds accumulating marks of duration through the centuries.”1 Drawing on Benjamin’s concept of the “aura” of the authentic, original work of art, Haxthausen terms Old Sound, along with Carpet of Memory and other works bearing marks of age that

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are obviously spurious (and intentionally so), a “parody of an auratic object.”2 He draws on Margaret Rose and Mikhail Bakhtin to define parody as humorous and metafictional, but not necessarily scornful or mocking in tone; parody, he notes, “may also spring from an attitude of sympathy, even of admiration for the parodied original.”3 But Old Sound combines this parody of the kind of work that might be perceived auratically—­a parody that proceeds through this strange scenario of an ancient sound preserved in a painting (a scenario one might connect to that of the Vocal Fabric of the Singer Rosa Silber, which presents itself as a sort of relic of a voice)—­with other parodies. Klee imagines this antique sound as somehow embedded in an abstract grid that he gives the appearance of an aged artifact, covering it with what appears to be yellowing varnish. If we continue to see the grid here as at some level alluding to De Stijl or to vanguard abstract painting of the 1920s more broadly, as in Picture-­architecture red yellow blue—­and the way that Klee registered Old Sound in his oeuvre-­catalogue, as “Oil colors abstract [here he draws a little picture of a grid] on black board,” rather suggests that we should—­we can see these as parodied as well by Klee’s painting, but by different means than in Picture-­architecture.4 In Old Sound, Klee appears playfully to flip basic modernist ideas upside down. If van Doesburg, for instance, saw his paintings as new and purely plastic, Klee reimagines them here as old and somehow recording or embodying or translating sound.5 We might see this painting as alluding as well to Kandinsky’s writings on the “inner sound [innerer Klang]” of a picture.6 The waxy surface of Old Sound suggests that the sound is somehow encased in an underlayer, as if the innerness of its sound consisted in its presence only just beneath the surface of the painting, within its slight bit of material thickness. And Klee’s painting seems to locate its sound in the past, in contrast to the “inner sound’s” present power to affect the viewer in Kandinsky’s writings. But what would it mean for Klee’s painting to “parody” the auratic object, the De Stijl painting, and Kandinsky’s theories all at once? If there is something paradoxical in even a simple parody, in this kind of imitation’s simultaneous reaffirming repetition and undermining of what is imitated, this paradoxicalness 184 EPILOGUE

would be redoubled by a simultaneous parody of such a group of incommensurable targets. And the ambivalence of tone in Old Sound is perhaps still more elusive than in Picture-­architecture. It may be helpful here to return once again to Greenberg’s extraordinary 1950 essay on Klee, the last paragraphs of which take up this question of the tone and aim of Klee’s parody, which Greenberg also refers to as his “irony”:

No longer taking the pictorial for granted but seeing it as one cultural convention among others, Klee isolates its distinguishing features in order to burlesque them  . . . the parody of the pictorial is but a core around which he wraps layer on layer of a parody that aims at all commonly held verities, all current sentiments, messages, attitudes, convictions, methods, procedures, formalities, etc., etc. Whence the irony omnipresent in the “literary” content of his paintings, an irony that is total, but not nihilistic  . . . Klee is not subversive. He is well content to live in a society and culture he has robbed of all earnestness; in fact, he likes them all the better for that. They become safer, more gemütlich. Far from being a protest against the world as it is, his art is an attempt to make himself more comfortable in it; first he rejects it, then, when it has been rendered harmless by negation, he takes it fondly back. For notice that Klee’s irony is never bitter. . . . One has to bring in the history of German idealist philosophy, with its penchant for explaining and changing the world by dialectics, in order to account for him.7

Not only in Old Sound but in much of his work of the 1910s and ’20s, as I have argued, Klee does indeed, as Greenberg writes, work by means of negation and inversion—­finding ways of working against Lessing’s division between painting and poetry, perversely inventing a “philosophical art” for its own sake, emphasizing both the inscriptions on and the “describability” of his works, taking up counterterms of Kandinsky’s prewar theories of abstraction such as the ornamental carpet and the fairy tale, inverting Delaunay’s equations of abstraction, vision, and simultaneity, countering expressionist and postexpressionist ideals of a new union of picture and architecture as well as of art and the public. And I think that Greenberg’s term of irony might be a better word for these operations (which are not, pace Greenberg, restricted to the “‘literary’ content” of Klee’s work but permeate it entirely, calling into question divisions between “‘literary’ content,” form, and material) than parody: the extraordinarily complex theorization of irony and reflection by the early German Romantics may offer more resources than parody does, and this theorization would have been more available to Klee and his contemporary audience.8 There is one more adjustment I would like to make to Greenberg’s account of Klee’s irony. Between the beginning and the end of the quotation above, Greenberg broadens out: at first he says that the target of Klee’s ironic negations is the pictorial, but later he speaks of them as directed at “society and culture” or the world at large. But I think that their prime target is indeed art and theories of art. It seems that one of the advantages of irony for Klee is the self-­reflection of

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Old Sound

formal irony, the possibility of, for instance, making Old Sound simultaneously painting and a painting of painting, to adapt Friedrich Schlegel’s famous description of “transcendental poetry” as “at once poetry and poetry of poetry.”9 Greenberg is right, I think, in seeing Klee’s irony as a maneuver not of attack but of defense; I would add that irony’s self-­reflection is in part what allows irony to serve Klee as a defense, a means of enclosing his works. Klee’s concern for the “literary” aspects of the plastic arts, and for analogies between reading and seeing, as opposed to conceptions of the plastic arts as purely optical and instantaneous from Lessing through van Doesburg, is intimately bound up with his dialectical, ironic play with modernist theories and practices of art: his concern for the literary is both motive for and means of this play of negation.

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Notes

INTRODUCTION 1. K. Porter Aichele notes that many of the “visual particulars of Klee’s painting seem to have been borrowed from Pieter Bruegel’s” in her Paul Klee, Poet/Painter (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2006), 98. See Anne Simonson, “Pieter Bruegel’s Magpie on the Gallows,” Konstkistorisk Tidskrift 67, no. 2 (1998): 71–­92, on the difficulties of interpreting this painting and how Bruegel’s milieu of Antwerp humanists would have viewed it as a moral landscape for emblematic exegesis. Klee mentions in his November 17, 1916, diary entry that on his first official transport of three airplanes from Munich to Cologne, he made time to see works by Bruegel and Bosch at the Wallraf-­ Richartz Museum (although not the Magpie on the Gallows, which is in the collection of the Hessisches Landesmuseum, Darmstadt). Klee, Tagebücher 1898–­1918, Textkritische Neuedition, ed. Wolfgang Kersten (Stuttgart: Gerd Hatje, 1988), 408. There is much discussion among Klee scholars of how his diaries, rich in interest and detail, ought to be handled as a source, particularly because the diaries served many functions for Klee, who repeatedly revised pre-­1916 entries at later points in time, so that, as O. K. Werckmeister points out (The Making of Paul Klee’s Career, 1914–­1920 [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989]), they cannot be read as “instant historical records of his self-­understanding at the time to which they refer” (7). For Klee, the diaries’ roles included, among others, a letter copybook, aide-­mémoire, a record of his work’s development, a means of self-­fashioning and of public self-­ presentation (a source of material to offer to critics writing about him, as well as potentially for his own use in writing an autobiography, perhaps modeled on the published diaries of Franz Grillparzer and Friedrich Hebbel, which he admired—­a project that Klee never, however, took further than revising his pre-­1916 entries). See Christian Geelhaar, “Journal intime oder Autobiogra-

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Notes to Pages 3–6

phie?: Über Paul Klees Tagebücher,” in Paul Klee: Das Frühwerk, 1883–­1922, ed. Armin Zweite (Munich: Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, 1979), 246–­60, and Werckmeister, Making of Paul Klee’s Career, 5–­8. It is therefore important to bear in mind their multiple functions and potential audiences, as well as their palimpsestic quality. 2. “Öl aufgezogene Leinwand Gips u. Kremserweißgrundiert.” Paul Klee: Catalogue raisonné, ed. Josef Helfenstein and Christian Rümelin, vol. 3, 1919–­1922 (Wabern: Benteli, 1999), no. 2178. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. 3. Versions of such discontinuity between linear forms and a painted ground can be found in much earlier works by Klee, who was troubled, as he wrote in a 1908 diary entry, that “naturalistische Malerei” offered little scope for his “lineare Produktionsfähigkeit”—­a problem he sometimes tried to solve by drawing in ink over a field of strokes of oil paint, as in Sitzendes Mädchen (1909, 71). See Jürgen Glaesemer, Paul Klee: Die farbigen Werke im Kunstmuseum Bern (Bern: Kornfeld, 1976), 23–­24. 4. “Schift und Bild, d.h. schreiben und bilden sind wurzelhaft eins.” The Zentrum Paul Klee has created a most valuable website making available all of Klee’s manuscripts pertaining to his teaching at the Bauhaus, both as facsimiles and as transcriptions. “Paul Klee—­ Bildnerische Form-­und Gestaltungslehre,” accessed June 1, 2014, http://www.kleegestaltungslehre.zpk.org/ee/ZPK/BG/2012/01/01/005/. 5. “By the magpie, [Bruegel] meant the gossips which he delivered to the gallows,” writes Karel Van Mander in his account of Bruegel’s life, quoted in Simonson, “Pieter Bruegel’s Magpie on the Gallows,” 73. 6. Michel Foucault, This Is Not a Pipe, trans. James Harkness (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 32–­33. On Foucault’s reading of Klee’s work, see Stephen H. Watson, Crescent Moon over the Rational: Philosophical Interpretations of Paul Klee (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 70–­74; Watson’s book takes up the larger question of the impact of Klee’s work on the crucial twentieth-­century thinkers who wrote about it, from Heidegger to Deleuze. 7. Foucault, This Is Not a Pipe, 33–­3 4. 8. Clement Greenberg, untitled essay in Five Essays on Klee, ed. Merle Armitage (New York: Duell Sloan and Pearce, 1950), 54; subsequent references are cited in the text in this paragraph and the next. See Charles W. Haxthausen’s discussion of Greenberg’s writings on Klee in his “Ad Marginem?: Klee und die amerikanische Kunstgeschichtsschreibung,” in Polyphone Resonanzen: Paul Klee und Frankreich—­La France et Paul Klee, ed. Gregor Wedekind (Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2010), 45–­61. 9. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-­Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 121–­24, translation slightly modified. 10. Hubert Damisch, “Equals Infinity,” in “Visual Poetics,” ed. Stephen Bann, special issue, 20th Century Studies 15/16 (December 1976): 77–­78. 11. Rainer Crone, “Cosmic Fragments of Meaning: On the Syllables of Paul Klee,” in Paul Klee: Legends of the Sign, by Rainer Crone and Joseph Leo Koerner (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 36. 12. On the Landscape with Gallows in particular, see Aichele, Paul Klee, Poet/Painter, 100. For her broader argument, see 10. 13. Charles W. Haxthausen, Paul Klee: The Formative Years (New York: Garland, 1981), 148–­160, 247–­54. Marcel Franciscono, Paul Klee: His Work and Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 40–­42. Klee writes in a July 1905 entry: “Mit der ‘reinen’ bildenden Kunst verhält es sich doch nicht ganz so einfach, wie das Dogma besagt . . . werde ich kein reiner bildender Künstler wie es das Dogma besagt, je sein.” Tagebücher, 220. When citing the Tagebücher and other published transcriptions of Klee’s manuscripts, I omit slashes indicating

line breaks and transcribe m’s and n’s with macrons as double m’s and n’s, but preserve Klee’s at times idiosyncratic spelling. 14. For an early example, see his journal entry of 1900: “Im Grunde Dichter zu sein, diese Erkenntnis sollte in der bildenden Kunst doch nicht hinderlich sein!” Klee, Tagebücher, 52. 15. There is a large body of scholarship on the relations between text and image in Klee’s art; at this juncture, I will sketch how my own study fits into it. At the outset, I wish to acknowledge Joseph Leo Koerner’s essay “Paul Klee and the Image of the Book,” in Paul Klee: Legends of the Sign, by Rainer Crone and Joseph Leo Koerner (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 45–­84, and Haxthausen’s work on this question as crucial impetuses for my work. In the last twelve years, Aichele has published two studies of how Klee transposed poetic and literary concepts into his visual art: Paul Klee, Poet/Painter and Paul Klee’s Pictorial Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Aichele argues that Klee created a “new, modernist concept of ut pictura poesis” distinguished from the tradition of paralleling painting and poetry central to Renaissance art theory in that Klee conceived neither art as mimetic. Instead, writes Aichele, Klee found grounds for comparison between the two arts in their use of “arbitrary signs in a nonillusionistic space” and ability to “communicate what can be known and felt” in addition to visible objects (Paul Klee, Poet/Painter, 10). I have learned much from Aichele’s work, but must take issue with her occlusion of the tensions between, on the one hand, theories and practices of modernist painting (especially abstract painting) and, on the other, the idea of “poetic” painting (in part by overrelying on Apollinaire’s art criticism; see ibid., 7–­8, 65–­66), tensions whose importance for Klee’s work I see as fundamental. Her consistent downplaying of these tensions dovetails with her view that Klee did indeed create “a pictographic language that could communicate content through linear structures and without reference to external sources” (ibid., 143). Certainly Klee’s art often plays with the idea of such a language, and this play is of the highest importance—­but engaging in such play is a very different matter from being such a language. See Charles W. Haxthausen’s critique of commentators who take too literally metaphors comparing Klee’s art to a kind of pictorial script in his important essay, “Zur ‘Bildsprache’ des Spätwerkes,” in Paul Klee: Das Schaffen im Todesjahr, ed. Josef Helfenstein and Stefan Frey (Stuttgart: Gerd Hatje, 1990), as well as the argument put forward by Claude Cernuschi in a recent essay, “Paul Klee and Language,” in Paul Klee: Philosophical Vision; From Nature to Art, ed. John Sallis (Chestnut Hill, MA: McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, 2012), 106–­33. According to Cernuschi, Klee should be understood not as having created a functioning, communicative “pictographic language” in his work but rather as “labor[ing] to hold our full understanding in check” (123). However, Cernuschi’s use of contemporary linguistics, neuroscience, and cognitive psychology as his primary framework for understanding Klee’s strategies for doing this cannot tell us how these strategies might have been understood in Klee’s own historical moment. On the other hand, other commentators on the relations between the poetic and pictorial in Klee’s art have gone too far in the opposite direction, arguing that in fact his art should ultimately be seen as purely visual, slotting Klee too smoothly into a certain narrative of modernist painting. Like Aichele’s account, this, too, has the effect of flattening tensions between modernist painting and the idea of the “poetic,” resolving issues that I see as generatively unresolved in Klee’s art. Again, I have learned a great deal from these accounts (including Haxthausen’s dissertation, Paul Klee: The Formative Years, and Franciscono’s Paul Klee), and build on them while putting forward an account that maintains, rather than dissolves, these tensions. For more discussions of text-­image relations in Klee’s art, see, besides the texts I cite elsewhere, Paul Bauschatz, “Paul Klee’s Speaking Pictures,” Word and Image 7 (1991): 149–­6 4; Renée Riese Hubert, “Paul Klee: Modernism in Art and Literature,” in Modernism: Challenges

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Notes to Pages 6–7

and Perspectives, ed. Monique Chefdor, Ricardo Quinones, and Albert Wachtel (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 212–­37; and Marianne Vogel, Zwischen Wort und Bild: Das Schriftliche Werk Paul Klees und die Rolle der Sprache in seinem Denken und in seiner Kunst (Munich: Scaneg, 1992). On Klee’s titles in particular, see Manfred Faust, “Entwicklungsstadien der Wortwahl in den Bildtiteln von Klee,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 48 (1974): 25–­46; Matthias Kühn, “‘Gewagte Symbiosen,’ Bild und Bildtitel im Spätwerk Klees,” in Paul Klee: Das Schaffen im Todesjahr, ed. Josef Helfenstein and Stefan Frey (Stuttgart: Gerd Hatje, 1990), 93–­99; and Sabine Mainberger, “‘Aktive’ Linie—­ kreatives System: Zu Titeln und Register beim späten Paul Klee,” Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, Heft 50/1, Jg. 2005, 111–­37. On Klee’s poetic work in the strictest sense, see Roman Jakobson, “On the Verbal Art of William Blake and Other Poet-­Painters,” Linguistic Inquiry 1 (January 1970): 3–­23. 16. On Klee’s postwar reception in Germany, see Christine Hopfengart, Klee, vom Sonderfall zum Publikumsliebling: Stationen seiner öffentlichen Resonanz in Deutschland, 1905–­1960 (Mainz: Phillip von Zabern, 1989). Hopfengart’s important study of Klee’s reception aims to understand historically how Klee came to be considered “the modern German artist” (11) in the Federal Republic during the Adenauer era. 17. The Making of Paul Klee’s Career is a revision and reorganization of Werckmeister’s earlier studies, including his essays in Die Tunisreise: Klee, Macke, Moilliet, ed. Ernst-­Gerhard Güse (Stuttgart: Gerd Hatje, 1982) and Paul Klee, ed. Carolyn Lanchner (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1987), as well as those gathered in his Versuche über Paul Klee (Frankfurt a. M.: Syndikat, 1981). 18. Werckmeister, Making of Paul Klee’s Career, 4–­9. Subsequent references are cited in the text in this paragraph and the next. 19. These questions also become particularly crucial in the distinctive drawings Klee made from 1937 until his death in 1940. On the limits and problems of the analogy between picture and writing with reference to this body of work, see Haxthausen, “Zur ‘Bildsprache’ des Spätwerkes,” 27–­36. Both of Aichele’s studies treat Klee’s oeuvre as a whole, but she also notes that Klee engages most intensely with “word/image juxtaposition” in the later 1910s and early 1920s and then again in the last years of his life. Paul Klee’s Pictorial Writing, 11. 20. In Paul Klee: The Formative Years, Haxthausen likewise describes 1916 as a crucial turning point for Klee’s work, the point at which Klee developed from a “poet-­draftsman” (a Dichter-­Zeichner, as Klee titled a drawing of 1915 that Haxthausen analyzes as a self-­ representation) to a “poet-­painter,” and thus the beginning of Klee’s artistic maturity. Haxthausen sees Klee’s watercolor Blätter of 1916 as achieving a synthesis of his preceding graphic work, and the fantastic play of “images and associations” in that work, with color and a kind of formal rigor, a synthesis achieved despite the difficult circumstances of Klee’s life at that time (488–­90). But how exactly does this synthesis work? Haxthausen emphasizes that Klee’s work is “not the romantic recreation of dreams” (505), “not really literary” (507), and he subordinates the “poetic” element of these Blätter by asserting that in them “the conscious process of plastic formation . . . is illumined, influenced, and enriched by the extraneous factors of culture, imagination, and wit” (505), drawing on Klee’s own description of his work process, especially in his Bauhaus teaching, to argue that these factors enter late in the process, after a process of formal elaboration, “by association rather than by prior intention” (510). This book aims to build on Haxthausen’s sensitive account of this shift in Klee’s work in 1916 (more nuanced than Glaesemer’s view of Klee’s development as an extension of technical mastery, first over line, then tone, then color, then oil painting) but aims also to revise it—­for I think that Haxthausen’s emphatic subordination of the literary to the formal may obscure the extent to which Klee’s work of 1910s actually calls into question that subordination, even

though some of Klee’s later statements about his work reinscribe it, often by the simple device of temporal sequence (the formal comes first, then imaginative interpretation may follow). For instance, his Jena lecture of 1924 presents an imaginative process of figurative interpretation as entering by way of association after a formal structure has developed; see Kersten’s transcription of Klee’s manuscript of the lecture in Paul Klee in Jena 1924: Der Vortrag, ed. Thomas Kain, Mona Meister, and Franz-­Joachim Verspohl (Jena: Stadtmuseum Göhre, 1999), 58–­59, and David Farrell Krell’s English translation in Paul Klee: Philosophical Vision; From Nature to Art, ed. John Sallis (Chestnut Hill, MA: McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, 2012), 12. As Haxthausen points out, the actual sequence of making that we can infer from the appearance of his works of 1916 varies: in some (e.g., Demon Above the Ships) it seems that their “fantastic subject matter” likely came late in the process of production, whereas in others (e.g., Presentation of the Miracle) it must have come much earlier. See also Franciscono’s salutary insistence that taking Klee’s Bauhaus-­era explanations of his working process, such as the Jena lecture, “at face value is not only to oversimplify the complex way [Klee] conceived his pictures but to distort their character” (Franciscono, Paul Klee, 197). One might also question the privileging of the first stages of making implicit in these explanations. 21. It is this conception of Graphik as a singular art, shared by Klee and many of his contemporaries, that I attempt to convey by translating the word either as “graphic art” or sometimes as “the graphic,” rather than “graphic arts.” The word Graphik is a complicated one. As the Deutsches Wörterbuch attests, the noun Graphik, which appears to have entered the German language in the late eighteenth century (the adjective graphique appears earlier in French, from 1762), is “zusammenfassend für graphische Künste,” a term which is itself a “Fachausdruck der Kunstwissenschaft in nicht ganz einheitlicher Verwendung,” designating only “in engerem Sinne jener Zweig der bildenden Kunst, dessen Werke, wie der Kupferstich, die Radierung, der Holzschnitt u. ä., auf ein reproduzierendes Verfahren angewiesen sind.” As the dictionary makes clear, the term tends to be used diacritically. It can include drawing, “in ausdrücklicher Unterscheidung etwa von der Malerei,” and sometimes even painting “im Gegensatz zur Plastik”—­more broadly, it signifies “das Lineare gegenüber dem Plastisch-­ gestalthaften.” The dictionary suggests that Graphik, unlike graphische Künste, is used “wohl durchweg” for printmaking as opposed to painting and sculpture, but the sources in this study indicate that the word was often used in the early twentieth century for drawing as well; it is often roughly equivalent to Max Klinger’s coinage Griffelkunst (see p. 103 below). Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch, vierter Band I. Abteilung 5. Teil (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1958), s.v. “Graphik,” “graphisch.” The wide possible range of the word is suggested by its definition in Meyers Großes Konversations-­Lexikon (Leipzig: Bibliographisches Institut, 1908): “im allgemeinen Zeichen-­, Maler-­oder Schreibkunst.” 22. “Das Wesen der Graphik verführt leicht und mit Recht zur Abstraktion.” Klee, contribution for the anthology Schöpferische Konfession, in Schriften: Rezensionen und Aufsätze, ed. Christian Geelhaar (Cologne: DuMont, 1976), 118. It has been been noted that Klee deploys “traditional” conceptions of drawing as abstract and as particularly appealing to the imagination. Ann Temkin, “Klee and the Avant-­Garde, 1912–­40,” in Paul Klee, ed. Carolyn Lanchner (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1987), 23–­24. My study seeks in part to detail how and why Klee deployed which older conceptions of drawing and graphic art. 23. See Erika Naginski’s reconsideration of this nearness—­of how drawing tends “to waver disconcertingly between mimesis and semiosis”—­in “Drawing at the Crossroads,” Representations 72 (Autumn 2000): 64–­81. 24. I retain the German word in my discussion because its pertinence to both graphic art and to books is important for my interpretation and cannot be rendered by any single English word.

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Notes to Pages 7–8

25. Anger argues that up to 1917, Klee “embraced the decorative in his art,” despite its associations as “commercial, feminine, and, with the onset of war, foreign and dangerous.” Jenny Anger, Paul Klee and the Decorative in Modern Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 94. 26. See also Mark A. Cheetham’s reading of Klee’s work as “a dissenting voice that questions the rhetoric of purity”—­exemplified for Cheetham by Kandinsky and Mondrian—­ “from within its own terms of reference” in The Rhetoric of Purity: Essentialist Theory and the Advent of Abstract Painting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 139–­51. 27. The first two books on Klee appeared shortly before Hausenstein’s. Leopold Zahn’s Paul Klee: Leben, Werk, Geist (Potsdam: Gustav Kiepenheuer, 1920), which Klee himself referred to as “Reclame,” was an expansion of the special issue of Der Ararat (the house organ of Hans Goltz’s Munich gallery) that served as the catalogue for the major Klee exhibition of May 1920. Hermann von Wedderkop’s Paul Klee (Leipzig: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1920), a volume in the Junge Kunst series published by Georg Biermann, editor of Der Cicerone, consists of nine pages of text introducing a selection of reproductions. See Hopfengart’s discussion of these two first books on Klee, Sonderfall zum Publikumsliebling, 39–­44.

CHAPTER ONE

192

Notes to Pages 9–17

1. “Bis zum Abend hatte ich fünf Aquarelle, darunter drei ganz vorzüglich, die mich selber ergreifen. . . . Ob meine Kunst bei gelassenem Weiterleben auch so schnell emporgeschossen wäre wie anno 16/17??” Paul Klee, Briefe an die Familie, 1893–­1940, ed. Felix Klee, vol. 2, 1907–­1940 (Cologne: DuMont, 1979), 876. 2. See Charles W. Haxthausen, Paul Klee: The Formative Years (New York: Garland, 1981), 503. The little signs first play a major role in a group of drawings of 1912 (good examples include Soaring to the Stars [1912, 143] and The Child and Its Star [1912, 141]) that Franciscono convincingly argues were likely conceived as lithographic illustrations for Goethe’s Faust, albeit not illustrations in the conventional sense but rather “free comic variations on the play  . . . some closely following individual lines or scenes, others merely taking up general Faustian themes.” As Franciscono writes, Klee’s use of such signs at that moment likely relates to developments in work he would have been observing closely: the play with conventional signs (letters, numbers, musical symbols) in the cubism of Picasso and Braque, and the primitivizing signs of some of Marc’s and Kandinsky’s more informal works, especially woodcuts and glass paintings (derived in turn from their interest in folk art, children’s art, and popular illustration). Marcel Franciscono, Paul Klee: His Work and Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 144–­53, 165. 3. Christine Hopfengart, Klee, vom Sonderfall zum Publikumsliebling: Stationen seiner öffentlichen Resonanz in Deutschland, 1905–­1960 (Mainz: Phillip von Zabern, 1989), 28–­32. O. K. Werckmeister, The Making of Paul Klee’s Career, 1914–­1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 88–­95. Of the 34 works exhibited in February 1917, 23 had been produced in 1916; another 7 had been made in 1915 and 4 in 1914. 4. “Seine Ausstellung ist geradezu erschütternd; es ist unglaublich, wie sehr er sich noch in der letzten Zeit vertieft und entwickelt hat.” Theodor Däubler, “Paul Klee und Georg Muche: Im Sturm,” Beilage des Berliner Börsen-­Courier 68 (February 10, 1917). 5. Klee writes of Robert Delaunay as creating a type of autonomous painting that leads a “ganz abstraktes Formdasein.” Klee, “Die Ausstellung des Modernen Bundes im Kunsthaus Zürich” (1912), in Schriften: Rezensionen und Aufsätze, ed. Christian Geelhaar (Cologne: DuMont, 1976), 108. One may gain a sense of the sharpness of the distinction Klee made between

drawing, on the one hand, and work with tonality or with color, on the other, in a diary entry of 1914 (no. 928), after his return from Tunis: “Die Graphik als Ausdrucksbewegung der Hand mit registrierendem Stift, wie ich sie wesentlich betreibe, ist vom Umgang m. Ton u. Farbe so grundverschieden, dass man diese Kunst motivisch ganz gut im Dunkeln ausüben könnte . . . Während Ton . . . etwas Licht, und Farbe viel Licht voraussetzt.” In Klee, Tagebücher 1898–­1918, Textkritische Neuedition, ed. Wolfgang Kersten (Stuttgart: Gerd Hatje, 1988). 6. By my count, Klee produced five small oils in 1916–­18: two in 1916, two reverse glass paintings in 1917, and one oil-­on-­board painting of 1918 that he did not enter into the oeuvre-­ catalogue in which he began to log his work in 1911. 7. The catalogue raisonné makes it much easier to see these kinds of shifts in Klee’s work: Paul Klee: Catalogue raisonné, ed. Josef Helfenstein and Christian Rümelin, 9 vols. (Wabern: Benteli, 1998–­2004). For examples of Klee’s watercolor abstractions, see the two watercolors titled abstract Garten Dämmerung (1914, 117 and 118), motorisches einer Landschaft (1914, 119), Abstrakt, farbige Kreise durch Farbbänder verbunden (1914, 218), the two titled Im Stil von Kairouan, ins Gemässigte übertragen (1914, 210 and 211), and ‘abstr. Aquarell’ (1915, 147). 8. Tamara Trodd, “Drawing in the Archive: Paul Klee’s Oil-­Transfers,” Oxford Art Journal 31, no. 1 (March 2008): 75–­95. See also Wolfgang Kersten, “Ölfarbenumdruckzeichnungen,” in Paul Klee: Art in the Making 1883–­1940, German edition (Tokyo: National Museum of Modern Art, 2011), 50–­54, and Franciscono, Paul Klee, 220–­22. 9. These were the three categories of work to which price ranges were assigned in the sales contract that Klee signed with Hans Goltz on October 1, 1919. Werckmeister, Making of Paul Klee’s Career, 208. 10. See ibid., 68 and 72–­74. 11. The most important account following this framework is Jürgen Glaesemer, Paul Klee: Die farbigen Werke im Kunstmuseum Bern (Bern: Kornfeld, 1976), 12–­55. 12. As Glaesemer writes: “Klees stetig fortschreitende Entwicklung von der Linie über die Tonalität zur Farbe spiegelt am eigenen Schaffen, was er später im Bauhaus als Grundlage des schöpferischen Prozesses analysierte.” Jürgen Glaesemer, Handzeichnungen I: Kindheit bis 1920 (Bern: Kunstmuseum Bern, 1973), 141n33. 13. Will Grohmann, “Paul Klee 1923/24,” Der Cicerone 16, no. 17 (1924): 786–­96. Hopfengart, Klee, vom Sonderfall zum Publikumsliebling, 57–­61. 14. “Klees Werk ist, wie die Arbeiten der letzten Zeit einwandfrei beweisen, kein romantischer Irrtum auf der Grenze von Weisheit und Darstellung, sondern einer der aufschlußreichsten Beiträge zur Erkenntnis der Möglichkeiten in der Malerei überhaupt. Wir haben allzulange uns mit rein subjektiven Eindrücken zufrieden gegeben und sie nach der Seite der eignen dichterischen, philosophischen und musikalischen Phantasie ausgebaut. Die Franzosen glauben heute noch, es handle sich bei Klee um eine typisch deutsche, kunstferne Herzensangelegenheit, die gar nicht den Anspruch erhebe, den Kreis der Eingeweihten zu überschreiten. . . . Was bei Klee früher wie ein liebenswürdiges Spintisieren aussah, ist ein künstlerisches Ereignis geworden. Den letzten Arbeiten gegenüber ist nicht viel gewonnen, wenn man von einer edlen Nervenkunst spricht, sie sind Leistungen, an denen ein großer Mensch mit allen geistigen, seelischen, metaphysischen Kräften teilhat.” Grohmann, “Paul Klee 1923/24,” 787, 795–­96. 15. Hopfengart, Klee, vom Sonderfall zum Publikumsliebling, 61. 16. Ibid., 11. 17. Will Grohmann, Paul Klee (New York: H. N. Abrams, 1954). See Hopfengart’s excellent discussion, Klee, vom Sonderfall zum Publikumsliebling, 187–­93. 18. As Hopfengart writes, “Möglicherweise hat Klee selbst während der Bauhaus-­Zeit seine ersten Erfolge im Umkreis von Walden verschwiegen oder heruntergespielt. Anlaß zu

193

Notes to Pages 17–19

194

Notes to Pages 19–21

dieser Annahme gibt ein Buchentwurf über Klee von Otto Ralfs, den dieser nach 1945 auf der Grundlage der früheren Gespräche schrieb. Dort ist von Klees Durchbruch zwischen 1917 und 1920 keine Rede.” The new image of Klee in 1923–­24 appears to have been a collaboration between Klee and Grohmann; Klee’s “Wege des Naturstudiums,” published in Staatliches Bauhaus Weimar 1919–­1923; his 1924 lecture at the Kunstverein in Jena; and Grohmann’s article reinforce one another. The importance of the 1924 Jena lecture in Klee’s postwar reception should not be underestimated; it was published as a book titled Über die moderne Kunst (Bern-­ Bümpliz, 1945) and soon translated into English (On Modern Art, intro. Herbert Read [London, 1948]). See Hopfengart, Klee, vom Sonderfall zum Publikumsliebling, 60–­61; Klee, “Wege des Naturstudiums,” in Schriften: Rezensionen und Aufsätze, ed. Christian Geelhaar (Cologne: DuMont, 1976), 124–­26; and the transcription of Klee’s manuscript of the lecture in Paul Klee in Jena 1924: Der Vortrag, ed. Thomas Kain, Mona Meister, and Franz-­Joachim Verspohl (Jena: Stadtmuseum Göhre, 1999), 48–­69. David Farrell Krell’s English translation of the lecture is available in Paul Klee: Philosophical Vision; From Nature to Art, ed. John Sallis (Chestnut Hill, MA: McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, 2012), 9–­14. 19. Unsurprisingly, these same circumstances seem to have reduced the number of works Klee made; Klee registered 220 works in 1914, 255 in 1915, and then only 81 in 1916. 20. Klee, letter to Alfred Kubin of April 10, 1916, in Paul Klee: Das Frühwerk, 1883–­1922, ed. Armin Zweite (Munich: Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, 1979), 90. 21. Ann Temkin, “Klee and the Avant-­Garde, 1912–­40,” in Paul Klee, ed. Carolyn Lanchner (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1987), 14–­20. 22. Hans Arp, “Sophie Taeuber,” in Unsern täglichen Traum . . . Erinnerungen, Dichtungen und Betrachtungen aus den Jahren 1914–­1954 (Zurich: Arche, 1955), 14. On Klee and Arp’s exchange of visits and further contacts in 1912–­13, see Klee, Tagebücher, nos. 913, 917. 23. Hugo Ball, Flight out of Time: A Dada Diary, ed. John Elderfield, trans. Ann Raimes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 100–­103. 24. Ibid., 103. 25. “‘Große Formate, Ölfarbe, Dekoration, Museums-­und Hauptwerk’—­für solche Dinge ist hier das Gewissen zu messerscharf.” Adolf Behne, “Paul Klee,” Die weissen Blätter 4, no. 5 (May 1917): 168. 26. See Hopfengart’s valuable discussion, Klee, vom Sonderfall zum Publikumsliebling, 54–­57. 27. “Und ob von den anderen Meistern Feininger, Klee, Muche Aktivität im Sinne einer streng real-­politischen, letzten Endes doch anti-­malerischen Gestaltung zu erwarten ist?” Adolf Behne, “Das Bauhaus Weimar,” Die Weltbühne 19, no. 2 (1923): 289. 28. Dennis Crockett, German Post-­Expressionism: The Art of the Great Disorder, 1918–­1924 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), especially 22–­24. 29. “1919–­20 ist ein Standpunkt erreicht, der dem großen Publikum nichts mehr zu sagen hat: koloristische und lineare Stenogramme, die—­siehe die dazwischen gesetzten Buchstaben!—­eine bedenkliche Ähnlichkeit mit Gaunerzinken haben. Aus diesen Experimenten führen die neuesten Arbeiten wieder heraus in transzendentales Gebiet mit zum Teil außerordentlichen Ergebnissen.” Review of Klee exhibition at the Nassauischer Kunstverein, Wiesbaden, Der Cicerone 14 (1922), 488. 30. See Jim M. Jordan, “Garten der Mysterien: Die Ikonographie von Paul Klees expressionistischer Periode,” and O. K. Werckmeister, “Klee im Ersten Weltkrieg,” in Paul Klee: Das Frühwerk, 1883–­1922, ed. Armin Zweite (Munich: Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, 1979), 227–­45 and 166–­226. 31. Klee, born in Switzerland to a Swiss mother and a German father, was legally a German citizen. See Franciscono, Paul Klee, 205.

32. Max Pulver, in Erinnerungen an Paul Klee, ed. Ludwig Grote (Munich: Prestel, 1959), 24. See also Werckmeister, Making of Paul Klee’s Career, 81. 33. Klee writes in an oft-­cited passage: “Die Farbe hat mich. . . . Das ist der glücklichen Stunde Sinn: ich und die Farbe sind eins. Ich bin Maler.” Tagebücher, 350. Subsequent references are cited in the text in this paragraph and the next. 34. “Nicht nur Maler mehr, sondern Kunstmaler. . . . Wir würden jetzt gerade eine Arbeit bekommen, an der wir unsere Kunst erproben könnten.” 35. See also Klee’s autobiographical text of 1919, which he wrote for Wilhelm Hausenstein. Ibid., 517. 36. “In der Schublade richte ich mich für Aquarellmalerei ein. Später habe ich als Zahlmeisteraspirant ein eigenes Zimmer. Die Arbeiten 17/18 sind fast alle da entstanden.” Ibid. 37. Werckmeister, Making of Paul Klee’s Career, 139, 143. Klee, Tagebücher, 418–­19. 38. “Ein leidenschaftlicher Zug in der Verklärung ist doch mit Produkt des äußeren Erlebens.” The version of this letter in Klee’s diary diverges slightly: “Ein leidenschaftlicher Zug nach Verklärung hängt doch wohl mit der grossen Veränderung der Lebensführung zusammen.” Klee, Tagebücher, 444. See also Klee’s letter to Alfred Kubin of April 10, 1916, which might be seen as elaborating on this statement, published in Das Frühwerk, 90. 39. In a journal entry of 1915, Klee sums up the relation between the kind of art he was trying to produce and the historical moment in which he found himself as follows: “Je schreckensvoller diese Welt (wie gerade heute) desto abstrakter die Kunst, während eine glückliche Welt eine diesseitige Kunst hervorbringt.” Tagebücher, no. 951. Klee’s formulation repeats the central opposition of Wilhelm Worringer’s dissertation Abstraction and Empathy (1906). Published by Piper in 1908, Worringer’s treatise became a frequent topic of discussion among artists associated with the Blaue Reiter; Klee appears to have had some limited familiarity with Worringer’s important work by the summer of 1911, shortly before he first came into contact with Kandinsky and Marc; see his letter to Lily, July 30, 1911, Briefe, 2:768. In 1915, Klee meditates in his journal on the differences between himself and the Swiss sculptor Hermann Haller, a friend of his youth; in 1916, he turns to those between himself and his friend Marc, killed in action near Verdun earlier in the year. In both these comparisons, Klee claims abstraction for himself over against what he describes as a propensity toward empathy in the other artists’ works and lives. Between 1914 and 1916, Klee’s early attempts to articulate an aesthetic of abstraction for himself are joined to attempts to formulate his own self as a kind of abstract being, a “kristallinischen Typ” or “Neutralgeschöpf.” Curiously, Klee figures himself not only at times as the fearful subject of the “urge to abstraction,” as described by Worringer, but even more often as the kind of inorganic object in which such a subject may find aesthetic pleasure and psychological refuge—­one might say that he speaks of a kind of self-­protective identification with the inorganic object when he writes, “Ich meinte zu sterben, Krieg und Tod. Kann ich denn sterben, ich Kristall? ich Kristall.” Klee, Tagebücher, no. 951. 40. For instance, in a letter of January 31, 1918, Klee recounts to Lily a conversation about his art in the following terms: “Heut sprach mich im Bureau ein Leutnant Österreicher an, ein netter Mann, der mir schon lang gut gefällt. Er wollte etwas von mir sehn. Ich konnte ihm aber nur die Reproduktion im ‘Kunstblatt’ zeigen. Da war er erst etwas verdutzt und bat um Aufklärung. Ich schnitt dann gleich die Frage der Weltanschauung an. . . . Wir kamen dann auf religiöse Fragen und auf den Krieg als Verwirklichung des Zusammenbruchs Europas.” Briefe, 2:902. 41. It is clear from Klee’s correspondence with his wife Lily that she tried hard, but unsuccessfully, to “convert” him to anthroposophy in 1917, sending him a book by Rudolf Steiner.

195

Notes to Pages 21–23

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Notes to Pages 23–25

“Also ein Einführungskurs in die Theosophie??? Ich gebe zu, daß viel Geistigkeit in der Sache liegt, aber noch viel mehr Unsinn und Dinge, die nicht allgemein gültig sein können. . . . Ich will nicht sagen, daß Schwindel im Spiel sei, aber die Gläubigen werden doch betrogen.” Briefe, 2:880, 882. See also Marcel Franciscono, review of Werckmeister, Making of Paul Klee’s Career, Art Bulletin 73, no. 4 (December 1991): 696–­97. 42. “Das Formale muß mit der Weltanschauung verschmelzen.” Klee, Tagebücher, 382. 43. Werckmeister, Making of Paul Klee’s Career, 100. 44. Ibid., 2; subsequent references appear in the text. 45. See also Hopfengart’s description of the “ebenso simplifizierende wie mystifizierende Stil” of the works exhibited at the 1917 Sturm exhibition: “Der neue Stil ist gekennzeichnet durch eine veränderte Malweise und eine neue Ikonographie. Die Bilder sind häufig absichtsvoll unsauber gemalt, mit breiten, groben Pinselstrichen, auf gewollt ungleichmäßiger Grundierung oder rohem Untergrund. Ihre Farbigkeit ist gegenüber den vorausgegangenen Arbeiten wesentlich intensiviert. . . . Die Bilder sind übersät mit rätselhaften Zeichen, Augen, Herzen, Pfeilen, Sonnen, Monden und Sternen—­einer Geheimschrift ähnlich—­, und die Titel suggerieren märchenhafte oder außerirdische Zusammenhänge.” Hopfengart, Klee, vom Sonderfall zum Publikumsliebling, 29–­30. 46. The description of the escape “preached” by artworks is taken from George Grosz and John Heartfield, “Der Kunstlump (The Art Scoundrel)” (1920), in Weimar Republic Sourcebook, ed. Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 484. On the debate provoked by “Der Kunstlump,” see Brigid Doherty, “The Work of Art and the Problem of Politics in Berlin Dada,” in special issue on Dada, ed. Leah Dickerman, October 105 (Summer 2003): 75–­78. I cite Doherty’s translation, 75. I have borrowed the description of Walden from Raoul Hausmann, “The German Philistine Gets Upset” (1919), in Kaes, Jay, and Dimendberg, Weimar Republic Sourcebook, 482. Franciscono also disputes Werckmeister’s discussion of Klee’s “fairytale landscapes” of this period by pointing out an apparent contradiction in Klee’s work of the late 1910s: on the one hand, Klee’s “dada-­like pictures” ridicule the “metaphysical pretensions of the expressionists,”while on the other hand, the landscapes “seem to uphold those very pretensions.” Franciscono argues that this need not lead us to view these landscapes as “cynical”; according to Franciscono, two different strains in Klee’s work, the “lyrical” (as in the landscapes) and the “sarcastic” (as in the “dada-­like” persiflages), coexist side by side throughout Klee’s career. Franciscono, Paul Klee, 227–­28. Later, and more convincingly (for the two strains in Klee’s art are indeed difficult to disentangle), Franciscono takes another tack: rather, he writes, than seeing these works as Werckmeister does, as a “regrettable compromise with public taste,” we should “recognize the ironic subversion introduced by their reductive elements”—­that is, the “simplified schemata” Klee uses to represent objects, following the example of children’s art. Marcel Franciscono, “Paul Klee and Children’s Art,” in Discovering Child Art: Essays on Childhood, Primitivism and Modernism, ed. Jonathan Fineberg (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 111–­12. 47. Klee, “Beitrag für den Sammelband Schöpferische Konfession (1920),” in Schriften: Rezensionen und Aufsätze, ed. Christian Geelhaar (Cologne: DuMont, 1976), 122. 48. Werckmeister, Making of Paul Klee’s Career, 180–­82. As Werckmeister writes, the status of the drawing as a programmatic self-­representation derives in part from the publication of a lithograph after it in the Münchner Blätter für Dichtung und Graphik of September 1919. 49. See ibid., 8–­9, on his aims and methods: “My historical inquiry into Klee’s career,” writes Werckmeister, “is intended as a critical challenge to the myth of his art, to the hagiography of his artistic personality. As an enterprise of cultural critique, it follows a tradition of which Theodor W. Adorno’s essay on Wagner is a famous example. However, today, in contrast to the time when Adorno wrote, the task of cultural critique can no longer be accom-

plished by negative theoretical reflections on the aesthetic experience. It has to proceed to an extensively documented assessment of the conditions under which Klee’s art was produced, an assessment that precedes and conditions any visual understanding of his works. Such an approach takes Klee’s career itself as a historical process enacted between the artist and his public, a process in which the works were not ends but functions” (9). The structure of Werckmeister’s book underscores this approach: each year under examination is allotted one chapter, each of which begins with a brief overview of the state of the German art market (the one exception is 1919, which is divided into two chapters by the crushing of the Soviet Republic of Bavaria) and then examines Klee’s activities and work largely as attempts to position himself in relation to the market. 50. Haxthausen, Paul Klee: The Formative Years, 489–­90. According to Haxthausen, it was in 1916 that Klee arrived at “a successful integration of line with color and color with fantasy” (489). For Haxthausen, what Klee achieved was a synthesis between his painting (and the formal concerns for which his paintings had been the privileged arena) and drawing (and the “poetry, humor, and inventiveness” for which his drawings had been the main outlet): “It is this definitive merging of two distinct and separate streams of artistic activity, rather than the quantity or quality of the works themselves, that makes 1916 the crucial and terminal turning point” (490). 51. Werckmeister, Making of Paul Klee’s Career, 132. 52. Ibid., 2. 53. The artist had previously appeared in only a small handful of Swiss publications when Hausenstein discussed Klee in two publications in 1914: Die bildende Kunst der Gegenwart (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-­Anstalt, 1923; first published 1914), 337–­38, and “Die Neue Münchner Secession,” Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration 34 (1914): 321–­36. 54. Many German expressionists ascribed special importance to the graphic arts, valuing the woodcut in particular as a popular medium of expressive immediacy. See Ida Katherine Rigby, “The Revival of Printmaking in Germany,” in German Expressionist Prints and Drawings, ed. Stephanie Barron et al. (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1989). Rigby quotes Gustav Hartlaub, who wrote in 1920 that printmaking “is no longer an art for lovers of minor masters’ artistic translations of technical refinements and variations. . . . It imperatively demands a new type of collector, who unhesitatingly aims more at artistic content and less at rarity and every possible collector’s value. . . . In the final analysis, print collecting today should no longer be carried out in a cabinet and in a private, capitalistic manner. Printmaking today is public and popular. . . . The print wants to fly, a broadsheet fluttering down out of the spiritual clouds on a vast populace with hands stretched upward!” (62–­63). As we will see, Hausenstein’s sense of the importance of the graphic for Klee’s work at around this time is sharply different from Hartlaub’s vision of graphic art here. 55. Wilhelm Hausenstein, Kairuan, oder eine Geschichte vom Maler Klee und von der Kunst dieses Zeitalters (Munich: Kurt Wolff, 1921). See also O. K. Werckmeister, “Kairuan: Wilhelm Hausensteins Buch über Paul Klee,” in Die Tunisreise: Klee, Macke, Moilliet, ed. Ernst-­Gerhard Güse (Stuttgart: Gerd Hatje, 1982), 76–­90. 56. Wilhelm Hausenstein, Die Kunst in diesem Augenblick (Munich: Hyperionverlag, 1920), 15–­16. Hausenstein, “Art at This Moment,” in Weimar Republic Sourcebook, ed. Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 479. 57. Klee, letter to Mathilde and Ida Klee, January 4, 1921, Briefe, 2:966. Klee, Tagebücher, 528–­29. Werckmeister, Making of Paul Klee’s Career, 236. Despite Klee’s praise for Hausenstein’s book, it is important to note that there were indeed, as Werckmeister emphasizes, tensions between the two men, who had known each other since 1913 (see Klee’s letter to

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his mother of April 4, 1913, Briefe, 2:77). Their interests came into conflict at several points: Hausenstein publicly opposed Klee’s proposed appointment at the Stuttgart art academy (discussed below, p. 144), while the assistance Klee gave to Zahn (as well as to Hausenstein), whose book Hausenstein saw as an attempt to preempt his own, pained the critic (in a letter to Klee, Hausenstein complains bitterly about Zahn’s book: “Mr. Westheim and his people do not want me to be the first to write about Klee. This glory must be reserved for the combine Kiepenheuer-­Goltz-­Westheim, etc. Of course it matters nothing to the business engineers of the new art that I stood up for you at a time when Mr. Zahn was still wrapped in his diapers, and when standing up for you still required special courage”; quoted in Werckmeister, Making of Paul Klee’s Career, 235–­36). Werckmeister’s analysis of these tensions is valuable (as is his publication of excerpts from the Klee-­Hausenstein correpondence), but one-­sided. It is true that, as he emphasizes, Klee distanced himself from Hausenstein’s book; I certainly do not want my emphasis on the latter to seem to imply that I would equate Hausenstein’s account of Klee’s work with Klee’s self-­understanding. In Klee’s long response to Hausenstein’s letter reproaching him for offering materials to Zahn (a draft of which may be found in the Tagebücher, 528–­30), Klee writes that he expects Hausenstein’s (not yet published) book to be a project very different from Zahn’s, “a work with artistic qualities of its own, or quite simply a poem. (You yourself called it after all a kind of novel.) I will only embody an historical aspect for this work”; quoted in Werckmeister, Making of Paul Klee’s Career, 236–­37. (When Hausenstein described his project to Klee in 1919, he wrote that “perhaps the book will become a half-­ novel”; quoted in ibid., 227.) Werckmeister then goes on to imply that Klee wished to distance himself from Hausenstein’s characterization of him as a “nihilistic draftsman of ruins” for careerist reasons, choosing instead to ally himself with Zahn’s publication, which “underscored just those principles of Klee’s art which Goltz had been able to observe as succeeding with the public in the past three years” (ibid., 236). But in making this case, Werckmeister neglects evidence of Klee’s appreciation of Hausenstein’s book. Klee made his preference for Hausenstein’s book over Zahn’s very clear in the letter to his mother and sister of January 4, 1921: “Das Buch ‘Paul Klee’ von Leopold Zahn ist heraus und liegt in den Läden auf . . . Das andere, noch viel schönere Kleebuch führt den Titel: ‘Kairuan oder eine Geschichte vom Maler Klee und von der Kunst dieses Zeitalters.’ Diese Schrift hat Wilhelm Hausenstein verfaßt . . . Er gab es mir sofort zum Lesen, ich finde es ganz ausgezeichnet” (Klee, Briefe, 2:966). This casts doubt on Werckmeister’s account of Klee as rejecting Hausenstein’s interpretation of his art; here, too, as in so many cases, we must see Klee as ambivalent. 58. Hausenstein, Kairuan, 134. Werckmeister, Making of Paul Klee’s Career, 226–­27, 235–­37. 59. “Sie werden in die Mitte gestellt, und um diese Mitte wird das Problem der Zeitkunst (und der Zeit) entwickelt”; Hausenstein quoted in Werckmeister, Making of Paul Klee’s Career, 227. 60. The lecture was published as Hausenstein, Die Kunst in diesem Augenblick (Munich: Hyperionverlag, 1920). See also Leopold Zahn’s commentary on it, “Apostata,” Der Ararat 7 (April 1920): 53. Werckmeister, Making of Paul Klee’s Career, 226–­27. Charles W. Haxthausen, “A Critical Illusion: ‘Expressionism’ in the Writings of Wilhelm Hausenstein,” in The Ideological Crisis of Expressionism: The Literary and Artistic German War Colony in Belgium, 1914–­1918, ed. Rainer Rumold and O. K. Werckmeister (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1990), 169–­91. Hausenstein’s repudiation of expressionism is discussed in more detail in chapter 3, pp. 143–44. 61. “Das Politische und Soziale . . . blieb ihm fremd, ja entgegengesetzt.” Hausenstein, Kairuan, 49; subsequent references appear in the text in this and the following two paragraphs.

62. “Einer, der militarisiert worden ist . . . einer, von dem man die uniformierte Konzession an eine Travestie des Kollektivismus erpreßte: das der nun vollends in die polare Entfernung der Subjektivität zurückschnellt, ist das primitivste der dialektischen Geschehnisse.” 63. “Dem mit Surrogaten in seinem Homunkeldasein erhaltenen Betrieb der Städte mit Trambahnen, Automaten und Filmtheatern.” Elsewhere, Hausenstein writes similarly of the “misery of the epoch, that it possessed neither people nor things”: “The objectlessness of Expressionism was ultimately no accident. The thing disappeared from painting as it disappeared from the world, and the subjugation of the object wanted to make a virtue of necessity. . . . Instead of things the sons of the twentieth century had surrogates. The surrogates had their engineers.” Hausenstein, “Art at This Moment,” 481; Hausenstein, Die Kunst in diesem Augenblick, 39–­40. 64. “Der Maler, der folgerichtig ist, muß heute ein Zeichner sein: denn der Breite des Malerischen wird kein Widerlager mehr geboten, wohl aber wird die Spekulation der Graphik angespornt. Der Malerzeichner, der konsequent ist, muß Ruinen zeichnen und malen.” 65. On the historical novelty of Bartsch’s distinction between graveur and peintre-­graveur, following closely on the invention of lithography in 1796, see Patricia Emison, The Simple Art: Printed Images in an Age of Magnificence (Durham, NH: The Art Gallery, University of New Hampshire, 2006), 2–­9. 66. “Betrieb Picasso [Kubismus] mit einer schier sportiven Manie, der gleichwohl die edle Tiefe nicht mangelte, in einem Atelier von Paris, so geschah das Gleiche nicht, aber das Ähnliche, Zeitgenössische, Wesengenössische in einer Münchner Malerstube, die nicht einmal ein Atelier, sondern das hofwärts gelegene Kabinett eines neuartigen peintre-­graveur war.” 67. On the oil-­transfer process, see p. 193n8. Klee discusses the advantages of lithographic transfer paper in a 1911 letter to Kubin, Das Frühwerk, 82. 68. “Züchtung des graphischen Genies.” Hausenstein, Kairuan, 47. 69. For instance, “Until about 1913 Klee was primarily a draftsman. This makes him virtually unique among the major artists of his generation who studied in Munich.” Franciscono, Paul Klee, 17. Tamara Trodd offers an illuminating discussion of how the oil-­transfer drawings and other aspects of Klee’s dealings with his own work served “to cast drawing as a point of origin for his work.” As Klee writes in a 1934 letter to his Paris dealer Kahnweiler, “Since 1920, I have no longer sold my drawings but keep them all myself, and give at most one drawing away as a special gift. Such is my regard for drawings.” Quoted in Tamara Trodd, “Drawing in the Archive: Paul Klee’s Oil-­Transfers,” Oxford Art Journal 31, no. 1 (March 2008): 7–­8. 70. “Um der Konsequenz willen nicht mehr Bilder, sondern nur noch Blätter sein können.” Hausenstein, Kairuan, 95. 71. The relation between Klee and Dada was an issue for critics at this time. See, for instance, Leopold Zahn’s comment in an anti-­Dadaist polemic: “Hier und da scheint es, daß sich der Dadaismus ernst nimmt. Dann wird er sich selbst untreu. Verwirrend mag es sein, daß sich wirklich schöpferische Kräfte, wie Klee und Grosz in seinen Bezirk verirrt haben,” writes Zahn, and goes on to emphasize that these two artists (both represented by Goltz’s gallery, which also published the journal in which Zahn’s polemic appeared) are not actually Dadaists at all. Leopold Zahn, “Dadaismus oder Klassizismus?,” Der Ararat 7 (April 1920): 51. 72. Hausenstein, Kairuan, 104. 73. “Über das Licht” (trans. Klee), in Schriften: Rezensionen und Aufsätze, ed. Christian Geelhaar (Cologne: DuMont, 1976), 116–­17; helpfully, Geelhaar also includes Delaunay’s original French text on pp. 170–­71, so that the reader can see just how free Klee’s translation is. 74. Klee essay in Schöpferische Konfession, ed. Kasimir Edschmid (Berlin: Erich Reiss, 1920), 28–­40; and same essay also as “Beitrag für den Sammelband Schöpferische Konfession (1920)” in Schriften: Rezensionen und Aufsätze, ed. Christian Geelhaar (Cologne: DuMont,

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1976), 118–­22. I will refer to Klee’s contribution henceforth in the text as “Graphic Art,” the title he gave his 1918 draft (in Schriften, 171–­75), as his 1920 publication is untitled. Klee also referred to the essay as his “Aufsatz über Graphik”: Briefe, 2:943. As Werckmeister points out, while Edschmid did specifically request that Klee write a statement on drawing, plenty of the anthology’s contributors ignored such requests, and Klee’s “definition of pictorial art as such in terms of graphic art,” the longest contribution published, far exceeds any attempt to explain it simply in terms of Klee’s following Edschmid’s instructions. Werckmeister also compares the essay for Edschmid with the earlier Delaunay translation to measure the distance between Klee’s work before and after the 1916 shift, which he sees as a “retreat.” Werckmeister, Making of Paul Klee’s Career, 131–­32. 75. Robert Delaunay, “La Lumière,” in Klee, Schriften: Rezensionen und Aufsätze, ed. Christian Geelhaar (Cologne: DuMont, 1976), 170–­71. 76. “Den Typus eines selbstständigen Bildes schuf, das ohne Motiv aus der Natur ein ganz abstraktes Formdasein führt. Ein Gebilde von plastischem Leben, nota bene, von einem Teppich fast ebensoweit entfernt, wie eine Bachsche Fuge.” Klee, “Die Ausstellung des Modernen Bundes im Kunsthaus Zürich” (1912), in Schriften: Rezensionen und Aufsätze, ed. Christian Geelhaar (Cologne: DuMont, 1976), 108. 77. Compare, for instance, Erwin von Busse, “Die Kompositionsmittel bei Robert Delaunay,” in Der Blaue Reiter, ed. Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc, Dokumentarische Neuausgabe, ed. Klaus Lankheit (Munich: Piper, 1984), 96–­102. 78. Klee, “Über das Licht,” 116. Subsequent references are cited in the text in the following paragraph. 79. “Solange die Kunst vom Gegenstand nicht loskommt, bleibt sie Beschreibung, Litteratur [sic], erniedrigt sie sich in der Verwendung mangelhafter Ausdrucksmittel.” A comparison of Klee’s translation with Delaunay’s original (“Si l’Art s’apparente à l’Objet, il devient descriptif, divisionniste, littéraire”) shows clearly that Klee, as he translates, not only reformulates but also simply omits what is less relevant to him. See “La Lumière” in the original French in Schriften: Rezensionen und Aufsätze, ed. Christian Geelhaar (Cologne: DuMont, 1976), 170–­71. 80. The paintings in question are Kakteen hinter Butzenscheiben (1913, 122), Blumensteg (1913, 124), Pflanzen in den Bergen (1913, 192), Blumenbeet (1913, 193), and an untitled painting that Klee did not register in his oeuvre-­catalogue, numbered 1108 in the catalogue raisonné. 81. Klee, “Die Ausstellung des Modernen Bundes im Kunsthaus Zürich,” 108. 82. Klee, “Beitrag für den Sammelband Schöpferische Konfession (1920),” in Schriften: Rezensionen und Aufsätze, ed. Christian Geelhaar (Cologne: DuMont, 1976), 121. Subsequent references are cited in the text in this paragraph and the next. 83. See also K. Porter Aichele’s brief discussion of Klee’s critique of Lessing in the “Graphic Art” essay in Paul Klee, Poet/Painter (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2006), 8 and 10, and Beate Allert’s in “Reconceptualizing a Pictorial Turn: Lessing, Hoffmann, Klee, and Elements of Avant-­Garde Language,” in Breaking the Disciplines: Reconceptions in Knowledge, Art, and Culture, ed. Martin L. Davies and Marsha Meskimmon (London: I. B. Tauris, 2003), 211–­12. 84. David E. Wellbery, “Aesthetic Media: The Structure of Aesthetic Theory before Kant,” in Regimes of Description: In the Archive of the Eighteenth Century, ed. John Bender and Michael Marrinan (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 200. Subsequent citations appear in the text. 85. Die Wanze is transcribed, reproduced, and richly annotated in Klee, Schriften: Rezensionen und Aufsätze, ed. Christian Geelhaar (Cologne: DuMont, 1976), 18–­36, 142–­45. 86. “I. Du sollst an Aristotelis Unfehlbarkeit glauben. II. Ebenfalls an diejenige Lessings

seines Propheten (mit Ausnahme von Kap. 6 [Lessing irrt sich] des Laokoon).” Ibid., 29. 87. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, trans. Edward Allen McCormick (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 40–­41. Subsequent references are given in the text. 88. On this struggle in Klee’s work and writings during these years, see below, pp. 44–46; Haxthausen, Paul Klee: The Formative Years, 148–­60, 242–­5 4; and Franciscono, Paul Klee, 40–­ 41, 74. 89. “Auf diese Fundamente hat schon Lessing aufmerksam gemacht . . . aber weil sich Lessing in manchem Detail (nie aber in einem Prinzip!) geirrt hat, hat er überhaupt unrecht.” Letter to Lily of September 30, 1903. Paul Klee, Briefe an die Familie, 1893–­1940, ed. Felix Klee, vol. 1, 1893–­1906 (Cologne: DuMont, 1979), 350–­51. 90. “Den ‘Laokoon’ Lessings muß jeder gebildete Mensch kennen. Wenn Du einmal Gelegenheit und Zeit hast das Buch vorzunehmen, so mußt Du mich um einen kleinen sehr guten Auszug bitten, den uns seiner Zeit jener Doktor von Nervenreiz gegeben hat.” Ibid., 354. 91. “In Lessings Laokoon, an dem wir einmal jugendliche Denkversuche verzettelten, wird viel Wesens aus dem Unterschied von zeitlicher zu räumlicher Kunst gemacht. Und bei genauerem Zusehen ist’s doch nur gelehrter Wahn. Denn auch der Raum ist ein zeitlicher Begriff.” Klee, “Beitrag für den Sammelband Schöpferische Konfession (1920),” in Schriften, 119. 92. “Wir sind ja schon von der Schule so durch und durch infiziert. Wir lasen Laokoon, wir kannten und werteten Bilder und Museen, bevor wir sie gesehen hatten.” Klee, “Die Ausstellung des Modernen Bundes im Kunsthaus Zürich,” in Schriften, 108. 93. “Man hat mehr von den Bildern, wenn man da und dort den Katalog konsultiert. Da steht z. B. zu lesen: “Wenn man ein Fenster öffnet, tritt der ganze Lärm der Strasse, die Bewegung und Gegenständlichkeit der Dinge draußen plötzlich in das Zimmer”, oder “Die Macht der Straße, das Leben, der Ehrgeiz, die Angst, die man in der Stadt beobachten kann, das erdrückende Gefühl, das der Lärm verursacht.” In der Tat, es sind solche Dinge mit vollem Effekt wirklich ausgedrückt (heiliger Laokoon!).” Klee, “Rezensionen aus Die Alpen (VII. Jahrgang, 1912/13),” in Schriften: Rezensionen und Aufsätze, ed. Christian Geelhaar (Cologne: DuMont, 1976), 113. 94. On Klee’s April 1912 trip to Paris, see Tagebücher, no. 910. 95. In 1910, Julius Meier-­Graefe published monographs on Cézanne (Paul Cézanne [Munich, 1910]) and Marées (Hans von Marées, sein Leben und sein Werk [Munich, 1910]). 96. On viewing the Cézannes displayed at the 1909 spring exhibition of the Munich Secession, Klee writes in his diary: “Das ist nun der Lehrmeister par excellence, viel mehr Lehrer als van Gogh.” Tagebücher, 294. Klee showed Meier-­Graefe some of his work when Meier-­Graefe was in Munich for the Munich Secession’s Marées exhibition in late January 1909. Ibid., 288. 97. “Gehe lernbegierig zur Schule, bei Lehrer Meier-­Gräfe oder bei Lehrer Karl Scheffler zu erfahren, wie ich es machen muss um ein guter Künstler zu werden.” Ibid., no. 809. Karl Scheffler’s lack of interest in the glass paintings Klee sent him in 1907 appears to have particularly frustrated Klee; see ibid., nos. 786 and 790, and p. 497. 98. “Wenn die Natur nun selber keiner Persönlichkeit gehorcht . . . sondern alles an ihr Gewöhnung, Gelegenheit und Anpassung ist, dann desto besser. Wenn es aber einen Gott giebt? (Bscht!!) Der Herr Lehrer meint: Was kümmert dich das Wesen Gottes, sieh dir eins seiner Blumenbeete an, das genügt. Ich will ja brav sein, Herr Lehrer!” Ibid., no. 809. Part of the reason why Klee seems here to set up an opposition between religious speculation and working “after nature” might be found in a very early letter to Lily of August 20, 1901, in which Klee makes a clear link between the “philosophical” quality of his works—­they are, he says, “Szenen aus meinem Denken”—­and his preoccupation with religious questions at a mo-

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ment when he was trying to clarify his wavering views on the subject. Klee, Briefe, 1:144. 99. Ibid., 498. Besides reading the letters, he also saw two Munich exhibitions of van Gogh’s work in 1908; one might infer from his 1908 diary entries that the lesson he took from van Gogh was that one could work from motifs in nature while using line as a “selbständiges bildnerisches Element”; see Klee, Tagebücher, nos. 806, 816, and especially 842. 100. “Das Speculative [eine Art expressionistische Sackgasse] mancher meiner Arbeiten von 1907 wird in ein scharfes Licht gerückt. Zur völligen Gesundung Vorsatz vor die Natur zurückzukehren. . . . Die Gesundung vom Speculativen teilweise dem Einfluß der Bücher Meier-­Graefes und Schefflers verdankt.” Ibid., 498. Klee added the phrase in brackets as a footnote to his manuscript. Compare also ibid., 514. 101. In a 1905 diary entry, Klee notes that he read both Meier-­Graefe’s Der Fall Böcklin and Manet und sein Kreis. Tagebücher, 230. Klee makes no mention of particular books by Karl Scheffler in his published letters or in his diaries, and only one much later book by Scheffler (Der Geist der Gotik, published in 1917) was in his library when it was inventoried in 1953. But the way in which Klee writes about Scheffler (as well as the timing) makes the critic’s Der Deutsche und seine Kunst: Eine notgedrungene Streitschrift (Munich: R. Piper, 1907) a very likely candidate. 102. “Später kam mir der in der Schweiz damals für wichtig und modern gehaltene Böcklin sehr schön vor, neben dem Kitsch aus obigen Journalen.” Klee, Tagebücher, 505. 103. Speculation, derived from the Latin specio, “to look,” is, writes Rodolphe Gasché, “a word that has fallen into deep disrepute since Martin Luther’s criticism of system-­oriented scholastic theology. Since then the pejorative sense of speculative has referred primarily to those propositions of Christian theology that evasively transcend the given, or reality, and, more broadly, to the construction of idle thoughts about idle subjects.” Rodolphe Gasché, The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 42. 104. “Solange man vom Bilde einen geschlossenen, harmonischen Kosmos verlangt, der . . . ein gesetzmäßiges Abbild der Anschauung des Künstlers gibt, ist das Selbstporträt mit dem Tod unendlich schwache Kunst. Dagegen meldet es wie Böcklin im Jahre 1872 ungefähr aussah und gibt im übrigen eine sonderbare Situation . . . Der Betrachter mischt sich in die Sache; und man kann es ihm nicht verdenken, denn nichts anderes außer dem Sinnbildlichen tritt entscheidend in dem Bilde hervor . . . Durch diese Zutat des Symbolischen wird also der Blick vom Werke abgezogen, und so entsteht scheinbar etwas der Wirkung Ähnliches, die wir als wesentlich für den Kunstgenuß fanden . . . Aber, ist denn das wirklich Seele, was sich an der phantastischen Selbstbiographie dieses Porträts ergötzt? . . .  Ist es nicht mehr eine Phantasie, was hier gelockt wird, ein Spiel, über dessen tatsächlicher Beweglichkeit man das mangelnde Ziel vergißt? . . .  Zum Denken regt dieses Selbstporträt an  . . . Es erfüllt weder den Selbstzweck des Denkens, denn es stählt nicht den Denkapparat, sondern verweichlicht, schwächt ihn; und es erfüllt keinen Kunstzweck, denn Kunstgenuß hat nichts mit Denken zu tun.” Julius Meier-­Graefe, Der Fall Böcklin und die Lehre von den Einheiten (Stuttgart: J. Hoffmann, 1905), 96–­99. 105. “Vor dem Bilde aber glaubt [der gebildete Deutsche] träumen zu dürfen. Wenn er vor einer Landschaft im Geiste eine Badereise erlebt, denkt er, künstlerisch zu fühlen; spinnt er, angeregt durch eine malerische Schilderung, die Situation dramatisch, also zeitlich aus, so ist er überzeugt, das Wesen der Raumkunst zu erfassen.” Scheffler, Der Deutsche und seine Kunst, 51. 106. “Das ist eine alte Meinung, mit der sich Lessing schon auseinanderzusetzen versuchte und die doch immer wieder zur Diskussion gestellt wird. . . . Das Malerische kann nie anders als räumlich, also bildmäßig wirken; es setzt die Unveränderlichkeit in der Zeit voraus.

In dem Sinne nämlich, als das Vorher oder Nachher des dargestellten Augenblicks nie interessieren darf. Sobald ein Gedanke über den Rahmen hinausschweift, ist das Bild schlecht oder der Betrachter minderwertig.” Ibid. 107. “Die ölriechende Pinselgöttin umarme ich bloss, weil sie eben meine Frau ist.” In German, Pinsel means “nitwit” as well as “paintbrush.” Letter from Klee to Hans Bloesch, October 10, 1898. “Ich will kein so verflucht einseitiger Maler werden, ich will ein Künstler werden.” Letter to Bloesch, November 27, 1898, quoted in Glaesemer, Handzeichnungen I, 74–­ 75; the October 10 letter is on p. 74. 108. “Weißt du, was ich jetzt vorläufig werden möchte: ein Maler? Nein! bloß ein ganz communer Zeichner.” Letter to Bloesch, November 28, 1898, quoted in ibid., 78. On Klee’s discontent with painting, see Marcel Franciscono, “Paul Klee um die Jahrhundertwende,” in Paul Klee: Das Frühwerk, 1883–­1922, ed. Armin Zweite (Munich: Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, 1979), 46–­47. 109. Klee, Briefe, 1:254. Klee writes as well that the kind of “poetry” in question has changed, from the lyrical to the satirical. 110. In his Paul Klee: The Formative Years (148–­60, 242–­55), Haxthausen gives a valuable account of Klee’s struggles with this contradiction. But whereas his account traces a narrative of development that arrives at a final resolution in the fusing of the plastic and poetic in Klee’s drawings from 1912–­13 onward (378) and watercolors from 1916 onward, I would emphasize how productive the contradiction itself was for Klee. 111. Klee, Tagebücher, 660. At this early moment, before Klee’s encounter with Meier-­ Graefe’s writing later in the year, it’s not clear who Klee’s interlocutors are in his dispute with the “dogma” of “‘pure’ plastic art.” At this juncture, Haxthausen chiefly discusses the critic and connoisseur Adolf Bayersdorfer and the sculptor and theorist Adolf von Hildebrand. Haxthausen argues that Klee read Hildebrand’s highly influential Das Problem der Form in der bildenden Kunst (1893): Paul Klee: The Formative Years, 156–­57; it is certain that he read Alexander Heilmeyer’s Adolf Hildebrand (Bielefeld and Leipzig: Velhagen & Klasing, 1902) (Klee, Briefe, 1:252). A diary entry of June 22, 1902, in which Klee tries on Hildebrand’s artistic ideal of the relief-­like rendering of a three-­dimensional body as a two-­dimensional form (as well as theories of the expressive power of form as grounded in the subject’s empathic projection of the self, widespread in late nineteenth-­century German art theory) shows, as Franciscono has noted, Hildebrand’s influence: Franciscono, Paul Klee, 44. Klee does not appear, however, to grapple with Hildebrand’s ideas in any detail, perhaps because the sculptor does not dwell much on any conflict between “idea” and “form”; Wilde, on the other hand, is indisputably important for Klee both for offering a model of the artwork as pure, autonomous form and for suggesting ways of complicating that model; see Klee’s letter to Lily of February 9, 1905 (Briefe, 1:479–­80). 112. Klee, Briefe, 1:648. 113. Klee was personally acquainted with both artists, both of whom had memorial exhibitions in 1912 (Brühlmann at Heinrich Thannhauser’s Munich gallery in the summer, Welti at the Kunsthaus Zürich in the fall). Klee reviewed both memorial exhibitions for Die Alpen; the diary entry elaborates on the published reviews. Schriften, 9, 102–­4, 111–­12, 163n45, 164n47, 166n59. 114. “Einen gemütvollen Spruch schrieb er auch noch drunter, und der Halbkitsch war da.” Klee, Tagebücher, 328. 115. “Hans Brühlmann war zu sehr mit Meier-­Graefe eins. Er ließ sich seine Böcklin-­ Verehrung mit dem Stock wegprügeln. . . . Der Nichtphantastische blieb eng im ‘neuen’ Gleis. Es folgen selbstverständlich Marées und Cézanne. Brühlmann wird Jünger, horcht auf!” Ibid. 116. Klee, “Beitrag für den Sammelband Schöpferische Konfession (1920),” in Schriften, 119.

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Subsequent citations are cited in the text for the next two paragraphs. 117. The beholder “bringt Teil für Teil in die Sehgrube, und um sich auf ein neues Stück einzustellen, muß er das alte verlassen.” 118. “Ohne die Wahrnehmungsmöglichkeiten des Gesichtssinnes wären wir bei einer Successiv-­Bewegung stehen geblieben.” Klee, “Über das Licht,” 116. 119. “Wer ein Kunstwerk verstehen und genießen will, der gehe womöglich ohne Begleitung und kaufe sich einen Stuhl, wenn solcher zu haben ist, setze sich in richtiger Distanz und suche, in Schweigen verharrend, wenigstens für eine Viertelstunde sein verehrliches Ich zu vergessen.” Anselm Feuerbach, “Zur Betrachtung eines Kunstwerkes,” in Ein Vermächtnis, ed. Henriette Feuerbach (Berlin: Meyer & Jessen, 1913), 276. Klee read Feuerbach’s book in June 1902 (Tagebücher, no. 424). Perhaps we might see an allusion to Feuerbach’s “Stuhl” for contemplating artworks, or, more broadly, to the frequent use of the chair (but usually the armchair) as a figure for art as a restorative leisure activity, a way to rest and recover from work (Joseph Masheck, “The Carpet Paradigm: Critical Prolegomena to a Theory of Flatness,” Arts Magazine 51, no. 1 [September 1976]: 97–­98), in Raoul Hausmann’s demand “Fort mit allen Stühlen” in “The German Philistine Gets Upset,” 483. 120. “Beine werden müd vom langen Stehen. Also, Spielraum: Zeit.” 121. Rensselaer W. Lee, Ut Pictura Poesis: The Humanistic Theory of Painting (New York: W. W. Norton, 1967), 21. 122. W. J. T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 103. 123. “Dem gleich einem weidenden Tier abtastenden Auge des Beschauers sind im Kunstwerk Wege eingerichtet.” 124. Mitchell, Iconology, 100. 125. Lessing, Laocoön, 5. Translation slightly altered. 126. “Entwickeln wir, machen wir unter Anlegung eines topographischen Planes eine kleine Reise ins Land der besseren Erkenntnis.” 127. “Über den toten Punkt hinweggesetzt sei die erste bewegliche Tat (Linie). Nach kurzer Zeit Halt, Atem zu holen. (Unterbrochene oder bei mehrmaligem Halt gegliederte Linie.) Rückblick, wie weit wir schon sind. (Gegenbewegung.) Im Geiste den Weg dahin und dorthin erwägen (Linienbündel). Ein Fluß will hindern, wir bedienen uns eines Bootes (Wellenbewegung).” 128. Wittgenstein’s famous “duck-­rabbit” drawing—­the mascot of “seeing as”—­ descended from an illustration published in 1892 in the Munich humor magazine Die fliegende Blätter, to which Klee’s teacher Franz von Stuck regularly contributed; see Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001), 165–­68, and W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 49–­56. 129. “Dies ist, was Züchtung der reinen Form, auch Absolutismus des Mittels genannt wurde. . . . Zusehends verwandelt das Unbedingte des Mittels sich in den Ausdruck eines Gegenständlichen—­oder jedenfalls einer Bedeutung, die sich nicht im Auslauf, in der Beharrung, im Rückzug eines Mittels erschöpft, sondern den Sinn einer irgendwie gearteten Stofflichkeit umfaßt. . . . Das Mittel also wirklich wieder Mittel: Vermittler, Mittelsmann, Zwischenglied; nicht Zweck und Ziel. Das Mittel Hieroglyphe, Rune, auch Stenogramm—­ Engschrift, Abkürzung. Stenogramm, das kaum ein andrer erlernen könnte.” Hausenstein, Kairuan, 118–­20. Hausenstein seems to play here on a phrase Klee used in a journal entry of 1910, “pure cultivation of the means” (Reinzucht der Mittel). Klee, Tagebücher, 302. But there is a telling slip in Hausenstein’s version of it: the text in the body of Hausenstein’s book actually reads “Dies ist, was Züchtigung der reinen Form, auch Absolutismus des Mittels genannt

wurde”—­“This is what is called castigation of pure form, even absolutism of the means.” It is only the page of errata at the end that tells us to read Züchtung (cultivation) instead of Züchtigung (castigation). 130. “Synchromische Aktion ist als eigentlicher und einziger Vorwurf (sujet) der Malerei zu betrachten.” Klee, “Über das Licht,” 117. 131. “An sich zur Abstraction mit noch größerem Recht führend mußte sie in unserem Zeitalter erhöhte Wertschätzung erfahren.” Klee, in Schriften: Rezensionen und Aufsätze, ed. Christian Geelhaar (Cologne: DuMont, 1976), 171. 132. Although painting served as the chief medium in Kandinsky’s theory and practice of abstraction—­the two main parts of On the Spiritual in Art are titled “General Remarks” and “Painting”—­this does not imply that the graphic arts were unimportant for him. See Peg Weiss’s discussion of the role that Kandinsky’s woodcuts from 1902 through 1913 played as “the bridge over which Kandinsky was able to advance from ‘decorative’ art to abstraction”: Kandinsky in Munich: The Formative Jugendstil Years (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), 126–­32. 133. Klee, “Beitrag für den Sammelband Schöpferische Konfession (1920),” in Schriften, 95. 134. “Die Elemente sollen Formen ergeben, nur ohne sich dabei zu opfern. Sich selber bewahrend.” Ibid., 119. 135. “Ein Tausendkünstler wird ja, die elemente vergewaltigend durch ihre Häufung gewisse Täuschungen hervorrufen. Aber das ist keine reine Kunst mehr, weil das Element geopfert wird und also verschwindet.” Klee, Schriften, 171–­72. 136. “Das Wesen der Graphik verführt leicht und mit Recht zur Abstraktion. . . . Je reiner die graphische Arbeit, das heißt, je mehr Gewicht auf die der graphischen Darstellung zu grunde liegenden Formelemente gelegt ist, desto mangelhafter die Rüstung zur realistischen Darstellung sichtbarer Dinge.” Klee, “Beitrag für den Sammelband Schöpferische Konfession (1920),” 118. 137. Hausenstein, in a passage on how Klee’s elective affinity with the tradition of the peintre-­graveur inflected his growing awareness of modernist painting (much of Hausenstein’s book is structured as a story of how the young artist gradually came to know French painting from impressionism through Delaunay), models Klee’s turn to the graphic along these lines, suggesting that Klee first grasped the “exclusivity of the painterly” by looking at Cézanne and later counterbalanced or opposed that exclusivity, that purity, with a notion of the graphic as a medium that could be treated similarly: “He placed opposite the exclusivity of the painterly, which he had grasped with Cézanne, the exclusivity of the draftsmanly: Kubin, the graphic artist.” “So breitete der Malerzeichner seine Studien und Erkenntnisse aus. . . . Er stellte der bei Cézanne begriffenen Ausschließlichkeit des Malerischen eines Tages die Ausschließlichkeit des Zeichnerischen gegenüber: Kubin, den Graphiker.” Hausenstein, Kairuan, 77. 138. Eric Rothstein, “‘Ideal Presence’ and the ‘Non Finito’ in Eighteenth-­Century Aesthetics,” Eighteenth-­Century Studies 9, no. 3 (Spring 1976): 331. Subsequent references are cited in the text for the next two paragraphs. 139. Roger de Piles, “Un Traité du peintre parfait” (1699), quoted in Rothstein, “‘Ideal Presence,’” 326. See also Wendelin A. Guentner, “British Aesthetic Discourse, 1780–­1830: The Sketch, the Non Finito, and the Imagination,” in special issue on Romanticism, guest editor Nina Athanassoglou-­Kallmyer, Art Journal 52, no. 2 (Summer 1993): 40–­47. 140. Along these lines, Rothstein implicitly criticizes Rensselaer Lee for not historicizing enough when he speaks, says Rothstein, “scornfully” of “dreaming in a literary manner of the thoughts and feelings of the figures [in a painting] as if they were characters in a novel or drama” in his discussion of Lessing. Rothstein, “‘Ideal Presence,’” 317; Lee, Ut Pictura Poesis, 66.

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141. “So angesehen, als eine Sammlung von künstlerischen Gedankenfragmenten, ein Vorrat von schöpferischen Kunstideen, und nicht bloß als eine der Farbe beraubte und also höchst unvollkommene Nachbildung von Gemälden, lassen sich Kupferstiche als eine wesentliche Vorübung und Bedingung der gesamten Kunst, vollkommen rechtfertigen und billigen.” Friedrich Schlegel, “Zweiter Nachtrag alter Gemälde,” in Kritische Friedrich-­Schlegel-­ Ausgabe, ed. Hans Eichner, vol. 4 (Munich: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1959), 95. Translation by E. J. Millington in Art in Theory, 1648–­1815, ed. Charles Harrison, Paul Wood, and Jason Gaiger (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 927. Translation slightly modified. Schlegel’s discussion was written in 1804, first published in Europa in 1805, and revised by Schlegel for his Sämmtlichen Werken in the 1820s. 142. “Das Wesen der Graphik verführt leicht und mit Recht zur Abstraktion. Schemen-­ und Märchenhaftigkeit des imaginären Charakters ist gegeben und äußert sich zugleich mit großer Präzision. Je reiner die graphische Arbeit, das heißt, je mehr Gewicht auf die der graphischen Darstellung zu grunde liegenden Formelemente gelegt ist, desto mangelhafter die Rüstung zur realistischen Darstellung sichtbarer Dinge.” Klee, “Beitrag für den Sammelband Schöpferische Konfession (1920),” 118. 143. This is, of course, a commonplace about Klee’s work in general. But the way in which it is most often spoken of, as Klee’s refusal to let himself be bullied by dogmatic abstractionists, fails to comprehend the logic of Klee’s graphic abstraction. 144. “Ein Blitz am Horizont (die Zickzacklinie).” Klee, “Beitrag für den Sammelband Schöpferische Konfession (1920),” 119. 145. “Aus abstrakten Formelementen wird über ihre Vereinigung zu konkreten Wesen oder zu abstrakten Dingen wie Zahlen und Buchstaben hinaus zum Schluß ein formaler Kosmos geschaffen.” Ibid., 121. 146. As Franciscono points out, the Kandinsky text Klee singles out for praise is a rather “conventional idealist and symbolist defense of the autonomy of art.” Paul Klee, 172. 147. “So weit bin ich noch nicht als Schriftsteller, ich operiere noch mit einer gewissen Nervosität, weil noch nichts überwunden ist. Abgesehen davon, daß ich überhaupt komplizierter veranlagt bin.” Klee, Briefe, 2:937. 148. Wassily Kandinsky, “Painting as Pure Art,” in Complete Writings on Art, ed. Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter Vergo, vol. 1, 1901–­1921 (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982), 351–­53. See also Mark A. Cheetham, The Rhetoric of Purity: Essentialist Theory and the Advent of Abstract Painting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 139–­43. 149. “Ein Wort wie ‘das Kunstwerk wird zum Subject’ sagt ja alles.” Klee, Tagebücher, 466–­ 67. Quoting Kandinsky, “Painting as Pure Art,” 1:350. 150. Wassily Kandinsky, Point and Line to Plane, trans. Howard Dearstyne and Hilla Rebay (New York: Dover, 1979), 64–­65. 151. Kandinsky, “Painting as Pure Art,” 1:349, 353; Wassily Kandinsky, On the Spiritual in Art, in Complete Writings on Art, ed. Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter Vergo, vol. 1, 1901–­1921 (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982), 161–­95. See also Thierry de Duve, Pictorial Nominalism: On Marcel Duchamp’s Passage from Painting to the Readymade, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 120–­23. 152. Geelhaar speculates that this passage may have been drafted with publication in mind (“Journal intime oder Autobiographie?,” 248.) See also Werckmeister, Making of Paul Klee’s Career, 99–­100. 153. “Die Philosophie habe eine Neigung zur Kunst; anfangs war ich erstaunt, was sie alles sahen. Denn ich hatte nur an die Form gedacht, das Übrige hatte sich von selber ergeben. Das erwachte Bewußtsein, dieses ‘Übrige,’ hat mir indessen viel genützt und größere Variabilität im Schaffen ermöglicht. Ich konnte sogar nun wieder zum Illustrator von Ideen werden,

nachdem ich mich formal durchgerungen hatte. Und nun sah ich gar keine abstrakte Kunst mehr.” Klee, Tagebücher, 440. 154. Ibid., no. 827. 155. Ibid., no. 27. 156. For a good example in Klee’s Bauhaus teaching materials, see Zentrum Paul Klee, “Bildnerische Form-­und Gestaltungslehre,” accessed June 16, 2014, http://www.kleegestaltungslehre.zpk.org/ee/ZPK/BG/2012/04/01/047/. Charles W. Haxthausen offers an illuminating discussion of Klee’s accounts of the making of his works as a two-­step process in his “Zur ‘Bildsprache’ des Spätwerkes,” in Paul Klee: Das Schaffen im Todesjahr, ed. Josef Helfenstein and Stefan Frey (Stuttgart: Gerd Hatje, 1990), 29–­31. Haxthausen proposes that they are a simplification for the sake of a public that Klee saw as unfortunately fixated on representation. In this essay, Haxthausen draws a very important connection between Klee’s understanding of his art as neither expressive nor communicative, which underlies these accounts, and his understanding of the place of the artwork in modernity as a functionless, thing-­like commodity (34)—­both of which differentiate Klee sharply from his peers in the German avant-­garde. 157. Haxthausen, “Zur ‘Bildsprache’ des Spätwerkes,” 29. 158. Osamu Okuda, “Paul Klee: Buchhaltung, Werkbezeichnung und Werkprozess,” in Radical Art History: Internationale Anthologie; Subject O. K. Werckmeister, ed. Wolfgang Kersten (Zurich: ZIP Verlag, 1997), 379–­90. 159. “Nun musste der Dichter in meinem bildnerischen Werk abtreten, weil ich zur Zeit Puritaner spielen muss. Ich sehe überall nur Architektur, Linienrhythmen, Flächenrhythmen.” Klee, Tagebücher, no. 429. 160. Okuda, “Paul Klee,” 380. Subsequent references are cited in the text for the next two paragraphs. 161. I borrow Glaesemer’s words from Handzeichnungen I, 140. 162. Klee, Tagebücher, no. 822. 163. Wassily Kandinsky, “Reminiscences,” in Complete Writings on Art, ed. Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter Vergo, vol. 1, 1901–­1921 (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982), 369–­70. 164. In his “‘Abstract with Memories’: Klee’s ‘Auratic’ Pictures,” Charles W. Haxthausen draws on Walter Benjamin and on Alois Riegl to give a brilliant account of this work as presenting itself as a parody of an aged auratic object. In Paul Klee: Philosophical Vision; From Nature to Art, ed. John Sallis (Chestnut Hill, MA: McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, 2012), 63–­66. 165. “Dem Maler fiel wohl selbst kein Titel für diese wahllose Farbenanhäufung ein. Einzelnes liess ich mir eingehen, wenn darunter stünde ‘Farbskizze für einen modernen Teppich.’ Aber weit gefehlt! Die Leute, die hier ausstellen, sind sich zu gut, sich mit ‘Kunstgewerblern’ auf eine Stufe zu lassen. Sie schaffen freie, reine, hohe Kunst—­meinen sie.” Georg Jakob Wolf, “Von Ausstellungen. München,” Die Kunst für Alle (October 13, 1910): 70; quoted in Okuda, “Paul Klee,” 383. 166. “Sie werden diese gefährliche Probe aushalten, und nicht als Teppiche, sondern als ‘Bilder.’” Franz Marc, Schriften, ed. Klaus Lankheit (Cologne: DuMont, 1978), 126–­27. 167. “Ein Gebilde von plastischem Leben, nota bene, von einem Teppich fast ebensoweit entfernt wie eine Bachsche Fuge.” Klee, “Die Ausstellung des Modernen Bundes im Kunsthaus Zürich,” in Schriften, 108. 168. “Gemeinhin werden solche heftige Entgleisungen, wie sie namentlich wieder Herrn Paul Klee begegneten, damit entschuldigt (oder vielmehr erklärt), dass man sagt: es kommt bei der Füllung einer Leinwand oder einer Tafel nicht auf den Stoff und nicht auf die Darstellung an, sondern auf den Rhythmus der Linien, auf die Schönheit der Farbenzusammenstel-

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lung, auf die Überwindung der Gegenständlichkeit. Das kann subjektiv richtig sein, aber wer das Bedürfnis empfindet, sich solcher Art künstlerisch auszuleben, soll Teppiche zeichnen und sein Geflunker nicht ‘Gedanken an die Schlacht’ oder ‘Ausblick aus einem Wald’ nennen.” Georg Jakob Wolf, “Kunst: Die Neue Münchner Sezession I (Vorschau),” in München-­ Augsburger Abendzeitung, February 23, 1915, 4; quoted in Okuda, “Paul Klee,” 385. 169. Masheck, “The Carpet Paradigm,” 82–­103. Subsequent references appear in the text. 170. Jenny Anger, Paul Klee and the Decorative in Modern Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 167–­68. 171. Herwarth Walden, Die neue Malerei (Berlin: Der Sturm, 1919), 22. 172. Haxthausen, “‘Abstract with Memories,’” 63–­65. 173. The title of George’s collection itself suggests how the “carpet paradigm” extended beyond visual artists in the late nineteenth century to poets such as George who were interested in the plasticity of poetry. See Carsten Strathausen, The Look of Things: Poetry and Vision around 1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003).

CHAPTER TWO

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1. Klee, “Beitrag für den Sammelband Schöpferische Konfession (1920),” in Schriften: Rezensionen und Aufsätze, ed. Christian Geelhaar (Cologne: DuMont, 1976), 95. 2. For a most valuable and pertinent consideration of how the graphic arts were understood to engage their viewers in the nineteenth century, attending in particular to the practices of print collectors, see Peter Parshall, “A Darker Side of Light: Prints, Privacy, and Possession,” in The Darker Side of Light: Arts of Privacy, 1850–­1900 (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2009), 2–­39. 3. Klee, Tagebücher 1898–­1918, Textkritische Neuedition, ed. Wolfgang Kersten (Stuttgart: Gerd Hatje, 1988), no. 733, p. 230. 4. Gershom Scholem, Tagebücher nebst Aufsätzen und Entwürfen bis 1923, ed. Karlfried Gründer, Herbert Kopp-­Oberstebrink et al., vol. 2, 1917–­23 (Frankfurt am Main: Jüdischer Verlag, 2000), 30–­3 4. The Sturm’s exhibition catalogue indicates that the works on view that August had been selected from the collection of Franz Kluxen. 5. See Benjamin’s reply to Scholem, dated October 22, 1917, in his Gesammelte Briefe, ed. Christoph Gödde and Henri Lonitz, vol. 1 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1995), 388–­97; I have slightly modified the translation in The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 1910–­1940, ed. Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno, trans. Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 97–­102. On Benjamin’s letter, see Yve-­Alain Bois, “Piet Mondrian, New York City,” in Painting as Model (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 178–­79, 308; Heinz Brüggemann, Walter Benjamin über Spiel, Farbe und Phantasie (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2007), 143–­53; Howard Caygill, Walter Benjamin: The Color of Experience (London: Routledge, 1998), 85–­89; Brigid Doherty, “Painting and Graphics,” in Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008), 195–­217; and Charles W. Haxthausen, “Reproduction/Repetition: Walter Benjamin/Carl Einstein,” October 107 (Winter 2004): 64–­65. 6. Scholem, Tagebücher nebst Aufsätzen und Entwürfen, 2:30–­32; Benjamin, Gesammelte Briefe, 1:394. Scholem also mentions synthetic painting as a possibility: “If I want a synthesis between line and color, I go to Rembrandt, I don’t go to the Cubists for that, I demand the sphere’s complete purity” (32). In his reply, Benjamin speaks of Scholem’s “trichotomy of

painting into colorless (linear), colorful, and synthetic” (394). I leave aside this third category because, unlike the “colorless” or the “colorful,” it remains undeveloped in Scholem’s diary. 7. Benjamin, Gesammelte Briefe, 1:393–­94. 8. Ibid. In his October 22 letter, Benjamin writes that he will send an essay—­or, rather, “the plan for one”—­in his next parcel in response to Scholem’s letter on cubism. This “plan,” in which Benjamin argues that there is no line in painting, is “On Painting, or Sign and Mark” (see note 35 below). For discussions of this text and “Painting and the Graphic Arts,” written earlier that year, see Yve-­Alain Bois, “The Semiology of Cubism,” in Picasso and Braque: A Symposium, ed. Lynn Zelevansky (New York, 1992), 186–­87, 217; Michael Fried, Realism, Writing, Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 174; Rosalind E. Krauss, “Horizontality,” in Formless: A User’s Guide, by Yve-­Alain Bois and Rosalind E. Krauss (New York: Zone Books, 1997), 93–­94; and David E. Wellbery, “Benjamin’s Theory of the Lyric,” in Benjamin’s Ground: New Readings of Walter Benjamin, ed. Rainer Nägele (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988), 54–­57, as well as those cited in note 5 above. 9. Scholem, Tagebücher nebst Aufsätzen und Entwürfen, 2:32; Benjamin, Gesammelte Briefe, 1:394. 10. Scholem, Tagebücher nebst Aufsätzen und Entwürfen, 2:32. 11. Benjamin, Gesammelte Briefe, 1:394. 12. For Benjamin on Klee as herald of “a new, positive concept of barbarism,” see, among other texts, Walter Benjamin, “Experience and Poverty,” in Selected Writings, vol. 2, 1927–­ 1934, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 733; see also Charles W. Haxthausen’s comments in “‘Abstract with Memories’: Klee’s ‘Auratic’ Pictures,” in Paul Klee: Philosophical Vision; From Nature to Art, ed. John Sallis (Chestnut Hill, MA: McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, 2012), 72–­73. On the place of Klee’s Angelus Novus in Benjamin’s writings, see Gershom Scholem, “Walter Benjamin and His Angel,” in On Jews and Judaism in Crisis: Selected Essays, ed. Werner J. Dannhauser (New York: Schocken, 1976); O. K. Werckmeister, “Walter Benjamin, Paul Klee, and the Angel of History,” Oppositions 25 (Fall 1982): 103–­25; Werckmeister, “Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History, or the Transfiguration of the Revolutionary into the Historian,” Critical Inquiry 22, no. 2 (Winter 1996): 239–­67; and Oskar Bätschmann, “Angelus Novus und ‘Engel der Geschichte’: Paul Klee und Walter Benjamin,” in Engel, Teufel und Dämonen: Einblicke in die Geisterwelt des Mittelalters, ed. Hubert Herkommer and Rainer Christoph Schwinges (Basel: Schwabe, 2006), 225–­42. 13. We know from Benjamin’s letters that he was in Berlin for most of February 1917 and therefore could have seen the exhibition; I think it likely that he did, both because this was Klee’s first exhibition to attract much attention, and because of the timing of the correspondence with Scholem under discussion here. Scholem was in Berlin at the time and could have seen the exhibition as well; even though the Sturm exhibition catalogue does not indicate that any works by Klee were included in the August 1917 exhibition, Scholem does mention Klee in his diary, aligning him, it seems, with the “colorlessness” that Picasso may be approaching: “Picasso is perhaps on the way to colorlessness. Then he would be good. Klee is good at times” (Scholem, Tagebücher nebst Aufsätzen und Entwürfen, 2:32). Benjamin might also have seen Klee’s work on display at the 1916 summer exhibition of the New Munich Secession, or at Klee’s first exhibition at the Sturm gallery in March 1916, or perhaps the 1915 spring exhibition of the New Munich Secession. For an account of the difficult circumstances of winter 1917 (Benjamin was trying to avoid military service), see also Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: New York Review Books, 2003), 45–­48.

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14. On the basis of the title and Scholem’s sketch, I think we can identify this painting as Woman Playing the Violin (Daix 393), which was indeed in circulation in Germany in the 1910s; see Pierre Daix, Picasso: The Cubist Years, 1907–­1916: A Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings and Related Works (London: Thames and Hudson, 1979), 264. 15. Scholem, Tagebücher nebst Aufsätzen und Entwürfen, 2:33–­3 4, 32. 16. Ibid., 2:32. Bois’s analysis of “this ‘informational,’ ‘hieroglyphic’ stage of Cubism” in “The Semiology of Cubism” (182–­85) can illuminate Scholem’s response. It appears that Scholem seizes on Picasso’s “search for a unitary mode of notation,” fastening on the lines of the grid and the “sickle” (Scholem speaks of the related “semicircle with tangent” as “one of the greatest symbols” [Scholem, Tagebücher nebst Aufsätzen und Entwürfen, 2:32]), which he reads as discrete symbols. But he sees the chiaroscuro not as play with illusionism, play made possible by its lack of denotative function, but as the betrayal of that search. In Scholem’s view, the chiaroscuro functions—­most objectionably—­to deliver thematic meaning: “The symbols were, for Picasso, not great enough to communicate the world remainderlessly and thus the Fall begins here: the world without music is light, that with music is Dionysiacally dark, all the rest gray in gray. That is unheard-­of kitsch” (ibid.). 17. See Carolin Meister, “‘Color Reading’: Zur Codierung von Farbe im kubistischen Werk Picassos,” in Ästhetische Erfahrung: Gegenstände, Konzepte, Geschichtlichkeit, ed. Sonderforschungsbereich 626, Berlin 2006, http://www.sfb626.de/veroeffentlichungen/online/ aesth_erfahrung/, and Christine Poggi, “Braque’s Early Papiers Collés: The Certainties of Faux Bois,” in Picasso and Braque: A Symposium, ed. Lynn Zelevansky (New York: Abrams, 1992), 129. 18. Scholem, Tagebücher nebst Aufsätzen und Entwürfen, 2:32. 19. Daniel-Henry [Kahnweiler], “Der Kubismus,” Die weißen Blätter 3, no. 9 (September 1916): 213, 220. Incidentally, Scholem mentions Benjamin’s criticisms of Die weißen Blätter in a journal entry of August 23, 1916; Kahnweiler’s article came out just the next month. Gerschom Scholem, Tagebücher nebst Aufsätzen und Entwürfen bis 1923, ed. Karlfried Gründer, Herbert Kopp-­Oberstebrink et al., vol. 1, 1913–­1917 (Frankfurt am Main: Jüdischer Verlag, 1995), 383. On the circumstances of Kahnweiler’s early writings, see Yve-­Alain Bois, “Kahnweiler’s Lesson,” in Painting as Model (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 65–­69. It is a striking coincidence that both Kahnweiler and Benjamin were exiled in Bern in 1917 and that both were deeply concerned with Kant at the time, although to very different ends. Kahnweiler was introduced to Klee’s work at this time by the Bern collector Hermann Rupf; years later, Kahnweiler took over Alfred Flechtheim’s contract with Klee after Flechtheim emigrated in 1933. I have found no indications that Benjamin was personally acquainted with either Kahnweiler or Rupf. See Rupf Collection, ed. Hermann und Margrit Rupf-­Stiftung and Kunstmuseum Bern (Bern: Benteli, 2005). 20. Daniel-­Henry [Kahnweiler], Der Weg zum Kubismus (Munich: Delphin-­Verlag, 1920), 33–­3 4. 21. See, for example, Charles Blanc, Grammaire des arts du dessin (Paris: Veuve Jules Renouard, 1870), 601. 22. Scholem, Tagebücher nebst Aufsätzen und Entwürfen, 2:31. 23. Ibid. 24. Kahnweiler, “Der Kubismus,” 222. 25. Scholem speaks in general terms of connections between cubism and mathematics in his diary, and one might suspect that the lost letter contained such a comparison on the basis of Benjamin’s retort: “In analytical geometry, I can certainly produce an equation for a two-­or three-­dimensional figure in space without consequently overstepping the bounds of spatial analysis; but in painting I cannot paint lady with fan (for example), in order to thereby com-

municate the essence of space through analysis” (Benjamin, Gesammelte Briefe, 1:395). 26. See Scholem’s paper “On Logical Calculus,” dated November 8, 1917, for a logic course at Jena: Tagebücher nebst Aufsätzen und Entwürfen, 2:109–­11. He argues for the fundamental importance of attempts to create a formal language of logic, from Leibniz to Frege, which he understands as “the endeavor to let thought speak in its own language,” for “pure thought can only be represented remainderlessly in the pure symbol” (2:109–­10). See also Gottlob Frege, Begriffschrift und andere Aufsätze, ed. Ignacio Angelelli (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1964), xii–­xiii. 27. Kahnweiler, Der Weg zum Kubismus, 41; Kahnweiler, “Der Kubismus,” 217. See Bois, “Kahnweiler’s Lesson,” 66. 28. Interview originally published as “Picasso Speaks” in The Arts (May 1923); republished in Art in Theory, 1900–­2000, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 216. Franz Marc uses this metaphor as well, writing that Picasso “personally seems to attach great value to the fact that one can ‘read’ his pictures, i.e. that one sees where the mustache and where the drawer etc. is,” in German Expressionism: Documents from the End of the Wilhelmine Empire to the Rise of National Socialism, ed. Rose-­Carol Washton Long (New York: G. K. Hall, 1993), 51. 29. Bois, “Kahnweiler’s Lesson,” 66. 30. Kahnweiler, “Der Kubismus,” 219. 31. George Henry Lewes, Problems of Life and Mind (Boston: Houghton, Osgood, 1880), 489. 32. Scholem, Tagebücher nebst Aufsätzen und Entwürfen, 2:31. 33. Benjamin, Gesammelte Briefe, 1:395. The identity of “Lady with Fan” remains unclear. In his journal, Scholem contrasts it with the “Woman with Violin”: “A picture like the lady with the fan by Picasso is kitsch because the lady and the fan are there to see, they are formed and not really raised into the Cubic sphere like, for example, later on, the woman with the violin, who is there only for the one who sees symbolically-­mathematically . . .” (Scholem, Tagebücher nebst Aufsätzen und Entwürfen, 2:31). As Benjamin was in Switzerland for the duration of the Kluxen exhibition, he responds here to Scholem’s argumentation rather than to this particular picture—­as Benjamin wrote, “Please do not take it amiss that I was not able to deal directly with what you had to say on cubism. . . . This is in the nature of things; you had paintings in front of you, and I had your words” (Gesammelte Briefe, 1:396). Brüggemann associates the “Lady with Fan” with Picasso’s 1909 Femme à l’éventail (Walter Benjamin über Spiel, Farbe und Phantasie, 149)—­but, as Bois has written in a detailed note on this question, it is unlikely that this painting would have been exhibited in Berlin in 1917. Bois, “Piet Mondrian, New York City,” 308n68. The editors of Benjamin’s Gesammelte Briefe identify the picture as “Picasso’s pencil drawing ‘Femme à l’éventail’ of 1917” (1:397)—­which could mean either of the two pencil studies for Blanquita Suarez à l’éventail, which Picasso painted in Barcelona in the summer of 1917 (Z.XXIX, 303 or Z.XXIX, 304; see Picasso’s Paintings, Watercolors, Drawings, and Sculpture, vol. 1, 1917–­1919 [San Francisco: Alan Wofsy Fine Arts, 1995], 56). However, it is difficult to square either of these line drawings with Scholem’s second reason for calling the picture kitsch: “because colors are used in the most various ways” (Tagebücher nebst Aufsätzen und Entwürfen, 2:31). 34. Benjamin, Gesammelte Briefe, 1:393. 35. Walter Benjamin, “On Painting, or Sign and Mark,” in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008), 221–­23. Subsequent references are cited in the text for the next three paragraphs. 36. Heinrich Wölfflin, Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in

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Later Art, trans. M. D. Hottinger (New York: Dover, 1950), 31; first published in 1915. On Benjamin’s disappointment with Wölfflin, see Thomas Y. Levin, “Walter Benjamin and the Theory of Art History,” October 47 (Winter 1988): 79. Wölfflin constructs a tactile mode of seeing in Renaissance linearism that is equally present in painting and drawing, sculpture and architecture, qua products of the same epoch in the “history of the development of occidental seeing” (Principles of Art History, 12–­13). One might see Benjamin’s “Painting and the Graphic Arts” and “On the Surface of the Uncolorful Picture Book,” discussed below, as countering Wölfflin to put forward a very different notion of tactility in relation to pictures. 37. It should be noted that Wölfflin himself does not equate the outline (Umriß) so important for “linear” painting with graphic line (Principles of Art History, 18–­19). 38. Haxthausen, “Reproduction/Repetition,” 65. 39. As Doherty writes, “This early theoretical interest in the power of the act of naming, with regard to human language in general as well as to pictures, specifically paintings, finds a counterpart in Benjamin’s insistence, beginning in the mid-­1920s, on the significance of captions and inscriptions broadly conceived.” Doherty, “Painting and Graphics,” 198. 40. Walter Benjamin, “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,” in Selected Writings, vol. 1, 1913–­1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996), 72. 41. Ibid., 73. 42. “It is throughout a question of relative judgments. Compared with one style, the next can be called painterly.” Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, 30–­31. 43. Benjamin, “On Painting,”, 224. 44. See Adolf Rosenberg, Raffael: Des Meisters Gemälde in 202 Abbildungen (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-­Anstalt, 1905), 158. On Benjamin’s “theory of proper names,” see Peter Fenves, “The Paradisal Epochē: On Benjamin’s First Philosophy,” in Arresting Language: From Leibniz to Benjamin (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 215–­19. 45. Benjamin, “On Language as Such,” 71–­72. 46. Ibid. 47. Thierry de Duve, Pictorial Nominalism: On Marcel Duchamp’s Passage from Painting to the Readymade, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 94, and Kant after Duchamp (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996). It would be foolhardy to try to reconcile Benjamin’s and de Duve’s interpretations of painting in the 1910s. Yet it is interesting that cubist painting leads to a crux of naming for both Benjamin and de Duve’s Duchamp—­in wildly disparate ways. See also Marie-­Laure Bernadac’s suggestive comment in Picasso and Braque: A Symposium, ed. Lynn Zelevansky (New York: Abrams, 1992), 210. 48. Walter Benjamin, “Über die Fläche des unfarbigen Bilderbuches,” in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, Hermann Schweppenhäuser et al., vol. 6 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985), 112–­13. Subsequent references are cited in the text in this and the next three paragraphs. 49. Anschauungsbilderbuch might be translated as “picture book for sensory intuition.” At Manifesta 7 (Trento, 2008), Brigid Doherty organized A Museum for Learning Things, an exhibition on the importance of the Anschauungsunterricht (instruction in perception) for Benjamin and avant-­garde art in the 1920s. Founded on the work of the educational reformers Pestalozzi and Froebel, this pedagogical approach of “teaching through the senses” deployed wall charts, handheld cards, and Anschauungsbilderbücher, all bearing captioned illustrations. See her extraordinary essay, “Learning Things,” in Manifesta 7: Companion, ed. Rana Dasgupta, Nina Möntmann, and Avi Pitchon (Milan: Silvana, 2008), 239–­55. 50. As early twentieth-­century guides to the museum frequently remark; see Hans Posse, Die Gemäldegalerie des Kaiser-­Friedrich-­Museums (Berlin: J. Bard, 1909–­11).

51. Walter Benjamin, “Painting and the Graphic Arts [Graphik],” in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008), 219–­20. In “The Semiology of Cubism,” Bois speaks of this fragment in relation to Picasso’s collage Still Life with Chair Caning: “In the collapse of the vertical and the horizontal, what Picasso is inscribing is the very possibility of the transformation of painting into writing—­of the empirical and vertical space of vision, controlled by our own erect position on the ground, into the semiological and possibly horizontal space of reading” (186–­87). See Klee’s own emphasis of the horizontality of his working surface in two works that seem intended as rather programmatic representations of himself at work, Creating Artist (1919, 74) and Feeling Artist (1919, 72), both of which represent the artist as holding a pencil or other instrument as if for writing while sitting at a desk or table. 52. Walter Benjamin, “Notes for a Study of the Beauty of Colored Illustrations in Children’s Books,” in Selected Writings, vol. 1, 1913–­1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996), 265; translation modified. 53. See also “A Child’s View of Color,” “‘Old Forgotten Children’s Books,’“ and “A Glimpse into the World of Children’s Books,” in Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 1, as well as the fragments gathered under the rubric “Zur Ästhetik,” in Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, 6:109–­29, and “Der Regenbogen: Gespräch über Phantasie,” in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, Hermann Schweppenhäuser et al., vol. 7 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991), 19–­26. 54. Benjamin, “Über die Fläche des unfarbigen Bilderbuches,” 112–­13. 55. Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” in Selected Writings, vol. 1, 1913–­1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996), 254. 56. “Kunst gibt nicht das Sichtbare wieder, sondern macht sichtbar.” Klee, “Beitrag für den Sammelband Schöpferische Konfession (1920),” in Schriften: Rezensionen und Aufsätze, ed. Christian Geelhaar (Cologne: DuMont, 1976), 118. 57. “Keine Flucht aus der Wirklichkeit, sondern ein Sichtbarmachen des Transzendenten und Gegebenen: dies ist die neue Metaphysik.” Theodor Däubler, “Acht Jahre ‘Sturm,’” Das Kunstblatt 1 (1917): 46. O. K. Werckmeister, The Making of Paul Klee’s Career, 1914–­1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 210. 58. “Früher schilderte man Dinge, die auf der Erde zu sehen waren, die man gern sah oder gern gesehen hätte. Jetzt wird die Relativität der sichtbaren Dinge offenbar gemacht und dabei dem Glauben Ausdruck verliehen, daß das Sichtbare im Verhältnis zum Weltganzen nur isoliertes Beispiel ist, und daß andere Wahrheiten latent in der Überzahl sind.” Klee, “Beitrag für den Sammelband Schöpferische Konfession (1920),” 120. One might also consider symbolist sources in connection with Klee’s first line, such as Odilon Redon’s statement that he desired to put “the logic of the visible at the service of the invisible” (À Soi-­même, 1922), although I have found no mention of Redon in Klee’s letters, diaries, or writings. Marcel Franciscono also objects to Werckmeister’s assertion that Däubler is the source for Klee’s sentence, given that closely related statements were common in art theory and criticism at the turn of the century. Review of Werckmeister, Making of Paul Klee’s Career, in Art Bulletin 73, no. 4 (December 1991): 696. 59. “Bildende Kunst ist nicht vom Sehen abhängig. Sie will allein sichtbar werden.” Paul Klee, Briefe an die Familie, 1893–­1940, ed. Felix Klee, vol. 2, 1907–­1940 (Cologne: DuMont, 1979), 945. 60. “Die Hoffmann-­Lectüre fortgesetzt.” Ibid. See also Klee, Tagebücher, 471: “Hoffmann

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Lectüre fortgesetzt. Dienstliche Arbeit nur mehr ganz mechanisch. Lang mag ich nicht mehr. Eine hübsche Ausgabe von des Knaben Wunderhorn könnte ich brauchen. Bei der Kunst ist das Sehn so wesentlich wie das Sichtbarmachen.” On Däubler, see ibid., 955. Bettina Gockel has also inquired into the possible connections between Klee’s brief mention of his reading of Hoffmann and statement that plastic art “only wants to become visible” in the December 10 letter. She compares the “state of oscillation between a magical and a real world” in which Hoffmann places his characters to Klee’s “oscillation” between figuration and abstraction, which she sees as asking “what reality is and how many realities there might be.” Bettina Gockel, “Paul Klee’s Picture-­Making and Persona: Tools for Making Invisible Realities Visible,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 39 (2008): 423, 428. 61. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, trans. Edward Allen McCormick (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 74–­76. Subsequent references are cited in the text in this and the next three paragraphs. 62. “Noch erinnere ich, daß ich unter dem Namen der Malerei die bildenden Künste überhaupt begreife.” 63. Anne Claude de Caylus, Tableaux tirés de l’Iliade, de l’Odyssée d’Homère et de l’Énéide de Virgile, avec des observations générales sur le costume (Paris: Tilliard, 1757), i–­ii. It has often been noted that Lessing is less than fair in his argument, for Caylus speaks explicitly of the commonplace distinction between spatial and temporal arts. See W. J. T. Mitchell, “The Politics of Genre: Space and Time in Lessing’s Laocoon,” Representations 6 (Spring 1984): 98 and 113n2. Michael Fried argues that Caylus’s distinction between the tableau and the image in fact anticipates Lessing. Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 215n90. 64. “Wer sieht aber nicht, daß bei dem Dichter das Einhüllen in Nebel und Nacht weiter nichts, als eine poetische Redensart für unsichtbar machen, sein soll?” 65. “Nicht genug also, daß die Wolke ein willkürliches, und kein natürliches Zeichen bei den Malern ist; dieses willkürliche Zeichen hat auch nicht einmal die bestimmte Deutlichkeit, die es als ein solches haben könnte; denn sie brauchen es ebensowohl, um das Sichtbare unsichtbar, als um das Unsichtbare sichtbar zu machen.” 66. “Ein poetisches Gemälde ist nicht nothwendig das, was in ein materielles Gemälde zu verwandeln ist; sondern jeder Zug, jede Verbindung mehrerer Züge, durch die uns der Dichter seinen Gegenstand so sinnlich macht, daß wir uns dieses Gegenstandes deutlicher bewußt werden, als seiner Worte, heißt malerisch, heißt ein Gemälde, weil es uns dem Grade der Illusion näher bringt, dessen das materielle Gemälde besonders fähig ist.” In a footnote, Lessing recommends the ancient terminology as less liable to confusion, adducing a sentence from Plutarch as an example: “Die poetischen Phantasien wären, wegen ihrer Enargie, Träume der Wachenden.” 67. Translation slightly modified. 68. “Warum kann ich mich an deinen sonderbaren phantastischen Blättern nicht satt sehen, du kecker Meister!” E. T. A. Hoffmann, Phantasiestücke in Callot’s Manier: Blätter aus dem Tagebuche eines reisenden Enthusiasten (Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1854), 3, 5. I consulted the translation in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Musical Writings: Kreisleriana, The Poet and the Composer, Music Criticism, ed. David Charlton, trans. Martyn Clarke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 76–­78. 69. “Warum kommen mir deine Gestalten, oft nur durch ein paar kühne Striche angedeutet, nicht aus dem Sinn?—­Schaue ich deine überreichen aus den heterogensten Elementen geschaffenen Compositionen lange an, so beleben sich die tausend und tausend Figuren, und jede schreitet, oft aus dem tiefsten Hintergrunde, wo es erst schwer hielt, sie nur zu entdecken, kräftig und in den natürlichsten Farben glänzend hervor.” Hoffmann, Phanta-

siestücke in Callot’s Manier, 3. Subsequent references are cited in the text in this and the next two paragraphs. 70. “Kein Meister hat so wie Callot gewußt, in einem kleinen Raum eine Fülle von Gegenständen zusammenzudrängen, die, ohne den Blick zu verwirren, neben einander, ja, in einander heraustreten.” 71. “Könnte ein Dichter oder Schriftsteller, dem die Gestalten des gewöhnlichen Lebens in seinem innern romantischen Geisterreiche erscheinen, und der sie nun in dem Schimmer, von dem sie dort umflossen, wie in einem fremden wunderlichen Putze darstellt, sich nicht wenigstens mit diesem Meister entschuldigen und sagen: er habe in Callot’s Manier arbeiten wollen?” 72. “Seine Zeichnungen sind nur Reflexe aller der phantastischen wunderlichen Erscheinungen, die der Zauber seiner überregen Phantasie hervorrief.” 73. Eric Rothstein, “‘Ideal Presence’ and the ‘Non Finito’ in Eighteenth-­Century Aesthetics,” Eighteenth-­Century Studies 9, no. 3 (Spring 1976): 328. 74. Marsha Morton, “‘Malerei und Zeichnung’: The History and Context of Max Klinger’s Guide to the Arts,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 58, no. 4 (1995): 560–­62. Barbara Maria Stafford, “From ‘Brilliant Ideas’ to ‘Fitful Thoughts’: Conjecturing the Unseen in Late Eighteenth-­ Century Art,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 48, no. 1 (1985): 329–­63. 75. See also chap. 25, on the representation of “disgusting objects” in poetry and painting. 76. “Errathen wir mit Vergnügen tausend Dinge, welche deutlich zu sehen kein Vergnügen ist. Die Lumpen eines zerrissenen Rockes würden, durch den feinen und genauen Grabstichel eines Wille ausgedrückt, eher beleidigen als gefallen; da sie doch in der wilden und unfleißigen Art eines Rembrandt wirklich gefallen, weil wir sie uns hier nur einbilden, dort aber sie wirklich sehen würden.” Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Sämmtliche Schriften, ed. Karl Lachmann, vol. 11 (Berlin: in der Voß’schen Buchhandlung, 1839), 372. Lessing’s fragment on Rembrandt is one of the many fragments on diverse topics posthumously published in 1790 as the Kollektaneen zur Literatur. 77. “Denn wenn uns schon bei hohen und edeln Gegenständen die Skizzen oft besser gefallen, als die vollendeten Gemählde; so geschieht es deswegen, weil wir bei den Skizzen dasjenige hinzudenken, was ein arbeitsamer Pinsel ausgeführt hätte.” Lessing, Sämmtliche Schriften, 11:372–­73. 78. And both manners appear to have been viewed in the nineteenth century as suitable models for fantastic writing, as in Aloysius Bertrand’s Gaspard de la nuit: Fantaisies à la manière de Rembrandt et de Callot (1842). 79. See Antony Griffiths, Prints and Printmaking: An Introduction to the History and Techniques (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), s.v. “Lettering,” 142. It is interesting to consider as well the way in which printed images were seen in the early era of print collecting as awaiting handwritten inscription. Peter Parshall has written of Alba amicorum (books of friends)—­the small autograph books of inscriptions and quotations from professors and classmates that scholars and students began to collect in mid-­sixteenth-­century Protestant German universities—­as exemplifying the use of prints on which the first major print collections, established at the same time, were founded as well. These Alba amicorum, writes Parshall, were “built around emblem books” or “suites of illustrations,” with blank pages interleaved for inscriptions. Writing in such an album was an “exercise in composing a learned response to a printed picture” in which the “illustration served as a stimulus to erudition”; looking at such prints, designed for exegesis, in this way “became a form of reading, an active arena of interpretation.” Peter Parshall, “Art and the Theater of Knowledge: The Origins of Print Collecting in Northern Europe,” in “Print Collecting in Sixteenth and Eighteenth Cen-

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tury Europe,” special issue, Harvard University Art Museums Bulletin 2, no. 3 (Spring 1994): 14–­15. 80. Quoted in Katie Scott, “Chardin Multiplied,” in Chardin, ed. Pierre Rosenberg (London: Royal Academy of Arts; New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000), 66 and 75. Translation slightly modified. 81. Thomas E. Crow, Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-­Century Paris (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), 137. 82. When Klee was working on his Inventions, he was looking at Goya’s prints, which may have helped to make the emblematic structure we see in them available to Klee. On Klee’s Inventions and Goya, see K. Porter Aichele, Paul Klee’s Pictorial Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 21. On Goya and emblematic literature, see George Levitine, “Some Emblematic Sources of Goya,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 22, no. 1/2 (January–­June 1959): 106–­31. 83. “Allegorie der Unzulänglichkeit”; “Greiser Phoenix als Symbol der Unzulänglichkeit menschlicher Dinge (auch der höchsten) in kritischen Zeiten.” Klee, Briefe, 1:482. 84. “Ich hasse diesen brutalen Streber mehr denn je! . . .  Worte genügen nicht, um den Abscheu in mir auszudrücken.” Klee, Briefe, 1:239. 85. Ibid., 1:277. Klee quotes Schiller’s poem “Tonkunst”: “Leben atme die bildende Kunst, Geist fordr’ ich vom Dichter, / Aber die Seele spricht nur / Polyhymnia aus.” 86. Sherwin Simmons, “Chaplin Smiles on the Wall: Berlin Dada and Wish-­Images of Popular Culture,” New German Critique 84 (Autumn 2001): 10–­11. 87. “Die Schönheit, die von der Kunst vielleicht nicht zu trennen ist, bezieht sich doch nicht auf den Gegenstand, sondern auf die bildnerische Darstellung.” Klee, Tagebücher, no. 733, p. 230. 88. Marcel Franciscono, Paul Klee: His Work and Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 41. 89. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-­Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 19 (subsequent references are cited in the text in this paragraph and the next); Ästhetische Theorie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970), 36. 90. Adorno’s treatment of the difference between the nineteenth-­century literature of the fantastic and Kafka’s work might be compared to some of Tzvetan Todorov’s remarks in his study of The Fantastic, also first published in 1970. “The nineteenth century transpired, it is true,” writes Todorov, “in a metaphysics of the real and the imaginary, and the literature of the fantastic is nothing but the bad conscience of this positivist era” (168). In Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” by contrast, “the supernatural event no longer provokes hesitation, for the world described is entirely bizarre, as abnormal as the very event to which it provides a background” (173). However, Todorov and Adorno define the fantastic differently. The first condition of Todorov’s definition of the fantastic text is that it must “oblige the reader . . . to hesitate between a natural and a supernatural explanation of the events described” (33). Within Todorov’s terms, what Adorno defines as the “fantastic”—­art and literature that “[present] something nonexistent as existing”—­would fall instead into the neighboring genre of the “marvelous” (25). See Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975). 91. Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, ed. Alfred H. Barr Jr. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1936). 92. Werner Haftmann also wrote that comparisons between Klee and Kubin fundamentally misunderstand Klee; see Paul Klee (Munich: Prestel Verlag, 1950), 32, 34. 93. Kubin’s sense of himself as a follower of Klinger comes out clearly in a passage in his autobiography in which he remembers his first encounter with the latter’s etching cycle Para-

phrase über den Fund eines Handschuhs (1878–­81): “Hier bot sich mir eine ganz neue Kunst, die genügend Spielraum für den andeutenden Ausdruck aller nur möglichen Empfindungswelten gab. Noch vor den Blättern gelobte ich mir, mein Leben dem Schaffen solcher Dinge zu weihen.” Cited in Dieter Gleisberg, “Max Klinger—­Sein Werk und seine Wirkung,” in Max Klinger 1857–­1920 (Vienna: Künstlerhaus Wien, 1981), 12. Glaesemer’s essay “Paul Klees persönliche und künstlerische Begegnung mit Alfred Kubin” is the fullest historical account of the relationship between the two artists, drawing on their correspondence; see in Paul Klee: Das Frühwerk, 1883–­1922, ed. Armin Zweite (Munich: Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, 1979), 63–­78. See also O. K. Werckmeister, “Klee’s Orientational Artists,” in The Klee Universe, ed. Dieter Scholz and Christina Thomson (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2008), 32–­35. 94. Besides Barr’s catalogue, see, for instance, Clement Greenberg’s untitled essay in Five Essays on Klee, ed. Merle Armitage (New York: Duell Sloan and Pearce, 1950), 39–­40; Franciscono, Paul Klee: His Work and Thought, 2–­12, and “Paul Klee um die Jahrhundertwende,” in Paul Klee: Das Frühwerk, 1883–­1922, ed. Armin Zweite (Munich: Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, 1979), 34–­59; Jürgen Glaesemer, “Klee and German Romanticism,” in Paul Klee (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1987), 65–­81; and Robert Rosenblum, Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition: Friedrich to Rothko (New York, 1975), 149–­56. 95. See Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1854–­1960), and the Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004). 96. Several exhibitions in postwar Europe—­Phantastische Kunst des XX. Jahrhunderts (Basel, 1952), Phantastische Malerei der Gegenwart (Vienna, 1962), Phantastische Kunst vom 16. Jahrhundert bis zum Gegenwart (Berlin and Baden-­Baden, 1966)—­presented twentieth-­century work as a continuation of earlier “fantastic art.” 97. See, on the development of antinarrative painting and art criticism in France, Susan Sidlauskas’s fascinating article situating Edgar Degas’s Interior (Le Viol) (1868–­69) within “a moment in the history of early modern art when there was believed to be a radical disjunction between ‘reading’ and ‘seeing’ pictures” (672), “Resisting Narrative: The Problem of Edgar Degas’s Interior,” Art Bulletin 75, no. 4 (December 1993): 671–­96. 98. Ferdinand Avenarius, “Unsere Künste: Zum Überblick,” Der Kunstwart 1, no. 1 (October 1, 1887): 1. 99. Kandinsky and Josef Albers also studied with Stuck in Munich. On Klee’s early interest in Arnold Böcklin, see Franciscono, “Paul Klee um die Jahrhundertwende,” 35. In his journals and letters, the young Klee often took a skeptical and distant attitude toward this training, and to the famous practitioners of Phantasiemalerei, but appears to have had relatively little exposure to, or interest in, other modes of contemporary painting. 100. Influential accounts of Klee’s work as completely overcoming or transcending these early influences include Will Grohmann, Paul Klee (New York: H. N. Abrams, 1954), and Werner Haftmann, The Mind and Work of Paul Klee (New York: Praeger, 1954). 101. Max Klinger, “Malerei und Zeichnung,” in Max Klinger: Wege zum Gesamtkunstwerk, by Manfred Boetzkes et al. (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 1984), 207–­52. 102. On the Kunstwart, see Gerhard Kratzsch, Kunstwart und Dürerbund: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Gebildeten im Zeitalter des Imperialismus (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1969); Ingrid Koszinowski, Von der Poesie des Kunstwerks: Zur Kunstrezeption um 1900 am Beispiel der Malereikritik der Zeitschrift “Kunstwart” (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1985); and Birgit Kulhoff, “Bürgerliche Selbstbehauptung im Spiegel der Kunst: Untersuchungen zur Kulturpublizistik der Rundschauzeitschriften im Kaiserreich (1871–­1914)” (PhD diss., Ruhr-­Universität Bochum, 1990). 103. Frederic J. Schwartz, The Werkbund: Design Theory and Mass Culture before the First World War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 142. While the Werkbund has often

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been discussed as one of a series of steps toward the conception of the role of the architect or designer in industrial modernity exemplified by the Dessau Bauhaus, Schwartz emphasizes instead how, before the First World War, the Werkbund sought to theorize and negotiate the realm of consumption, which the Bauhaus scanted in favor of a narrower focus on production (2–­3). Besides Schwartz’s magisterial study, see also Jennifer Jenkins, “The Kitsch Collections and The Spirit in the Furniture: Cultural Reform and National Culture in Germany,” Social History 21, no. 2 (May 1996): 123–­41; Mark Jarzombek, “The Kunstgewerbe, the Werkbund, and the Aesthetics of Culture in the Wilhelmine Period,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 53, no. 1 (March 1994): 7–­19; and David Hamlin, “Romanticism, Spectacle, and a Critique of Wilhelmine Consumer Capitalism,” Central European History 38, no. 2 (2005): 250–­68. 104. See Jenkins, “The Kitsch Collections,” 136–­37, on reformers’ attempts to control and use the “power of mass reproduction” to counter the ill effects of “mass reproduction run amok.” 105. Avenarius, “Unsere Künste: Zum Überblick,” 3. 106. Ibid., 6. 107. There appears to have been widespread agreement in the 1890s and early 1900s that Böcklin, Klinger, and Thoma were the leading practitioners of Phantasiekunst. As one critic and Klinger biographer put it, “Max Klinger ist neben Arnold Böcklin und Hans Thoma wohl die bedeutendste Erscheinung der neuesten deutschen Malerei. Wie in der Epoche des Realismus Menzel, Liebermann und Uhde, so sind in der neuen Periode der Phantasiekunst Böcklin, Thoma und Klinger die geistigen Führer, diejenigen, die frei von aller Nachahmung und Nachempfindung fremden Wesens, eine rein deutsche Richtung vertreten.” Max Schmid, Klinger (Bielefeld: Velhagen & Klafing, 1899), 1. 108. Beth Irwin Lewis, Art for All? The Collision of Modern Art and the Public in Late Nineteenth-­Century Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 68. 109. Max Halbe, quoted in Kingdom of the Soul: Symbolist Art in Germany, 1870–­1920, ed. Ingrid Ehrhardt and Simon Reynolds (Munich: Prestel, 2000), 81. 110. As an advertisement for the Kunstwart’s Künstler-­Mappen puts it: “Das Bedeutendste derjenigen unserer großen Meister, die berufen sind, mit uns und in uns wahrhaft zu leben, bemüht sich der Kunstwart zu sammeln und in guten großen Wiedergaben . . . in Mappen zu vereinigen, die gleichfalls zu ganz billigen Preisen abgegeben werden.” Advertisement inserted in Dürer-­Mappe, with text by Ferdinand Avenarius (Munich: Kunstwart-­Verlag, G. D. W. Callwey, 1902). See Jenkins, “The Kitsch Collections,” 138–­39, on the Meisterbilder fürs deutsche Haus series of affordable art reproductions. 111. Theodor Heuss, quoted in Kulhoff, “Bürgerliche Selbstbehauptung im Spiegel der Kunst,” 76. 112. Lewis writes that “Der Kunstwart emphasized discussions of ‘what is modern’ in German art rather than ‘what is the best art for the new nation,’ as in Die Kunst für Alle” (Art for All?, 69). 113. See also Kenworth Moffett, Meier-­Graefe as Art Critic (Munich: Prestel, 1973). 114. Albert Dresdner, “Berliner Kunst: Gewinn und Verlust in der modernen Kunst,” Kunstwart 16, no. 5 (1. Dezemberheft 1902): 331. See also Dresdner, “Berliner Kunst,” Kunstwart 16, no. 3 (1. Novemberheft 1902): 146. 115. Ferdinand Avenarius, “Was Wir Wünschen,” Kunstwart 13, no. 1 (1. Oktoberheft 1899): 2. Artists’, critics’, and art historians’ reactions to impressionist opticality in late nineteenth-­and early twentieth-­century Germany could be usefully connected to the celebration of tactile vision in contemporary writing on German Renaissance art. As Christopher S. Wood writes regarding the “taste for tactility” among early twentieth-­century German art historians such as Wilhelm Worringer, Fritz Burger, Wilhelm Pinder, and Erwin Panofsky,

considerations of the relations of vision and touch were sometimes “correlated with nationalist and racist views in unscholarly and repugnant ways”: “The German [Renaissance] artist’s lack of detachment from the world, his tendency to in effect pounce bodily upon things, seemed to imply his sincerity and spirituality. For what things meant to the recipient subject, what effects they worked on the soul, was surely more important than merely how they looked. Thus the blindness of the German artist was seen as a prized relic of premodern consciousness, a mind that observed no debilitating split between itself and the cosmos, a mind that refused the false consolation of a detached and artificially fixed point of view.” Christopher S. Wood, “Germany’s Blind Renaissance,” in Infinite Boundaries: Order, Disorder, and Reorder in Early Modern German Culture, ed. Max Reinhart, Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies, vol. 40 (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 1998), 228. 116. Avenarius, “Was Wir Wünschen,” 2. 117. Ferdinand Avenarius, “Was Wollen Wir? Ankündigung zum Kunstwart,” enclosed in the first issue of Der Kunstwart (October 1, 1887). 118. I mean to suggest that the domestic interior as furnished by the Kunstwart’s photomechanical art reproductions becomes something like a psychic apparatus in Jean-­Louis Baudry’s sense, constituting, through Phantasie, a certain kind of subject. See Baudry, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus” and “The Apparatus: Metaphysical Approaches to Ideology,” in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, ed. Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 286–­318. 119. In a very general sense, one could say that the aesthetics of the Gesamtkunstwerk underwrote this proliferation of relations among media. See Juliet Koss on Georg Fuchs’s 1895 article “Richard Wagner und die moderne Malerei,” in her Modernism after Wagner (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 98, and Andrea Gottdang, “‘Man muss sie singen hören’: Bemerkungen zur ‘Musikalität’ und ‘Hörbarkeit’ von Böcklins Bildern,” in Arnold Böcklin, ed. Katharina Schmidt (Heidelberg: Edition Braus, 2001), 131–­37. However, Wagner’s theory of the Gesamtkunstwerk, prominent as it indeed was in the pages of Der Kunstwart (it’s worth mentioning that Avenarius was the composer’s nephew), does not fit well with the particular kind of relations among media under discussion here. Wagner himself, in his The Art-­Work of the Future, contrasts the forging of a community through group spectatorship that he sees as a crucial part of the work of the Gesamtkunstwerk (indubitably important for the Kunstwart’s larger project of national cultural renewal) with the viewing of pictures in a domestic interior (on “secluded chamber walls”). Quoted in Koss, Modernism after Wagner (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 20. David E. Wellbery’s discussion of Hegel’s treatment of the differences among artistic mediums as “demoting the material texture of the non-­verbal arts to a provisional phase in the self-­realization of Geist” while promoting “a robustly optimistic view regarding the capacity of the poetic word to convey sensuous contents” (such that poetry is understood as “the internal presentation [Vorstellen] of a fully determinate quasi-­percept”) is illuminating for understanding the importance of the cross-­media translations for the Kunstwart. As Wellbery writes, for Hegel, the “differences among the arts  . . . make no real difference, and this because they blend into one another across a transformative process that is the coming-­to-­itself of what I would call a deep cultural subject.” One could say that in the aesthetics of the Kunstwart, such blending becomes programmatic. David E. Wellbery, “Aesthetic Media: The Structure of Aesthetic Theory before Kant,” in Regimes of Description: In the Archive of the Eighteenth Century, ed. John Bender and Michael Marrinan (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 200–­201. 120. Böcklin, quoted in Andrea Linnebach, Arnold Böcklin und die Antike: Mythos, Geschichte, Gegenwart (Munich: Hirmer, 1991), 103.

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121. Julius Meier-­Graefe, Der Fall Böcklin und die Lehre von den Einheiten (Stuttgart: J. Hoffmann, 1905), 222. 122. Böcklin-­Mappe (Munich: Georg D. W. Callwey im Kunstwart-­Verlage, n.d.). Herbert Broermann, Der Kunstwart in seiner Eigenart, Entwicklung und Bedeutung (Munich: Callwey, 1934), 45. 123. “Nicht mit Photographien kontrollieren! Nachdem sich der Brauch immer mehr einbürgert, ein Bild auf dem bequemen Wege der Reproduktion zu genießen, kann auf diese fehlerhafte Schätzung Böcklins, der sich ganz besonders des Wohlwollens der Photographie-­ Liebhaber erfreut, nicht dringend genug hingewiesen werden. . . . Je mehr sich eine Malerei ihrer spezifischen Mittel bedient, d. h. je reicher, je malerischer sie ist, desto schlechter fährt sie bei der Wiedergabe auf dem Wege dieser mechanischen Reduktion. Böcklin dagegen profitiert bei dieser Übertragung.” Meier-­Graefe, Der Fall Böcklin und die Lehre von den Einheiten, 92. 124. Ferdinand Avenarius, “Unsere Künste. Schluß des Überblicks.” Der Kunstwart 6, no. 2 (2. Oktoberheft 1892): 18. See also Avenarius, Max Klingers Griffelkunst (Berlin: Amsler & Ruthardt, 1895). 125. Klinger, “Malerei und Zeichnung,” 208. Subsequent references appear in the text. 126. Morton, “‘Malerei und Zeichnung,’” 543. 127. Klinger, “Malerei und Zeichnung,” 212. 128. Max Klinger, Malerei und Zeichnung, Tagebuchaufzeichnungen und Briefe, ed. Annaliese Hübscher (Leipzig, 1986), 113. 129. Klinger, “Malerei und Zeichnung,” 216. Subsequent references are cited in the text in this and the next three paragraphs. 130. “Den Versuch, die Ästhetik der Zeichnung rein für die Malerei anzuwenden, hat die deutsche Kunst in der Mitte dieses Jahrhunderts leider gemacht. Ihm fällt ein gutes Stück der Verantwortung jenes Mangels an Formenverständnis zu bei unserem heutigen Publikum, welches noch immer einen gewissen Hang zu jener ‘Tradition’ hat. Dieser Versuch war auch nur möglich bei einem Volke, welches so tiefen Hang zum Poetisieren hat wie unseres. Ihm war besonders günstiger Boden bereitet worden dadurch, daß unser ganzes künstlerisches Emporringen am Ende des vorigen und Anfang dieses Jahrhunderts nicht durch Künstler, sondern durch Dichter und Schriftsteller hervorgerufen wurde.” 131. “Für ein Publikum berechnet, das, über den Kunstwert sich unklar, etwas haben will, darüber zu fabulieren, zu ‘verstehen.’” 132. “Die ‘Idee’ liegt für den Künstler in der der Stellung des Körpers entsprechenden Formentwicklung, in seinem Verhältnis zum Raum, in seinen Farbenkombinationen, und es ist ihm völlig gleichgültig, ob dies Endymion oder Peter ist. . . . Unser Tagesgeschmack verlangt aber vorerst genau zu wissen, ob das nicht etwa Endymion ist.” 133. As Franciscono points out (Paul Klee: His Work and Thought, 41), Klee seems to have adopted this view of Klinger’s in his letter to Lily of June 13, 1906, discussed above, p. 45. 134. Charles Baudelaire, “L’Art philosophique,” in Écrits esthétiques (Paris: Éditions 10/18, 1986), 268–­69. This unfinished essay was published posthumously in L’Art romantique (1868). 135. As Morton explains, Laocoon was the subject of much critical debate and interest in late nineteenth-­century Germany. Lessing’s status as a “restorer of German language and literature” coupled with the fact that he could be cited in attacks on history painting, allegorical painting, and the painting of “low,” “ugly” subjects alike made him a handy support for many different arguments (Morton, “‘Malerei und Zeichnung,’” 557–­58). 136. “In seinem ‘Laokoon’ scheidet Lessing von den der Darstellung durch Malerei völlig künstlerisch möglichen Vorwürfen alle die Punkte aus, wo das Verharren in höchsten Affekten, im Häßlichen Grauen-­und Ekelerregenden unnatürlich wäre . . . Diese Punkte

sind der Darstellung durch Poesie, Drama, Musik erlaubt, ja für sie unentbehrlich, weil in diesen die Phantasie nicht an eben dieselben gebunden ist selbst wenn sie mit aller Kraft und Intensität sich vordrängen . . . Die gleichzeitige Beschäftigung unserer Phantasie bei Gewahrwerden des an und für sich Widerwärtigen, das Verhindern seiner Alleinwirkung ist also das wesentliche Moment, dieses künstlerisch darstellbar zu machen. Solche Momente besitzt nun die Zeichnung, indem sie z. B. der Farbe entbehrt, eines der unerläßlichsten Teile des Gesamteindruckes, den die Natur auf uns macht. Wir sind genötigt, dem einfarbigen Eindruck die fehlende Farbe nachzuschaffen, wie wir dem gelesenen Wort Ton und Rhythmus nachschaffen.” 137. On the “voice between the lines,” nineteenth-­century practices of teaching reading, and the “metaphysics of silent reading,” see the section “The Mother’s Mouth,” in Friedrich A. Kittler’s Discourse Networks 1800/1900, trans. Michael Metteer, with Chris Cullens (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990). See also Erich Schön, Der Verlust der Sinnlichkeit oder Die Verwandlungen des Lesers: Mentalitätswandel um 1800 (Stuttgart: Klett-­Cotta, 1987), and Garrett Stewart, Reading Voices: Literature and the Phonotext (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). 138. “Die vorausgeschickten Erörterungen führten zu dem Schlusse, daß es Phantasiebilder gibt, die durch die Malerei nicht, oder nur bedingterweise künstlerisch darstellbar sind, daß dieselben jedoch der Darstellung durch Zeichnung zugänglich sind, ohne daß ihrem Kunstwerte etwas vergeben wird. . . . Diese Betrachtungen werden bei Untersuchung der technischen Mittel der Griffelkunst bestätigt.” 139. Ludwig Justi, Zweihundert Bilder der Nationalgalerie: Erworben 1910 bis 1925 von Ludwig Justi (Berlin: Julius Bard, 1926), 23. In conversation, Patrizia Zeppetella, painting conservator at the Zentrum Paul Klee, confirmed that this was not the work’s original condition and that the mount might well have been cut while in possession of the Nationalgalerie in Berlin. Like many of the works in the Nationalgalerie’s important collection of modern art, the Vocal Fabric was shown in the 1937 Munich exhibition Degenerate Art and then sold abroad. It was given to the Museum of Modern Art in 1955. 140. See Elizabeth Kaiser Schulte, Margaret Holben Ellis, and Antoinette King, “An Approach to the Conservation Treatment of Paul Klee Drawings,” Book and Paper Group Annual 5 (1986): 19–­32, on the integral place of these card stock mounts in Klee’s working process, and on the various “types of abuse to secondary supports” that Klee’s “compound works of art” often suffer. 141. Werckmeister, Making of Paul Klee’s Career, 99–­100. 142. Ibid., 92. See also O. K. Werckmeister, “Klee im Ersten Weltkrieg,” in Paul Klee: Das Frühwerk, 1883–­1922, ed. Armin Zweite (Munich: Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, 1979), 192. 143. “Ich bin überzeugt, daß alle jene unvermeidlichen hübschen Mädchenköpfe—­Ada—­ Hermine—­Lydia—­der illustrierten Blätter vollständig verschwinden würden, wenn Eigennamen nicht mehr darunter gesetzt werden dürften. Ich habe beobachtet, daß ein solches, in einem Blatt nur ‘Studie’ genanntes Gesicht einen Kunstfreund ganz kalt ließ, aber als ‘Kläre’ in einem anderen volles Interesse abgewann. Der Mangel einer regelrechten Vorstellung hinderte den Wohlerzogenen jedenfalls am Abwickeln der selbstgesponnenen kleinen Novellen, die sich jedem solchen Blatte anzuschließen pflegt.” Klinger, “Malerei und Zeichnung,” 214. 144. For a richly detailed analysis of Klee’s use of music as model in his work, see Andrew Kagan, Paul Klee: Art and Music (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983). 145. Grohmann, Paul Klee, 48. 146. Renée Riese Hubert, “Writers as Art Critics: Three Views of the Paintings of Paul Klee,” Contemporary Literature 18, no. 1 (Winter 1977): 81.

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147. K. Porter Aichele, “Paul Klee’s Operatic Themes and Variations,” Art Bulletin 68, no. 3 (September 1986): 459. 148. See Yve-­Alain Bois’s pertinent remarks on Cézanne’s “contamination of the pictorial field by the graphic one”—­his refusal to treat painting and drawing as different media—­by keeping white reserve zones in his paintings: “The art of drawing evolved in a framework of conventions very different from that of painting (many things permitted in drawing would never have been accepted in painting). Now, the major difference between the space of drawing and that of painting concerns the nature of the support. Since the time of Alberti, the picture plane is assumed as transparent in painting, but the condition sine qua non of this transparency is that the supporting ground be covered over without reserve. Conversely, as Walter Benjamin has remarked, ‘the graphic line can exist only against this background, so that a drawing that completely covered its background would cease to be a drawing.’ Benjamin made this remark after having seen a show of Picasso’s cubist paintings, precisely because they seemed to him to put this simple opposition into question.” Yve-­Alain Bois, “Cézanne: Words and Deeds,” trans. Rosalind Krauss, October 84 (Spring 1998): 42–­43. I discuss the Benjamin fragment Bois cites above, pp. 73–78. 149. On the development of hatching and other conventions for rendering tonality in the work of early engravers such as Master ES and Martin Schongauer, see Suzanne Boorsch and Nadine M. Orenstein, “The Print in the North: The Age of Albrecht Dürer and Lucas van Leyden,” introduction to Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 54, no. 4 (Spring 1997): 5. 150. Klinger, “Malerei und Zeichnung,” 216. Another analysis of the Vocal Fabric that locates it implicitly in relation to silent reading—­albeit one that approaches the issue very differently, through the poetics of Mallarmé—­is found at the beginning of Lebensztejn’s “Écart,” which is in fact a reading of a line from Mallarmé along the lines suggested by the Vocal Fabric, using Klee’s painting as a model for thinking about writing as constituted by its gaps, its spaces. Jean-­Claude Lebensztejn, “Écart,” in La fourche (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), 105–­32. 151. Georg Jakob Wolf, Deutsche Maler-­Poeten (Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1920), 1. 152. Later works suggest that this reading of the Vokaltuch as presenting itself as a handkerchief is less far-­fetched than it may initially appear. In two works, Klee both uses an actual handkerchief as a support and draws attention to the support’s former use. Klee noted in his oeuvre-­catalogue that the support of his Fruechte auf rot (1930) is the silk “Sweatcloth [Schweisstuch] of the Violinist” (almost certainly his own—­he was, of course, a talented violinist). I thank Charles W. Haxthausen for the reference. One of Klee’s own handkerchiefs provides the cloth support of the Art Institute of Chicago’s untitled work of ca. 1939 (number 8995 in Paul Klee: Catalogue raisonné, ed. Josef Helfenstein and Christian Rümelin, vol. 8 [Wabern: Benteli, 2004]) as well, as he wittily underlines by means of his “signature,” which is in fact clearly his embroidered initials—­his paint application emphasizes the monogram’s already raised surface. Unlike these works, the support of the Vokaltuch is not literally a handkerchief, but the work presents itself as something along the lines of one, albeit an unusual one. 153. My account draws largely on Joseph Leo Koerner’s “Not Made by Human Hands,” a fascinating treatment of the importance of this model for Albrecht Dürer’s self-­portraiture, in his Moment of Self-­Portraiture in German Renaissance Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 80–­126, as well as on Gerhard Wolf, “From Mandylion to Veronica: Picturing the ‘Disembodied’ Face and Disseminating the True Image of Christ in the Latin West,” in The Holy Face and the Paradox of Representation, ed. Herbert L. Kessler and Gerhard Wolf (Bologna: Nuova Alfa Editoriale, 1998), 153–­79. 154. I summarize Koerner’s account of the Veronica legend as it was disseminated in Germany and the Low Countries. “Not Made by Human Hands,” 80–­82. 155. Ibid., 83–­86. It might be noted how often Dürer was invoked as the originator of an

“idealist” German tradition of art (and of graphic art in particular) by the partisans of Phantasiekunst, who viewed themselves as his heirs—­it is no coincidence that the cultural-­political organization that Avenarius founded was called the Dürerbund (Dürer Association), nor that Klinger, as we saw, cites Dürer as the origin of the mode of drawing that he wishes to defend and promote (“Malerei und Zeichnung,” 210). Nor that Scheffler regrets, in his critical treatment of the causes and effects of nineteenth-­century German Gedankenmalerei, that Germans chose Dürer as their artistic “Schutzheiligen”: “einen Künstler, der auch vor allem Zeichner war und den nur die ungeheure Sinnlichkeit der Renaissancezeit vor den Klippen der Gedankenkunst bewahrte.” Karl Scheffler, Deutsche Maler und Zeichner im neunzehnten Jahrhundert (Leipzig: Insel, 1920; 1st ed. 1909), 6. For a contemporary art-­historical discussion of Dürer’s idealism, see Erwin Panofsky, Idea: Ein Beitrag zur Begriffsgeschichte der älteren Kunsttheorie (Leipzig: B. Teubner, 1924). 156. Koerner, “Not Made by Human Hands,” 89–­91 and 466n44. 157. Ibid., 90–­91. 158. Lebensztejn draws attention to this as well; “Écart,” 111. 159. See p. 63 above. 160. El Lissitzky, “Topographie der Typographie,” Merz 4 (July 1923): 47. See also Jan Tschichold’s assertion in 1928 that modernized reading is essentially optical: he understands Marinetti’s poetry as “an attempt  . . . to create ‘visible-­poetry,’ instead of the old ‘audible-­ poetry,’ (to which in any case nobody had listened for a long time)” (Jan Tschichold, The New Typography, trans. Ruari McLean [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998], 56). “Zum ersten Male ist . . . versucht worden, Sicht-­Gedichte statt der alten Hör-­Gedichte (die man doch schon längst nicht mehr hörte) zu gestalten.” Tschichold, Die neue Typographie: Ein Handbuch für zeitgemäss Schaffende (Berlin: Brinkmann & Bose, 1987), 56. 161. These little signs appear earlier in Klee’s drawings, beginning in 1912. See p. 129 below and 192n2. Franciscono sees these signs as permitting Klee to represent “symbolic subjects” without using the rounded and “substantial forms” that he used in his Inventionen—­ thus allowing him to escape the “bathos of much late nineteenth-­century allegory.” Paul Klee: His Work and Thought, 150. 162. Jim M. Jordan, “Garten der Mysterien: Die Ikonographie von Paul Klees expressionistischer Periode,” in Paul Klee: Das Frühwerk, 1883–­1922, ed. Armin Zweite (Munich: Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, 1979), 227–­45, especially 234–­37. As he writes: “Solche Symbole sind leicht zu erkennen und haben eine große historische Resonanz. Indem er mit ihnen arbeitet, beschwört Klee die Kraft ihrer mystischen Assoziationen. Klee ordnet die Zeichen zu immer neuen Kombinationen und überschreitet dadurch ihre traditionelle Symbolik, die sich zu einer Vielfalt neuer esoterischer und poetischer Deutungsmöglichkeiten ausweitet” (235). 163. The artists Baudelaire sees as belonging to “the German school” would be seen as representatives of Gedankenmalerei in German art criticism of the early twentieth century; see, for instance, Scheffler’s Deutsche Maler und Zeichner, which devotes a chapter to each. 164. “Ainsi l’art philosophique est un retour vers l’imagerie nécessaire à l’enfance des peuples, et s’il était rigoureusement fidèle à lui-­même, il s’astreindrait à juxtaposer autant d’images successives qu’il en est contenu dans une phrase quelconque qu’il voudrait exprimer. Encore avons-­nous le droit de douter que la phrase hiéroglyphique fût plus claire que la phrase typographiée. . . . Plus l’art voudra être philosophiquement clair, plus il se dégradera et remontera vers l’hiéroglyphe enfantin.” Baudelaire, “L’Art philosophique,” 268–­69. 165. See Frances S. Connelly, “Poetic Monsters and Nature Hieroglyphics: The Precocious Primitivism of Philipp Otto Runge,” in special issue on Romanticism, guest editor Nina Athanassoglou-­Kallmyer, Art Journal 52, no. 2, Romanticism (Summer 1992): 31–­39. 166. Klee, “Graphic Art” essay (Beitrag für den Sammelband Schöpferische Konfession

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[1920]), in Schriften, 121. 167. See p. 49 above. Wilhelm Hausenstein, Kairuan, oder eine Geschichte vom Maler Klee und von der Kunst dieses Zeitalters (Munich: Kurt Wolff, 1921), 118–­19. 168. Klee records that he read Baudelaire’s Schriften (the Abhandlungen zur Malerei, the fourth volume of Max and Margarete Bruns’s German edition of Baudelaire’s Schriften, in Klee’s library) in Tagebücher, 258, 514. 169. “Ein Lallen in Sprachen wie an den biblischen Pfingsten, als jeder, der Sprache des andern unkundig, dennoch die Sprache des andern redete.” Hausenstein, Kairuan, 79–­80. 170. Klee surely found an important model for this kind of relation between text and image in the comic illustrations for which the Munich weeklies Jugend and Simplizissmus were famous around the turn of the century. On the relation between Klee’s Inventions and such illustrations (particularly the witty work of Julius Diez, which often appeared in Jugend), see Franciscono, Paul Klee: His Work and Thought, 47. Jürgen Glaesemer remarks more generally on the importance for Klee’s work of the key role played by titles and inscriptions in the illustrations in Jugend and Simplizissmus: “Deutlich ist zu erkennen, wie Klees Kunst der Titelgebung sich in ihren Anfängen aus der Karikatur herleitete” (Jürgen Glaesemer, Handzeichnungen I: Kindheit bis 1920 [Bern: Kunstmuseum Bern, 1973], 118). Glaesemer sees links between Klee’s own early drawings imitating such comic illustration and his later play with titling: “So will es scheinen, dass die Verbindung zwischen Bild und Titel, die Klee in den späteren Werken zu einer untrennbaren Einheit verschmolz, sich auf die frühen prosaischen Bilderwitze zurückführen lässt” (77). Certainly some of Klee’s very early drawings, such as the 1899 caricatures of “Eine sog. Revolverschwester” and “Jeanne d’Arc” (no. 228 in Handzeichnungen I), were modeled on pictures from Jugend and Simplizissmus—­this is obvious from the drawing style as well as from the relation between image and written inscription. Certain later works—­perhaps most clearly Munich Policeman in Conversation (1913, 197), which, in its subject matter and spatial organization, although not in its style, is more typical of Simplizissmus than it is of the rest of Klee’s work of that moment—­show that the model of caricature was still in play much later. But the archaizing style of the Inventions, based in part on Renaissance prints (“from Mantegna to Dürer,” writes Klee, Briefe, 1:416), suggests that Klee looked to much older models of allegorical juxtaposition of image and inscription as well. There are, in short, a number of important models for Klee’s play with captioning. 171. “Il faut, dans la traduction des oeuvres d’art philosophiques, apporter une grande minutie . . . là les lieux, le décor, les meubles, les ustensiles (voir Hogarth), tout est allégorie, allusion, hiéroglyphes, rébus.” Baudelaire, “L’Art philosophique,” 271. 172. “Même à l’esprit d’un artiste philosophe, les accessoires s’offrent, non pas avec un caractère littéral et précis, mais avec un caractère poétique, vague et confus, et souvent c’est le traducteur qui invente les intentions.” Ibid. 173. Also telling, although much later, are the remarkable comments that Hans-­ Friedrich Geist reports Klee as having made when Geist visited the artist’s studio in 1930: “Meine Zeichen sind keine gewollten Träger von Inhalten. . . . Der Beschauer deutet, verbindet Lineares, Flächiges, Hell-­Dunkles, Farbiges mit ‘Erinnerungen.’ Ich bin zum Schluß selber Beschauer und lasse mich beschenken.” In Erinnerungen an Paul Klee, ed. Ludwig Grote (Munich: Prestel, 1959), 90. See Charles W. Haxthausen’s discussion in “Zur ‘Bildsprache’ des Spätwerkes,” in Paul Klee: Das Schaffen im Todesjahr, ed. Josef Helfenstein and Stefan Frey (Stuttgart: Gerd Hatje, 1990), 28–­29. 174. It is crucial, I think, to see both sides of this relation, both rejection and radicalization; I think K. Porter Aichele is too one-­sided in interpreting Landscape with Gallows (1919, 115; fig. 0.1) as having “renounced allegorical symbolism in favor of a new vocabulary of signs.” Paul Klee, Poet/Painter (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2006), 99. Haxthausen, on the

other hand, speculates in passing about a more positive connection between Klee’s inscribed Inventions and his Schriftbilder of 1916. Charles W. Haxthausen, Paul Klee: The Formative Years (New York: Garland, 1981), 498. 175. Klee recommends looking to these “primal beginnings,” as well as the “parallele Erscheinungen” of “die Zeichnungen Geisteskranker,” in his January 1912 review of the first Blaue Reiter exhibition at Heinrich Thannhauser’s Munich gallery; in Schriften: Rezensionen und Aufsätze, ed. Christian Geelhaar (Cologne: DuMont, 1976), 97. See Hal Foster on Klee’s trio of “visionary” models (the child, the mentally ill, and the “primitive”) in “Blinded Insights,” in Prosthetic Gods (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 198–­202, and Jonathan Fineberg, “Reawakening the Beginnings: The Art of Paul Klee,” in The Innocent Eye: Children’s Art and the Modern Artist (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 82–­119. 176. Later, in the 1924 Jena lecture, Klee distanced himself from children’s art altogether, claiming that talk of the “infantilism” of his art was a misunderstanding of those “linear constructions” in which he sought to connect “an objective representation  . . . with a pure presentation of the linear element.” Klee, “On Modern Art,” trans. David Farrell Krell, in Paul Klee: Philosophical Vision, 14. But this is another way in which the Jena lecture works to disavow aspects of Klee’s earlier art; see p. 194n18 above. The overview I give here of Klee’s early interest in children’s art builds on Marcel Franciscono, “Paul Klee and Children’s Art,” in Discovering Child Art: Essays on Childhood, Primitivism and Modernism, ed. Jonathan Fineberg (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 95–­121. 177. “‘So zeichnet . . . ein Kind, das noch nie das Bilderbuch gründlich angeschaut hat.’ Hier, glaube ich, treffen wir den Kernpunkt der neuen Kunst, die sich in Klee einen Weg sucht. Er und die ähnlichen Zielen zustrebenden Maler  . . . sehen in der noch unbeeinflussten Kunst des Kindes und primitiven Völker einen Wegweiser für ihr eigenes Schaffen.” Hans Bloesch, “Ein moderner Graphiker,” Die Alpen 6 (1912): 264–­72. 178. “Jedes Ding mit ungewohnten Augen anschaut und noch die unbetrübte Fähigkeit besitzt, das Ding als solches aufzunehmen.” Wassily Kandinsky, “Über die Formfrage,” in Der Blaue Reiter, ed. Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc, Dokumentarische Neuausgabe ed. Klaus Lankheit (Munich: Piper, 1984), 168. 179. The account I develop here takes off from O. K. Werckmeister’s argument that Klee revalued the “schematic” stage of children’s art, as theorized by Kerschensteiner, and made it productive in his art in his excellent article, “The Issue of Childhood in the Art of Paul Klee,” in special issue on Paul Klee, Arts Magazine 52, no. 1 (1977): 138–­51, from which I have learned a great deal. Franciscono also argues that although there is no unequivocal evidence that Klee knew of Kerschensteiner’s study, the similarity between one of Klee’s drawings of 1912 (Human Helplessness) and a child’s drawing of a snowball fight that Kerschensteiner reproduces is striking enough to suggest that Klee did indeed look at it. See also the discussion in Franciscono, Paul Klee: His Work and Thought, 156–­57. 180. Georg Kerschensteiner, Die Entwicklung der zeichnerischen Begabung: Neue Ergebnisse auf Grund neuer Untersuchungen (Munich: Carl Gerber, 1905), 15–­18. Subsequent references are cited in the text in this paragraph and the next. 181. “Die Schemata tragen nicht selten den scheinbaren Ausdruck einer seelischen Stimmung. . . . Sully hat in diesem Zug eine Absicht des darstellenden Kindes zu erkennen geglaubt. Das vorliegende Material hat mich überzeugt, dass dies nicht der Fall ist . . . ob das Kind einen Leichenzug oder ein Schneeballgefecht darzustellen hat, das Menschenschema ist genau das gleiche.” 182. “Zunächst eilt die Sprache der Vorstellungsentwicklung weit voraus. Längst spricht das Kind Wörter, ohne dass es den Sinn derselben erfasst hat, und längst weiss es einen Gegenstand zu benennen, von dem es sich vielleicht nur einer einzigen Wahrnehmung be-

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wusst ist. Der Stolz der Eltern, die Kinder recht bald sprechen zu lehren, und das Streben der Schule, sie recht bald zum Lesen und Schreiben zu bringen, tut das übrige, damit die Sprache der Erfahrung noch mehr vorauseilt. . . . Denn der heutige gebildete Mensch hat vielleicht denken, selten aber sehen gelernt. Beim Kinde besteht zweifellos der bewusste Teil der meisten Vorstellungen nur aus vereinzelten Gegenstandsmerkmalen. . . . Damit hängt es nun auch zusammen, dass das Zeichnen des Kindes weiter nichts ist, als ein Niederschreiben der Merkmale der Bestandteile des Gegenstandes; es beschreibt den Gegenstand, aber es stellt ihn nicht dar.” 183. “Unser sogenannter Anschauungsunterricht . . . der oft nichts weiter ist als eben auch eine Beschreibung des Gegenstandes meist nach einem künstlerisch recht zweifelhaften Bilde, der fast immer nur die Teile des Dinges aufzählt und nicht ihren Zusammenhang klar legt, hält geradezu das Kind auf diesem niederen Standpunkte fest” 184. “Die ovale Darstellung des Rumpfes herrscht zwar bei der Menschendarstellung vor, aber beinahe ebenso oft drückt es den Rumpf durch anders begrenzte Figuren aus und findet dabei die absonderlichsten Phantasieformen, wie Quadrate, Rechtecke, Dreiecke, biskuitförmige, flaschenähnliche, glockenartige, herzförmige, vasenförmige Figuren u. s. w.” 185. Werckmeister, “Issue of Childhood,” 143. 186. Werckmeister discusses the elementary schematic signs in Klee’s “fairy-­tale landscapes” of 1918 as derived from similar forms Klee used in his own childhood work, examining his Summer Landscape, March 20 (1890) beside his Landscape of the Past (1918), whose title perhaps alludes to such borrowing. Werckmeister argues that although Klee’s interest in children’s art in 1912 was a “principled provocation of the public,” modeling aspects of his art on children’s art in 1918 amounted to virtually the opposite: “Walden’s obituary on Marc and Däubler’s article on Klee in Das Kunstblatt sanctioned the convergence of childlikeness and artistic vision as Klee’s recipe for success in the Sturm Gallery. When Klee now adapted his own childhood pictures, he was conforming to Däubler’s characterization of him.” Making of Paul Klee’s Career, 116–­17. 187. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 273. 188. “Eine vollständig ebene Fläche bildet den unteren Teil des Gesichts. . . . Während nun die Nase sich einfach als ein schmales Brett aufsetzt, bilden zwei etwa acht Zentimeter vorspringende Zylinder die beiden Augen, ein etwas niedereres Hexaeder den Mund. . . . Wohl ist die Form hier noch geschlossen, aber es ist nicht die “wirkliche” Form, sondern ein straffes Formenschema von plastischer Urgewalt.” Kahnweiler, Der Weg zum Kubismus, 45–­46. 189. Bois, “Kahnweiler’s Lesson,” 86–­87, 94. 190. Ibid., 94. 191. Klee, Tagebücher, no. 910. 192. “Hier sind allenfalls Bestätigungen, Wahlverwandtschaften; nicht Ursprünge.” Hausenstein, Kairuan, 107. Jordan and Franciscono, among others, have investigated the question of Klee’s relation to cubism. 193. “Die mütterliche Großmutter zeichnete malte und strickte wie viele Biedermeierinnen aus guter Familie Blumen und andere Dinge die man wohl lieb haben kann. Sie weckte in mir sehr frühzeitig die Lust am Zeichnen und Kolorieren. Meine ersten Kinderzeichnungen sind Illustrationen zu phantastischen Vorstellungen und Erzählungen. Eine Naturvorlage wurde nicht erwogen. Blumen Tiere, z. T. bekleidet, Kinder, Kirchen, Gießkannen, Pferde Wagen Schlitten Gartenpavillons kommen vor. Zum Muster für freie Nachbildung dienten französische Bilderbogen mit volkstümlichen Verschen. Azor et mimi und Cadet Roussel sind mir noch in bester Erinnerung.” Klee, Tagebücher, 504. 194. Glaesemer, Handzeichnungen I, 10–­12.

195. Glaesemer writes that Felix Klee, the artist’s son, confirmed for him that what looks like one of the “Azor et mimi” sheets in a 1924 photograph Felix had taken of his father’s studio is indeed one. Handzeichnungen I, 11. Some of the complexity of the relation between illustration and Klee’s practice of captioning is suggested by a much later quotation from Klee, when he was working, however, in a very different way than in the late 1910s: “Je ne pense pas que les titres de mes tableaux soient exactement ce que chacun voudrait qu’ils soient, mais comme pour moi le tableau est primordial, que mes sous-­titres illustrent le tableau et que je ne fais par conséquent pas une illustration d’après un texte donné, il se peut très bien que telle personne voie sur ma toile telle chose que je n’y vois pas; de même si vous lisez un livre illustré, il vous arrivera d’imaginer maintes scènes différemment que l’illustrateur les présente.” Hans Schiess, “Notes sur Klee. A propos de son exposition à la Galerie Simon,” Cahiers d’Art 9, nos. 5–­8 (1934): 183. See Haxthausen’s illuminating discussion of this passage in “Zur ‘Bildsprache’ des Spätwerkes,” 28–­29. 196. For Franciscono’s argument regarding Klee’s project of illustrating Faust, see 192n2. 197. And not only the mode of comic illustration for which turn-­of-­the-­century Munich was famous. See 224n170. 198. Incidentally, in Benjamin’s writings on illustrated children’s books, mentioned earlier in this chapter, products of the Biedermeier era were a particular focus; see, for instance, Walter Benjamin, “‘Old Forgotten Children’s Books’” (1924), in Selected Writings, vol. 1, 1913–­1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996), 409–­11, and “A Glimpse into the World of Children’s Books” (1926), 1:440–­42. 199. “Wir . . . die Feuerprobe nicht scheuen, unsere Werke, die in die Zukunft zeigen und noch unerwiesen sind, neben Werke alter, längst erwiesener Kulturen zu stellen. Wir tun es mit dem Gedanken, durch nichts unsere Ideen deutlicher zu illustrieren als durch solche Vergleiche; Echtes bleibt stets neben Echtem bestehen, so verschieden auch sein Ausdruck sein mag.” Franz Marc, “Zwei Bilder,” in Der Blaue Reiter, ed. Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc, Dokumentarische Neuausgabe ed. Klaus Lankheit (Munich: Piper, 1984), 33. Subsequent references are cited in the text in this paragraph and the next. 200. “Rechts eine volkstümliche Illustration aus Grimms Märchen aus dem Jahre 1832, links ein Bild von Kandinsky 1910. Das erste ist echt und ganz innerlich wie ein Volkslied und wurde von seiner Zeit mit der vollkommensten Selbstverständlichkeit und Liebe verstanden, da noch 1832 jeder Handwerksbursche und jeder Prinz dasselbe künstlerische Gefühl besaß, aus dem heraus das Bildchen geschaffen ist.” Marc’s identifications of the two pictures—­the order of which was reversed in the actual publication—­is not quite accurate. The Kandinsky dates from 1911 and the illustration was in fact taken from Johann Andreas Christian Löhr’s Das Buch der Maehrchen für Kindheit und Jugend, nebst etzlichen Schnaken und Schnurren, anmuthig und lehrhaftig (Leipzig, ca. 1819–­20). 201. Beginning in the 1890s, particularly after the 1896 exhibition at the Kunstgewerbemuseum in Vienna, Biedermeier became a term designating the style of the Vormärz period and was conceived by Adolf Loos, Hermann Muthesius, and many of their contemporaries as the last true collective style in Germany; reformers, such as those involved with the Werkbund, often admired it for its Materialgerechtigkeit and simple forms, virtues that they saw as swept away by the ersatz historicist kitsch that accompanied Germany’s rapid industrialization, but hoped to resuscitate. 202. “Der Kunststil aber, der unveräußerliche Besitz der alten Zeit, brach in der Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts katastrophal zusammen. Es gibt seitdem keinen Stil mehr. . . . Was es an ernster Kunst seitdem gegeben hat, sind Werke einzelner; mit ‘Stil’ haben diese gar nichts zu tun, da sie in gar keinem Zusammenhang mit dem Stil und Bedürfnis der Masse stehen. . . . Es sind

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eigenwillige, feurige Zeichen einer neuen Zeit. . . . Dieses Buch soll ihr Brennpunkt werden, bis die Morgenröte kommt und mit ihrem natürlichen Lichte diesen Werken das gespenstige Ansehen nimmt, in dem sie der heutigen Welt noch erscheinen. Was heute gespenstig scheint, wird morgen natürlich sein.” 203. “Gut ist es, weil es nett aussehen würde. Nicht gut, da es ein Märchenparfüm auf meine Bilder überhaupt spritzen würde.” Kandinsky to Marc, in Wassily Kandinsky Franz Marc Briefwechsel, ed. Klaus Lankheit (Munich: R. Piper, 1983), 77. See Brüggemann’s discussion in Walter Benjamin über Spiel, Farbe und Phantasie, 128. 204. “Dieser Kampf mit der Märchenluft ist dem Kampfe mit der Natur gleich.” Wassily Kandinsky, Über das Geistige in der Kunst (Bern: Benteli, 1952), 122. Subsequent references are cited in the text in this paragraph and the next. Klee mentions Kandinsky’s treatise in articles in Die Alpen in January and February 1912. 205. “Ein ganz anderer Fall endlich ist ein rotes Pferd. Schon der Klang dieser Worte versetzt uns in eine andere Atmosphäre. . . . Die ‘unnatürlichen’ Gegenstände . . . können leicht einen literarischen Klang bekommen, indem die Komposition als ein Märchen wirkt. Dies letzte Resultat versetzt den Zuschauer in eine Atmosphäre, welche er, da sie märchenhaft ist, ruhig gelten läßt, und wo er dann 1. die Fabel sucht, 2. unempfindlich oder wenig empfindlich gegen die reine Farbenwirkung bleibt. Jedenfalls ist in diesem Fall die direkte, reine innere Wirkung der Farbe nicht mehr möglich: das Äußerliche hat leicht über das Innerliche Übergewicht. . . . Deswegen muß eine Form gefunden werden, die erstens die Märchenwirkung ausschließt und zweitens die reine Farbenwirkung in keiner Weise hemmt.” On the clear connection between this passage and Marc’s 1911 painting Grazing Horses IV (also known as The Red Horses), see John F. Moffitt, “‘Fighting Forms: The Fate of the Animals.’ The Occultist Origins of Franz Marc’s ‘Farbentheorie,’” Artibus et Historiae 6, no. 12 (1985): 116. 206. “Zu diesem Zweck müssen Form, Bewegung, Farbe, die aus der Natur (realen oder nicht realen) geliehenen Gegenstände keine äußerliche und äußerlich verbundene erzählerische Wirkung hervorrufen.” 207. Klee, “Beitrag für den Sammelband Schöpferische Konfession (1920),” in Schriften, 118. For the original German, see 206n142. 208. “Wenn das Märchen nicht im ganzen ‘übersetzt’ ist, so hat es zur Folge ein Resultat, ähnlich dem der kinematographischen Märchenbilder.” Kandinsky, Über das Geistige, 120. One might say that Werckmeister misunderstands Klee’s work of 1916–­18 by seeing a hint of a fairy tale as necessarily an “unartistic effect,” as Kandinsky does—­that at times he does not historicize enough, repeating rather than investigating the art-­critical terms of the 1910s. 209. Hausenstein, Kairuan, 118. 210. “Ich möchte doch den Leuten, die gegen Romantik sind, die dem Künstler Geist und Phantasie und Imagination verbieten wollen, einmal die Frage vorlegen: Was habt ihr eigentlich gegen das Märchen? . . .  Warum soll denn der Maler nicht Romantiker, nicht Träumer und Fabulierer sein?” P. W. [Paul Westheim], “Was ist’s mit dem Märchen?,” Frankfurter Zeitung, June 9, 1920. For evidence of Hausenstein’s hostility to Westheim, see 197–98n57.

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CHAPTER THREE 1. Excerpted in“Paul Klee und die Kritik: Eine Auswahl,” Der Ararat 8 (July 1920): 80. 2. Franz Marc, “Zwei Bilder,” in Der Blaue Reiter, ed. Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc, Dokumentarische Neuausgabe ed. Klaus Lankheit (Munich: Piper, 1984), 35–­38. 3. “Symbole . . . die auf die Altäre der kommenden geistigen Religion gehören und hinter denen der technische Erzeuger verschwindet.” Franz Marc, “Die ‘Wilden’ Deutschlands,” in

Der Blaue Reiter, 31. 4. Charles W. Haxthausen, “A Critical Illusion: ‘Expressionism’ in the Writings of Wilhelm Hausenstein,” in The Ideological Crisis of Expressionism: The Literary and Artistic German War Colony in Belgium, 1914–­1918, ed. Rainer Rumold and O. K. Werckmeister (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1990), 172. Worringer and Hausenstein had different methodological apparatuses for viewing stylistic changes in recent avant-­garde art as anticipating a new collective culture—­Worringer’s framework was psychological, whereas Hausenstein’s was sociological (178–­79). But both shared the assumption that connections could be drawn between artistic style and the broadest historical developments (foundational as well for the development of art history as an academic discipline) as well as romantic anticapitalist hopes that a new era of spiritual unity might overcome capitalist individualism. As Haxthausen explains, the conception of the avant-­garde at work in expressionist art criticism may well be aligned with Peter Bürger’s well-­known theorization of the historical avant-­garde movements; Bürger, however, insists that German expressionism is not an avant-­garde in his sense in his article “Avant-­Garde” in the Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, ed. Michael Kelly (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). 5. Haxthausen, “A Critical Illusion,” 179. I borrow Haxthausen’s translation of the quotation from Hausenstein. Wilhelm Hausenstein, Der nackte Mensch in der Kunst aller Zeiten und Völker (Munich: R. Piper, 1913), 182–­83. “Die Entwickelung ist nicht so einfach, wie etliche Mechaniker eines mißverstandenen historischen Materialismus meinen mögen,” writes Hausenstein. 6. Haxthausen, “A Critical Illusion,” 180. Wilhelm Hausenstein, Die bildende Kunst der Gegenwart (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-­Anstalt, 1923; first published 1914), 23. 7. See above, pp. 27–28. See Wilhelm Hausenstein’s “Remembering Eisner,” translated in Weimar Republic Sourcebook, ed. Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 52–­53. As Haxthausen writes in “A Critical Illusion,” the concept of expressionism as used by such critics as Hausenstein and Worringer might be seen as a “grand illusion”(169) that collapsed between 1918 and 1920—­both Hausenstein and Worringer attacked expressionism, which they had come to see as a kind of delusion, in lectures and publications. Some of the factors for this collapse included a deep disillusion with the idea of a return to religion in modernity, the commercialization of expressionism, and the impact of Spengler’s Decline of the West (184–­89). I would argue against Haxthausen’s assertion that “neither the war nor the failed revolution were cited” in Hausenstein’s “lugubrious dismantlings of the myth [of expressionism]” (185). In Kunst in diesem Augenblick, Hausenstein parallels the “bankruptcy” of expressionism with that of “socialism, which once promised salvation,” but “has entered into bankruptcy with the revolution” (Wilhelm Hausenstein, Die Kunst in diesem Augenblick [Munich: Hyperionverlag, 1920], 481). 8. See Dennis Crockett’s account of the debate triggered by Hausenstein’s denunciation of expressionism in his German Post-­Expressionism: The Art of the Great Disorder, 1918–­1924 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), 11–­13. 9. “Die Kritiker erklären, was Klee male und zeichne, sei unverständlich. Als ob gemeinverständlich sein könnte, was in einer Zeit entstand, die etwa nach der Weise der Gewalthaber zwischen 1914 und 1918 die Organisation auf widerorganische Art betrieb. . . . Daß je die Menschen, die es vermochten, die Kathedralen der Gotik zu bauen, nach Organisation geschrien hätten, ist nicht vorzustellen. Sie besaßen die Kollektivität. Wir aber sind in die Epoche des Anarchischen und der Disgregation eingetreten. Das Subjektive ist wahrlich nicht das Höchste. Aber es ist in diesem scheelen Augenblick das Einzige. . . . Es ist undenkbar, daß Kunst, hat sie die Bedeutung und Schönheit der Konsequenz, in ihr [die Epoche] anders aussehe als die Zeichnung Klees, deren Grenzen in der Spannweite des Exzesses seiner Subjektivität liegen.”

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Wilhelm Hausenstein, Kairuan, oder eine Geschichte vom Maler Klee und von der Kunst dieses Zeitalters (Munich: Kurt Wolff, 1921), 101–­2. 10. Haxthausen, “A Critical Illusion,” 178–­79. Hausenstein, Der nackte Mensch, 24. 11. Hausenstein, Kairuan, 21, 22, 102. 12. “Der Gedanke einer derartigen Berufung Klees . . . wäre . . . verfehlt, weil er am eigentlichsten Wert Klees, an der absoluten Subjektivität und Irrationalität seines Arbeitens . . . geraden Wegs vorbeigeht.” Quoted in O. K. Werckmeister, The Making of Paul Klee’s Career, 1914–­1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 305n135. 13. Ibid. 14. Hausenstein gives the following description of art in the “critical” epoch following the bourgeois revolutions, beginning with the Dutch Revolt: “Wie der bürgerliche Kapitalismus sein Lebenszentrum in der Erzeugung mobiler Werte findet und wie er dem Individuum die Herrschaft über diese mobilen Werte zuspricht, so wird auch die künstlerische Produktion zu einer Produktion mobiler Kunstgüter . . . Das Bild wird zum Staffeleibild, die Skulptur zur Individualplastik . . . Und wiewohl es sich bei künstlerischen Leistungen im Grunde immer um monopolwertige Güter handelt, werden Bilder und Skulpturen . . . fungible Dinge . . . Dieses bürgerliche Weltzeitalter, das sich rühmt, das Persönliche zu pflegen, ist im Gegensatz zum anonymen Mittelalter . . . so ohne jede Achtung für die besonderen Qualitäten eines Kunstwerkes, daß . . . dem Kunstwerk jeder beliebige Platz gewährt wird; und das ist soviel wie Heimatlosigkeit der Kunst.” Hausenstein, Der nackte Mensch, 24–­25. 15. Friedrich Schlegel, “Zweiter Nachtrag alter Gemälde,” in Kritische Friedrich-­Schlegel-­ Ausgabe, ed. Hans Eichner, vol. 4 (Munich: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1959), 79. 16. See Marcel Franciscono’s chapter “Bruno Taut, Adolf Behne, and the Mission of the Avant-­Garde,” in Walter Gropius and the Creation of the Bauhaus in Weimar: The Ideals and Artistic Theories of Its Founding Years (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971), 88–­126. 17. “Die gotische Kathedrale umfaßt ebenso alle Künstler, die von einer wundervollen Einheit erfüllt waren und in dem Architekturgebilde des Domes den klingenden Gesamtrhythmus fanden.” Bruno Taut, “Eine Notwendigkeit,” Der Sturm 4, nos. 196–­97 (February 1914) (Nendeln, Liechtenstein: Kraus Reprint, 1979): 174–­75. English translation in German Expressionism: Documents from the End of the Wilhelmine Empire to the Rise of National Socialism, ed. Rose-­Carol Washton Long (New York: G. K. Hall, 1993), 125. 18. Taut, “Eine Notwendigkeit,” in Long, German Expressionism, 126. 19. “Gemeinsame Planung umfangreicher utopischer Bauentwürfe—­Volks-­und Kultbauten—­mit weitgestecktem Ziel.” Walter Gropius, April 1919 broadsheet, in Long, German Expressionism, 249. Broadsheet reproduced in Bauhaus 1919–­1933: Workshops for Modernity, ed. Leah Dickerman and Barry Bergdoll (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2009), 65. See also Charles W. Haxthausen’s essay “Walter Gropius and Lyonel Feininger: Bauhaus Manifesto. 1919” on the broadsheet in the same exhibition catalogue, 64–­67. 20. “Vielleicht ist Klee schon ein Ende, vielleicht geht er den Gefahren, die die abstrakte Kunst in sich birgt, durch die Anspruchslosigkeit seines Formats aus dem Wege. Wie ein Schmetterling erfreut er, der, vergrößert, nur grotesk wirken würde. . . . Ueber ihn hinausgehend muß sich die abstrakte Kunst, ihres inneren Gesetzes bewußt werdend, vom Bild abwenden, Ausdruck finden in der Architektur.” Waldemar Jollos, “Paul Klee (in der “Sturm”-­ Ausstellung der Galerie Dada),” Neue Zürcher Zeitung, April 17, 1917 (first evening edition). 21. “Ein Gang durch den Dom . . . hat mich von neuem von der Herrlichkeit dieser Architektur überzeugt und tief ergriffen. Die Bilder auf den Altären sind nur nicht entsprechend. Es fehlt ihnen durchaus die Inbrunst der Farbe. Wir können das jetzt besser, nur haben wir wieder keine Architektur dazu. . . . Dome wollen wir überhaupt nicht errichten, höchstens Klöster, das ist zeitgemäß.” Paul Klee, letter to Lily, May 27, 1917, in Briefe an die Familie,

1893–­1940, ed. Felix Klee, vol. 2, 1907–­1940 (Cologne: DuMont, 1979), 868. 22. See Haxthausen’s remarks on this same passage, which he, too, reads as a most striking departure from the views of Klee’s contemporaries, commenting that Klee “did not share the view of his colleagues Schlemmer and Gropius and other contemporaries, that an autonomous painting could not achieve the level of the painting of past ages, when it was part of architecture and served an indispensable social function.” Charles W. Haxthausen, “Between Representation and Parody: Klee’s ‘Auratic’ Pictures,” Study of Art History 1, no. 3 (2001): 29. 23. See Marcel Franciscono, Paul Klee: His Work and Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 168–­70, on Klee’s “general ambivalence towards the religious and visionary beliefs of Marc and Kandinsky” and the stark contrast between their attitudes and Klee’s emphasis on individuality, as well as Werckmeister, Making of Paul Klee’s Career, 56–­62 and 76–­80. 24. “Even when they are not monks, [Friedrich’s] Rückenfiguren do not appear as inhabitants of the landscape, but as strangers to the country, dressed in the garb of a bourgeois city dweller. . . . [The Rückenfigur’s] otherness to landscape makes nature something experienced only from afar, from the standpoint of the Bürger who has lost a natural bond to the land and seeks it now with his gaze.” Joseph Leo Koerner, Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape (London: Reaktion, 1990), 220. In an interesting and apposite aphorism entitled “Architecture for the search for knowledge,” Friedrich Nietzsche proposes that what big cities lack is “quiet and wide, expansive places for reflection,” which he describes as “cloisters” (Hallengänge) for the “vita contemplativa” of “we who are godless,” whom church buildings, even if secularized, would not suit because of the “far too pathetic and unfree language” of their architecture. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), 226–­27. Translation slightly altered. I am grateful to Maria Stavrinaki for bringing this aphorism to my attention. 25. See also the “theory of the cloister” Michael Fried traces out in French art criticism of the 1860s in Manet’s Modernism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 253ff. 26. “Wenn ich alt bin, sehr alt, dann existieren vielleicht ein paar Räume rein geistiger Architektur von mir mit einigen Plastiken, dem notwendigen Mobiliar, und einem halben Hundert Bilder.” Briefe, 2:868. 27. Klee, “Beitrag für den Sammelband Schöpferische Konfession (1920),” in Schriften: Rezensionen und Aufsätze, ed. Christian Geelhaar (Cologne: DuMont, 1976), 120. 28. “Die Kunst ist keine Wissenschaft, die von vielen fleißig forschenden Gliedern schritt-weise gefördert wird, sie ist im Gegenteil die Welt der Verschiedenheiten. . . . Die Modernität ist eine Erleichterung der Individualität, auf neuem Gebiet verändern sich auch Wiederholungen zu neuen Ichformen.” Klee, “Die Ausstellung des Modernen Bundes im Kunsthaus Zürich,” in Schriften, 108–­9. See also discussions of Klee’s emphasis on individuality in Charles W. Haxthausen, Paul Klee: The Formative Years (New York: Garland, 1981), 372–­ 73, and Franciscono, Paul Klee: His Work and Thought, 166–­69. 29. “So wenig dauerhaft diese kommunistische Republic von Anfang an schien, so gab sie doch Gelegenheit zur Überprüfung der subjektiven Existenz-­Möglichkeiten in einem solchen Gemeinwesen. Ohne positives Ergebnis war sie nicht. Natürlich eine zugespitzte, individualistische Kunst ist zum Genuß durch die Gesamtheit nicht geeignet, sie ist kapitalistischer Luxus. Aber wir sind doch wohl mehr als Kuriositäten für reiche Snobs. Und das was an uns irgendwie darüber hinaus Ewigkeitswerten zustrebt, das würde im kommunistischen Gemeinwesen eher Förderung erfahren können.” Letter to Alfred Kubin, May 12, 1919, in Paul Klee: Das Frühwerk, 1883–­1922, ed. Armin Zweite (Munich: Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, 1979), 93. See Werckmeister, Making of Paul Klee’s Career, 171–­80, on Klee’s involvement with the radical Action Committee of Revolutionary Artists, chaired by Hans Richter, during

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the short-­lived republic, and letter to Kubin. In the letter, Klee speaks also of the idea, much discussed since the turn of the century, that the “Erfindertätigkeit” of artists should influence artisans through “Kunstschulen für Handwerker,” thereby allowing the Volk to absorb the new art: “Die befruchtende Wirkung unseres Beispiels würde sich durch anders geartete Kanalisierung auf breiterer Basis abspielen . . . wir würden die Ergebnisse unserer Erfindertätigkeit dem Volkskörper zuleiten können. Diese neue Kunst könnte dann ins Handwerk eindringen und eine große Blüte hervorbringen.” Das Frühwerk, 93. 30. “Bei Janco, das schon gestern und vorher gehabte Dadaistenmilieu, ein etwas programmatisches, aber tiefernstes und etisches Wollen. Ein Herr Eggeling aus Schweden kam noch hinzu mit einem graphischen Kind. Zuletzt tauchte noch ein Pariser Komponist auf, der operettenhaft aussah, aber präcis und gescheit sprach. Es war auch von der Anonymität des künftigen Kunstwerks die Rede, davon stachen aber etwas ab seine Lockenperücke und seine geschminkten Brauen.” Letter to Lily, June 25, 1919, in Briefe, 2:956. See also Franciscono’s discussion of this letter, Paul Klee: His Work and Thought, 229. 31. “Die für mich wesentlichsten Eindrücke empfing ich auf dieser Ausstellung von den Blättern Kubins und Klees. . . . Das Urteil ist vollkommen persönlich gemeint; es verpflichtet niemand. Zumal bleibt die Einschätzung Klees sich bewußt, daß sie eine irgendwie allgemeingültige Urteilsnorm weder geben kann noch will; seine Zeichnung ist so subjektiv und so voll von grundsätzlich Problematischem, daß sie objektiv-­allgemeinen Kunstmaßstäben gegenüber unmöglich geltend gemacht werden kann. Vielleicht ergibt sich einmal Gelegenheit, die äußerst pointierte Art Klees, zu der man fast nur ein persönlich zugespitztes Verhältnis haben kann, in besonderer Studie einem weiteren Kreis (wiewohl niemals einem großen) versuchsweise zu vermitteln.” Wilhelm Hausenstein, “Die Graphische Ausstellung der Neuen Sezession,” Münchner Neueste Nachrichten 71, no. 141, March 18, 1918, 2. My thanks to Charles W. Haxthausen and Jens Klenner for assistance with this translation. 32. “Ihre Subjektivität ist so schwer erreichbar, daß sie zugleich das Ende des unveräußerlichen Begriffs der künstlerischen Öffentlichkeit zu werden droht.” Wilhelm Hausenstein, Über Expressionismus in der Malerei (Berlin: Erich Reiss, 1919), 51. Werckmeister, Making of Paul Klee’s Career, 119. 33. “Ob ein Kleid, ein Haus, eine Blume schön sei: dazu läßt man sich sein Urteil durch keine Gründe oder Grundsätze beschwatzen. Man will das Objekt seinen eignen Augen unterwerfen, gleich als ob sein Wohlgefallen von der Empfindung abhinge; und dennoch, wenn man den Gegenstand alsdann schön nennt, glaubt man eine allgemeine Stimme für sich zu haben, und macht Anspruch auf den Beitritt von jedermann, da hingegen jede Privatempfindung nur für ihn allein und sein Wohlgefallen entscheiden würde.” Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1974), 130. Kant, The Critique of Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 57. 34. “Man hat das Gefühl einer bis zur Kindlichkeit sublimen Verderbtheit, die aber keinen Moment im Stofflichen bleibt, sondern sich sofort mit grösster Intensität in künstlerische Anschauung umsetzt und das verwischteste Erlebnis mit einer Handschrift von namenloser, dennoch präziser Erotik niederzuschreiben weiss. . . . Begriffe wie Dekadenz sind hier sinnlos: die Intensität und die Schärfe der Form überwindet zuletzt jegliche Zerrüttung.” Hausenstein, Die bildende Kunst der Gegenwart, 337–­38. 35. Haxthausen, “A Critical Illusion,” 183; Hausenstein, Über Expressionismus, 71. I cite Haxthausen’s translation. 36. “Dezember 1918 beurlaubt bis zur Entlassung. Im Februar 1919 entlassen. Ich widme mich jetzt mit mehr Musse und auf breiterer Basis der Malerei und baue das kleine Ölbild aus.” Klee, Tagebücher 1898–­1918, Textkritische Neuedition, ed. Wolfgang Kersten (Stuttgart: Gerd Hatje, 1988), 503.

37. Clement Greenberg, untitled essay in Five Essays on Klee, ed. Merle Armitage (New York: Duell Sloan and Pearce, 1950), 49, and “Art Chronicle: On Paul Klee (1870–­1940),” in The Collected Essays and Criticism, ed. John O’Brian, vol. 1, Perceptions and Judgments, 1939–­1944 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 71. “Art Chronicle: On Paul Klee (1870–­1940)”—­Greenberg’s first essay on a single artist—­was originally published in the Partisan Review, May–­June 1941. 38. Greenberg, in Armitage, Five Essays on Klee, 52–­53. 39. Ibid., 52. 40. For a critique of both Koerner’s and Foucault’s interpretations of Klee’s work, see Regine Prange, “Das utopische Kalligram: Klees ‘Zeichen’ und der Surrealismus,” in Paul Klee: Kunst und Karriere, ed. Oskar Bätschmann and Josef Helfenstein (Bern: Stämpfli, 2000), 206–­10. Prange argues that Koerner’s essay suppresses “die Moderne und ihren Bruch mit der klassischen künstlerischen Bildrepräsentation” to maintain the possibility of iconological interpretation (207), falling into the trap of Klee’s own metaphorics of what she calls “das utopische Kalligramm”—­“die neoromantischen Totalitätskonzepte der Moderne” which, following from Friedrich Schlegel’s idea of the hieroglyph, are ultimately attempts to shore up classical pictorial representation (225). I would argue that a strong account of Klee’s work must engage with his metaphorics, his “primitivistischen Ikonographie” (225), and that Koerner’s essay does so in exemplary fashion. 41. Joseph Leo Koerner, “Paul Klee and the Image of the Book,” in Paul Klee: Legends of the Sign, by Rainer Crone and Joseph Leo Koerner (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 48–­49, 53. 42. Ibid., 55. 43. Jürgen Glaesemer writes that these works “gehören zu den wenigen völlig ungegenständlichen Kompositionen in Klees Oeuvre.” Paul Klee: Die farbigen Werke im Kunstmuseum Bern (Bern: Kornfeld, 1976), 178. In his oeuvre-­catalogue, Klee, when he did not simply note the materials used, usually referred to them as Tafelbilder or Ölgemälde. See Paul Klee: Catalogue raisonné, ed. Josef Helfenstein and Christian Rümelin, vol. 4, 1923–­1926 (Bern: Benteli, 2000). 44. Glaesemer, Paul Klee: Die farbigen Werke, 178. 45. See, for instance, Will Grohmann’s description of them as “magic squares” in his Paul Klee (New York: H. N. Abrams, 1954), 213–­16. 46. And far beyond the Bauhaus, too—­and not only in the avant-­garde circles in direct or indirect contact with the Bauhaus that will be discussed below. For an overview of the frequent discussions in Weimar Germany about the “book crisis,” see the first chapter of Gideon Reuveni’s Reading Germany: Literature and Consumer Culture in Germany before 1933 (Oxford: Berghahn, 2006). 47. El Lissitzky, “Topographie der Typographie,” Merz 4 (July 1923): 47. 48. Walter Benjamin, One-­Way Street, in Selected Writings, vol. 1, 1913–­1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996), 456–­57; Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, Hermann Schweppenhäuser et al., vol. 4 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991), 102–­4. See Benjamin’s description of One-­Way Street in his letter to Gershom Scholem of December 22, 1924, in Walter Benjamin, Briefe, ed. Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno, vol. 1 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1978), 367. 49. Benjamin, One-­Way Street, in Selected Writings, 1:444; Gesammelte Schriften, 4:85. Frederic J. Schwartz, Blind Spots: Critical Theory and the History of Art in Twentieth-­Century Germany (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 39–­55. Benjamin’s interest in the material makeup of texts predates his involvement with the G group and typographical

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avant-­garde. Scholem, speaking of the 1918–­19 period when he and Benjamin were living in Switzerland, remembered that “the enthusiasm with which [Benjamin] was capable of discussing bindings, paper, and typefaces in those years frequently got on my nerves” (Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship, trans. Harry Zohn [New York: New York Review Books, 2003], 87). Indeed, Benjamin’s concern for the material and visual form of writing runs through much of his early work, from his Origin of the German Trauerspiel to his writings on children’s books. 50. Benjamin, One-­Way Street, in Selected Writings, 1:456; translation slightly modified. 51. Quotations are from ibid., 1:456–­57; translation slightly modified; Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, 4:103–­4. 52. Schwartz, Blind Spots, 37–­38, 54–­55. By contextualizing Benjamin’s thinking about reception in this way, I do not mean to reduce it to the simpler formulations of some of his avant-­garde interlocutors of the 1920s. But the richness of Benjamin’s elaboration of this polarity is not my object of study here. 53. For instance, Johannes Itten’s “Analysen alter Meister,” in Utopia: Dokumente der Wirklichkeit, ed. Bruno Adler (Weimar: Utopia Verlag, 1921), or Lothar Schreyer’s Kreuzigung. Spielgang. Werk VI (Hamburg: Kampfbühne, 1920). See the excellent catalogue, Das A und O des Bauhauses. Bauhauswerbung: Schriftbilder, Drucksachen, Ausstellungsdesign, ed. Ute Brüning (Berlin: Bauhaus-­Archiv, 1995). 54. On the bookbinding workshop, see Klee’s letters to his wife of April 14 and 19, 1921, in Briefe, 2:974–­75. See also Rainer K. Wick, Teaching at the Bauhaus, trans. Stephen Mason (Ostfildern-­Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2000), 234–­35. 55. László Moholy-­Nagy’s one-­page article, “Die neue Typographie,” originally published in Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar, 1919–­23 (Weimar and Munich: Bauhausverlag, 1923), is reproduced in Bauhaus: Drucksachen, Typografie, Reklame, ed. Gerd Fleischmann (Stuttgart: Oktagon, 1995), 14; an English translation is available in Moholy-­Nagy, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (London: Penguin Press, 1971), 75. The Educational Alliance of German Printers originally published Tschichold’s The New Typography: A Handbook for Modern Designers in 1928. Tschichold later wrote of his own visit to the 1923 Bauhaus exhibition as a turning point in his work. Jan Tschichold, Schriften 1925–­1974, ed. Günter Bose and Erich Brinkmann, vol. 2, 1947–­1974 (Berlin: Brinkmann & Bose, 1992), 423, quoted in Robin Kinross, “Introduction to the English-­Language Edition,” in Jan Tschichold, The New Typography, trans. Ruari McLean (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), xln4. Besides the books previously mentioned, see also Wulf Herzogenrath, “Typographie in der Reklame-­Werkstatt,” in Bauhaus Utopien: Arbeiten auf Papier, ed. Wulf Herzogenrath (Cologne: Edition Cantz, 1988), 103–­16, and Ute Brüning, “Die Druck-­und Reklamewerkstatt: Von Typographie zur Werbung,” in Experiment Bauhaus (Berlin: Bauhaus-­Archiv, 1988). 56. I borrow the phrase from Brigid Doherty, “Photography, Typography, and the Modernization of Reading,” in A New History of German Literature, ed. David E. Wellbery (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004), 733–­38. 57. On the New Typographers’ strategy of professionalization, see Schwartz, Blind Spots, 91–­92. 58. In The New Typography, Tschichold uses a Mondrian quotation as an epigraph for his book, which includes a twenty-­one-­page history of the “new art,” for, he writes, “the laws governing typographic design are the same as those discovered by modern painters as governing design in general” (30). He cites Marinetti as “providing the curtain-­raiser for the change-­ over from ornamental to functional typography” (53) and John Heartfield’s June 1917 cover for Neue Jugend as “one of the earliest and most significant documents of the New Typography” (56). New media play a more prominent role in Moholy’s thinking than in Tschichold’s.

59. See Brigid Doherty’s analysis in “Photography, Typography, and the Modernization of Reading,” 733–­38. 60. See Tschichold’s advocacy of phonetic reform of the German alphabet and orthography (The New Typography, 81), and El Lissitzky’s praise for hieroglyphics in his “The Future of the Book,” originally published in the 1926–­27 Gutenberg-­Jahrbuch, translated in New Left Review 41 (January–­February 1967): 40. 61. László Moholy-­Nagy, “Bauhaus und Typografie,” in Das Bauhaus, 1919–­1933: Weimar, Dessau, Berlin, by Hans M. Wingler (Bramsche: Gebr. Rasch, 1962), 124; originally published in the Anhaltische Rundschau (Dessau), September 14, 1925. Such orthographic reform, inspired in part by Walter Porstmann’s Sprache und Schrift (1920), was espoused by Lissitzky and Tschichold, too. Some argued for Kleinschreibung as more economical; see Tschichold, The New Typography, 80. 62. See Peter Galison, “Aufbau/Bauhaus: Logical Positivism and Architectural Modernism,” Critical Inquiry 16, no. 4 (Summer 1990), 709–­752; Robin Kinross, “Otto Neurath et la communication visuelle,” in Le Cercle de Vienne: doctrines et controverses, ed. Jan Sebestik and Antonia Soulez (Paris: Klincksiek, 1986), 271–­88; and Friedrich Stadler, ed., Arbeiterbildung in der Zwischenkriegzeit Otto Neurath—­Gerd Arntz (Vienna: Österreichisches Gesellschafts-­und Wirtschaftsmuseum, 1982). See also Constanze Hofstaetter, Karl Peter Röhl und die Moderne (Petersberg: Michel Imhof, 2007), 205–­8, on the pictograms the Bauhäusler Karl Peter Röhl devised in 1926 to serve as public signage, examples of which were published in 1927 in the journal Das neue Frankfurt. 63. Tschichold, The New Typography, 218. Jan Tschichold, Die neue Typographie: Ein Handbuch für zeitgemäss Schaffende (Berlin: Brinkmann & Bose, 1987), 224. 64. “Die Wörter des gedruckten Bogens werden abgesehen, nicht abgehört.” “Oeconomie des Ausdrucks—­Optik anstatt Phonetik.” Lissitzky, “Topographie der Typographie,” 47. I have slightly altered the translation in Tschichold, The New Typography, 60. See also Schwartz, Blind Spots, 72, on the disembodied eye of New Typography. Unsurprisingly, the objects that the New Typographers designed are often far more complex than their published statements; For the Voice, written by Vladimir Mayakovsky and designed by Lissitzky, and published in the same year as these statements, insistently engages the reader’s body and voice. 65. Tschichold, The New Typography, 64, 218. 66. Johannes Molzahn, “Nicht mehr lesen! Sehen!,” Das Kunstblatt 12 (1928), 78–­82, translation in the Weimar Republic Sourcebook, ed. Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 648–­49. Molzahn emphasizes the complete incorporation of photography into the illustrated magazines and newspapers of the future. 67. Besides freundlicher Blick (1923, 54), the “square pictures” of 1923 include Harmonie blau-­orange (1923, 58), Architektur (1923, 62), Statisch-­Dynamische Steigerung (1923, 67), Bildarchitectur rot gelb blau (1923, 80), Buntes Beet (1923, 109), centrifugales Gedenkblatt (1923, 171), and Harmonie aus Vierecken mit Rot, Gelb, Blau, Weiss, und Schwarz (1923, 238); Klee continued the series through the 1920s and beyond. The standard accounts of these works are Glaesemer, Paul Klee: Die farbigen Werke, 177–­82; Eva-­Maria Triska, “Die Quadratbilder Paul Klees—­ein Beispiel für das Verhältnis seiner Theorie zu seinem Werk,” in Paul Klee: Das Werk der Jahre 1919–­1933 (Cologne: Kunsthalle Köln, 1979), 45–­78; and Triska, “Die Quadratbilder Paul Klees—­ein Beispiel für das Verhältnis seiner Theorie zu seinem Werk” (PhD diss., University of Vienna, 1980). See also K. Porter Aichele, “Paul Klee’s ‘Rhythmisches’: A Recapitulation of the Bauhaus Years,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 57, no. 1 (1994): 75–­89, and Christian Rümelin’s discussion in his Paul Klee: Leben und Werk (Munich: Beck, 2004), 78–­82. 68. See Rosalind E. Krauss on “centripetal” readings of the grid in “Grids,” in The Origi-

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nality of the Avant-­Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 18–­ 22. She does not mention Klee’s paintings, which are strongly centripetal; she uses Mondrian as her example of the capacity of the grids of modernist painting to lend themselves to both centripetal and centrifugal readings. 69. Leah Dickerman, “Bauhaus Fundaments,” in Bauhaus 1919–­1933: Workshops for Modernity, ed. Leah Dickerman and Barry Bergdoll (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2009), 19. 70. Paul Westheim, “Comments on the ‘Squaring’ of the Bauhaus,” in The Bauhaus: Weimar, Dessau, Berlin, Chicago, by Hans M. Wingler (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1976), 69. 71. Dickerman, “Bauhaus Fundaments,” 19–­20. 72. Yve-­Alain Bois, “The De Stijl Idea,” in Painting as Model (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 103. 73. Ibid., 102–­3. See also the passage Bois cites from a text that Bart van der Leck published in De Stijl in 1918: “Modern painting has now arrived at the point at which it may enter into a collaboration with architecture. It has arrived at this point because its means of expression have been purified. The description of time and space by means of perspective has been abandoned: now it is the flat surface itself that transmits spatial continuity. . . . Painting today is architectural because in itself and by its own means it serves the same concept as architecture—­space and the plane—­and thus expresses ‘the same thing’ but in a different way,” 111. 74. Dickerman, “Bauhaus Fundaments,” 20–­21. 75. Arndt’s carpet and Klee’s “square pictures” may also be regarded as early evidence of the generative exchange that developed between Klee and the weaving workshop at the Bauhaus. See Jenny Anger, Paul Klee and the Decorative in Modern Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 179–­88. 76. In Walter Gropius’s 1923 “Idee und Aufbau des Staatlichen Bauhauses Weimar,” the architect writes of the rise of the academy, the form of art education against which the Bauhaus defined itself, as resulting in “a drawing-­room art detached from life. In the 19th century this dwindled to the production of individual paintings totally divorced from any relation to an architectural entity.” Translated in Bauhaus 1919–­1928, ed. Herbert Bayer, Walter Gropius, and Ise Gropius (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1938), 23. Incidentally, one might also wonder about the relation between Klee’s grids and the Lattice Picture that Josef Albers made at the Bauhaus around 1921, a picture made of pieces of colored glass held together by an iron lattice and copper wire; the effect of luminosity that Klee achieves by painting his colored rectangles over black in many of his grids might be seen as an attempt to achieve with paint something akin to the glow of colored glass, and the way the black ground often shows through between the rectangles recalls Albers’s iron lattice. See Peter Nisbet, “Josef Albers: Lattice Picture, 1921,” in Bauhaus 1919–­1933: Workshops for Modernity, ed. Leah Dickerman and Barry Bergdoll (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2009), 92–­95. 77. “Übrigens scheint Klees Berufung das meiste Kopfschütteln zu erregen, als Typ für l’art pour l’art, jeglichen Zwecks entäußert.” The Letters and Diaries of Oskar Schlemmer, ed. Tut Schlemmer, trans. Krishna Winston (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1972), 99. Oskar Schlemmer, Briefe und Tagebücher, ed. Tut Schlemmer (Munich: Albert Langen, 1958), 106. 78. See also Klee’s remarks in his lecture of December 19, 1922, which read as an implicit criticism of De Stijl painting: Beiträge zur bildnerischen Formlehre: Anhang zum faksimilierten Originalmanuskript von Paul Klees erstem Vortragszyklus am staatlichen Bauhaus Weimar 1921/22, transcribed and introduced by Jürgen Glaesemer (Basel: Schwabe, 1979), 101–­2. Van Doesburg’s letter to Moholy of January 5, 1926, in which he speaks of Klee’s Pedagogical Sketchbook, makes his contempt for Klee perfectly clear: “Meinen herzlichen Dank fuer die

Buecher. Klee’s Buch hat mir viel Spasz [sic] gemacht. Es ist unglaublich kindlich und naief. Ob wir das alles noch nicht wuessten!! . . .  Der Klee soll ruhig seine Surrealistische Bildchen malen, aber sich daraus keine ‘Gesetze’ fantasieren.” I thank Joyce Tsai for sending me this quotation, which she found in a letter in the van Doesburg archive, Nationaal Archief, The Hague. 79. See also Wolfgang Kersten’s interpretation of Klee’s grid painting Blühender Baum (1925, 119) as a riposte to De Stijl painting in “Zwischen Geniekult, Kultraum und Werkstatt: Klees Atelierräume im Bauhaus Weimar und Dessau,” in Paul Klee: Art in the Making 1883–­ 1940, German edition (Tokyo: National Museum of Modern Art, 2011), 37–­38. As a caricature, Picture-­architecture might be seen as akin to the works Haxthausen has called “parodies of murals,” such as his Blatt “Mural from the Temple of Longing ‘thither’” (1922, 30), which parodies the hopes that many at the Weimar Bauhaus attached to murals as an art that would allow painting, integrated into architecture, to regain a public function. Haxthausen, “Between Representation and Parody,” 19–­21. Some of the humor of the work lies in the disparity between its own material makeup as a small watercolor on gessoed cloth mounted on cardboard and the scale and solidity implied by the word Mural, inscribed on the mount. In such a work, we can see very clearly how the “privacy” of Klee’s art is not simply detached from Bauhaus aspirations of restoring a public function to painting, but rather a response to and commentary on them. 80. Moholy-­Nagy, “Die neue Typographie.” 81. Klee makes no explicit references in his letters or pedagogical writings to the New Typography—­nor to many other subjects of heated discussion at the Bauhaus. It was his habit to stand apart from debates there; see, for instance, his 1921 statement approving of the “interplay of opposing forces” at the Bauhaus while avoiding even suggesting the possibility of any allegiance to any particular “force,” in The Bauhaus: Weimar, Dessau, Berlin, Chicago, by Hans M. Wingler (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1976), 50, and Georg Muche’s description of Klee’s aloofness in Erinnerungen an Paul Klee, ed. Ludwig Grote (Munich: Prestel, 1959), 44. 82. Similarly, Lissitzky implies that the “hieroglyphic mode” of “Chinese or Egyptian” writing might serve as a model for “the book of the future,” which, unlike the “alphabetic book,” will require no proficiency in a particular language. “The Future of the Book,” 40. More broadly, many commentators in the 1910s and 1920s spoke of the proliferation of images brought about by the illustrated press, advertising, and, above all, film, as the return of hieroglyphic writing. As Miriam Hansen writes, “The comparison between cinema and hieroglyphics appears rather early and frequently in discourse on film throughout the silent era. . . . In most commentaries during the silent era, the comparison between cinema and hieroglyphics is celebratory, if not apologetic; the underlying concept of hieroglyphics is one of a language of mystical correspondence and visual self-­evidence, reincarnated in the new universal language of film.” Miriam Hansen, “Mass Culture as Hieroglyphic Writing: Adorno, Derrida, Kracauer,” in special issue on Theodor W. Adorno, New German Critique 56 (Spring–­Summer 1992): 58. 83. Klee termed several of the six 1916 watercolors which he based on excerpts of Chinese poems in translation “watercolored writing” (Aquarellierte Schrift) in his oeuvre-­catalogue; see Paul Klee: catalogue raisonné, ed. Josef Helfenstein and Christian Rümelin, vol. 2, 1913–­ 1918 (Bern: Benteli, 2000). See Haxthausen’s discussion in Paul Klee: The Formative Years, 494, 497–­501. On February 13, 1918, Klee wrote in a letter to his mother that he will “auch mit Schrift Versuche machen (Farbenschrift),” probably referring to his watercolor Once emerged from the grey of night. Briefe, 2:905. Klee’s term, Farbenschrift, would seem most obviously to imply a writing, a script, made of color, but Schrift can also mean writing in the sense of treatise or work. Thus, for instance, in a letter to Goethe on March 20, 1806, the composer Karl

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Friedrich Zelter referred to Goethe’s Farbenlehre (then in preparation) as the Farbenschrift. Klee, who was fascinated by the Farbenlehre, had in his library the complete published correspondence between Goethe and Zelter; he may well have understood his Farbenschrift as a sort of Farbenlehre, a theory or doctrine of color in the form of color-­writing. The very idea of a color-­writing in a strong sense, in which color would signify as writing, has the potential to upset writing as a system. It is interesting in this context to look at the writings of Ferdinand de Saussure on the necessary and absolute insignificance for writing as a system of its material mode of production, including its color: “Le moyen de production du signe est totalement indifférent, car il n’intéresse pas le système. . . . Que j’écrive les lettres en blanc ou en noir . . . cela est sans importance pour leur signification,” Cours de linguistique générale (Paris: Payot, 1962), 165–­66. Klee at once makes and undermines a parallel assertion of the insignificance of materiality for writing in his Bauhaus lecture notes: “Wenn ich das Wort Wein mit Tinte schreibe, so spielt die Tinte dabei nicht die Hauptrolle, sondern ermöglicht die dauernde Fixierung des Begriffes Wein. Also Tinte verhilft zu Wein auf Dauer.” Explicitly, Klee’s point is that the material used for writing does not much matter, but the example he gives of writing the word wine with ink implies that it does indeed—­the wit of Klee’s choice of wine, out of all other possible words, lies in the similarity between wine and ink as substances, as two dark, staining liquids, allowing him to stage the writing of the word as a humble sort of transubstantiation of material into referent. Klee, “Bildnerische Form-­und Gestaltungslehre,” http:// www.kleegestaltungslehre.zpk.org/ee/ZPK/BG/2012/01/01/005/. 84. Klee was far from alone among his German-­speaking contemporaries in drawing on such translations of Chinese poetry; Kafka wrote enthusiastically to Max Brod about Hans Heilmann’s translations in 1920, Webern set a poem of Wang Seng Yu’s to music in 1914, and Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde was based on another set of German translations of Chinese poems. Nor was this early twentieth-­century surge of interest in translations of Chinese literature and in the problems attending such translations confined to the German-­speaking world—­Fenollosa, Apollinaire, Pound, and others were involved with the subject. 85. Hans Heilmann, Chinesische Lyrik vom 12. Jahrhundert v. Chr. bis zur Gegenwart (Munich: Piper, 1905). Subsequent references are cited in the text in this and the next two paragraphs. Constance Naubert-­Riser’s article “Paul Klee et la Chine,” in Revue de l’art 63 (1984): 46–­56, contains useful information about this cycle of watercolors and on the place of Heilmann’s translations in German literature during the First World War. She understands Klee’s interest at this time in Chinese culture as “une prise de position politique,” as a statement of pacifism, associated with Chinese philosophy in expressionist circles (54). 86. Heilmann is quoting Hervey St. Denis. 87. Gottfried Böhm’s translation may be found in Judith Mendès, Chinesische Lieder aus d. Livre de jade in d. Dt. Übertr. von Gottfried Böhm (Munich: Ackermann, 1873). I use Heilmann’s romanizations of Chinese names. 88. “Aber in des Wassers leicht bewegten, weiten, wonn’gen, schwanken Spiegelwogen / Gleichet einem Halbmond nur der Brücke umgekehrter, leichter Bogen / Und man sieht die lustig zechenden Genossen all, die bunten / Fröhlich plaudernd sitzen dort, gestreckt das Haupt nach unten. / Und das Lusthaus selber . . .” 89. “Die einsame Gattin” may be found on p. 14 and the “Ruderlied” on p. 10 of Heilmann’s Chinesische Lyrik. 90. “In Vorzeiten der Völker, wo schreiben und zeichnen noch zusammenfällt, ist [die Linie] das gegebene Element.” Klee, lecture of November 14, 1921, in Beiträge zur bildnerischen Formlehre: Anhang zum faksimilierten Originalmanuskript von Paul Klees erstem Vortragszyklus am staatlichen Bauhaus Weimar 1921/22, transcribed and introduced by Jürgen Glaesemer (Basel: Schwabe, 1979), 15. In later notes, he writes of this common origin as suggesting that

writing and pictures in general are, at bottom, identical: “Schrift und Bild, d.h. schreiben und bilden sind wurzelhaft eins.” “Bildnerische Form-­und Gestaltungslehre,” http://www.kleegestaltungslehre.zpk.org/ee/ZPK/BG/2012/01/01/005/. 91. “Den Anfang bildet die zeichnerische Wiedergabe des Objektes oder ganzer Vorgänge selbst.” Karl Weule, Vom Kerbstock zum Alphabet: Urformen der Schrift (Stuttgart: Kosmos, 1915), 11. James Smith Pierce discusses what Klee may have gleaned from Weule in his “Pictographs, Ideograms, and Alphabets in the Work of Paul Klee,” Journal of Typographic Research 1, no. 3 (July 1967): 219–­43. To build on Pierce, part of what may have interested Klee in Weule’s copious illustrations of pictorial writing systems were the models they offered for using pictorial signifiers as discrete units to be combined and linearized. Although we do not know when Klee acquired Weule’s book, it is suggestive that in the same year that it appeared, Klee began incorporating “hieroglyphs” into his watercolors in significant numbers and making works such as Mot:       (1915, 215), which thematizes questions of the linearization of writing that many of Weule’s illustrations prompt (such as on p. 26). Such linearization would continue to be a great interest of Klee’s, as a scherzo such as Bilderinschrift für Irene, wenn sie einmal grösser ist (1920, 116) demonstrates most obviously. Presumably Klee did not need Weule to make him aware of these issues, nor do we need Weule’s book to see that they are important for Klee’s art, but the presence of the book in Klee’s library at least underlines their importance. 92. Weule, Vom Kerbstock zum Alphabet, 54–­55. 93. “Hoch und stralend [sic] steht der Mond. Ich habe meine Lampe ausgeblasen, und tausend Gedanken erheben sich von meines Herzensgrund. Meine Augen strömen über von Tränen.” I borrow the translation from Paul Klee: Catalogue raisonné, 2:334. 94. Heilmann, Chinesische Lyrik, xxxiii. 95. Ibid., 14. 96. Ibid., xxii. 97. Moholy-­Nagy, “Die neue Typographie,” 14. 98. Kees Broos, “From De Stijl to a New Typography,” in De Stijl 1917–­1931: Visions of Utopia, ed. Mildred Friedman (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1982), 152–­53. 99. It is also entirely possible that Moholy intended more generally to criticize attempts made at the Weimar Bauhaus during its early years and elsewhere to create letterforms based on the square and other elementary geometric forms. See Robin Kinross, “Das Bauhaus im Kontext der Neuen Typographie,” 9, and Ute Brüning, “Kalligraphie und Konstruktion,” 35, both in Das A und O des Bauhauses. Bauhauswerbung: Schriftbilder, Drucksachen, Ausstellungsdesign, ed. Ute Brüning (Berlin: Bauhaus-­Archiv, 1995). See also Moholy’s later, more measured words on such attempts in “Zeitgemäße Typografie. Ziele, Praxis, Kritik” (1926), in Bauhaus: Drucksachen, Typografie, Reklame, ed. Gerd Fleischmann (Stuttgart: Oktagon, 1995), 19. 100. Moholy-­Nagy, “Die neue Typographie,” 14. 101. Koerner also suggests that the square pictures might be seen as precipitating out from Once emerged, describing them as “painting at its furthest remove from any narrative or illustrative elements, and yet the grid that makes up Einst dem Grau suggests that what might now be abstract once (‘einst’) was more bookish.” “Paul Klee and the Image of the Book,” 65. Morphologically, the grids of Once emerged and of the later square pictures are, of course, variations on one another: the grid of Once emerged is of the kind that Klee later, in his lecture notes of November 10, 1923, termed “gemauert”—­a variation on the basic grid “durch wechsel weise Verschiebung jeder zweiten Horizontallage um einen halben Grad” to create a “Structur welche an eine Mauer erinnert.” “Bildnerische Form-­und Gestaltungslehre,” http:// www.kleegestaltungslehre.zpk.org/ee/ZPK/BG/2012/01/02/015/. 102. Krauss, “Grids,” 9.

239

Notes to Pages 169–175

240

Notes to Pages 175–177

103. See Klee, Pädagogisches Skizzenbuch, originally published as volume 2 of the series of “Bauhausbücher” edited by Gropius and Moholy, available in a facsimile edition (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 2003), 48–­51. The very form of the Pädagogisches Skizzenbuch represents a collaboration between Klee and Moholy; as Hans M. Wingler comments in his foreword to its republication, “als typographischer Gestalter hat auch Moholy-­Nagy einen Beitrag geleistet. . . . Es ist eine andere (schon damals erhobene) Frage, ob die von Moholy-­Nagy gefundene Lösung dem Spirituellen des Denkens und Zeichnens Paul Klees ganz gerecht wird. . . . Immerhin: Klee hat diese Form autorisiert. So, wie das Buch vorgelegt wurde, verkörperte es auch etwas von dem für das Bauhaus bezeichnenden Zusammenwirken ‘verschieden gerichteter Kräfte,’ das von Klee als eine Möglichkeit der fruchtbaren Auseinandersetzung und Leistung nachdrücklich bejaht worden ist” (5). 104. As Glaesemer writes, “So liess sich beispielsweise die Technik der lasierend gemalten Farbstufungen nur sehr gegrenzt auf die Ölmalerei anwenden. Ohne grossen Erfolg hatte er ..  .  durch Mischung von Aquarell-­und Öltechnik die transparente Malweise auch auf deckende Farben auszuweiten versucht,” until Klee arrived at the very different solution the square pictures offered to the problem of creating color movements. Paul Klee: Die farbigen Werke, 177–­78. 105. “Die Versuche,” Glaesemer writes, “progressive Farbbewegungen auch in der Ölmalerei zur Anwendung zu bringen, führten schliesslich wie von selbst zur Gattung der ‘Quadratbilder.’” Ibid., 178. Glaesemer lays out with exemplary clarity the relation between the layered watercolor technique Klee developed in 1921 and his theoretical writings (167–­ 70), as well as that between the layered watercolors and the square pictures (177–­80). See also Triska, “Die Quadratbilder Paul Klees,” 49, 62–­63. 106. Besides the already cited pages of Klee’s Pädagogisches Skizzenbuch, see “Bildnerische Form-­und Gestaltungslehre,” http://www.kleegestaltungslehre.zpk.org/ ee/ZPK/BG/2012/01/03/134/ and http://www.kleegestaltungslehre.zpk.org/ee/ZPK/ BG/2012/02/21/067/. 107. See, for instance, “Bildnerische Form-­und Gestaltungslehre,” http://www. kleegestaltungslehre.zpk.org/ee/ZPK/BG/2012/01/03/094/, http://www.kleegestaltungslehre.zpk.org/ee/ZPK/BG/2012/01/03/095/, http://www.kleegestaltungslehre.zpk. org/ee/ZPK/BG/2012/01/03/096/, and http://www.kleegestaltungslehre.zpk.org/ee/ZPK/ BG/2012/01/03/099/. See also Susanne Friedli, “Specielle Ordnung (PN 30 M60),” in Paul Klee: Die Kunst des Sichtbarmachens; Materialien zu Klees Unterricht am Bauhaus, ed. Michael Baumgartner and Christine Flechtner (Bern: Benteli, 2000), 69–­74. 108. Klee, Pädagogisches Skizzenbuch, 6–­8; see also Klee, in Schriften: Rezensionen und Aufsätze, ed. Christian Geelhaar (Cologne: DuMont, 1976), 172–­73. 109. Klee, Pädagogisches Skizzenbuch, 23. 110. Yve-­Alain Bois, “‘Der liebe Gott steckt im Detail’: Reading Twombly,” in Abstraction, Gesture, Écriture: Paintings from the Daros Collection (Zurich: Scalo, 1999), 64–­65. 111. Ibid. 112. If one wishes instead to stay within the terms of Klee’s writings, there is an easy answer to this question. Klee’s writings assert that movement is the basis of all becoming and the general rule of the cosmos; that the artwork’s production and reception can both be understood as movement in time thus knits it into Klee’s vision of the universe. Klee, “Beitrag für den Sammelband Schöpferische Konfession (1920),” in Schriften: Rezensionen und Aufsätze, ed. Christian Geelhaar (Cologne: DuMont, 1976), 119–­20. 113. Klee, Beiträge zur bildnerischen Formlehre, 56. 114. Klee made a number of works between 1917 and 1924 that he termed Gedenkblätter or Erinnerungsblätter, which may be translated as “memorial pages” or “commemorative sheets,”

such as Erinnerungsblatt an eine Empfängnis (1918, 75), Gedenkblatt mit dem eisernen Kreuz (1918, 125), and Gedenkblatt (1918, 196; fig. 1.4); as Werckmeister has pointed out, these works may be connected to the mass-­produced Gedenkblätter, “picture prints with a framed blank space in which to inscribe the name of a soldier killed in action, which army authorities sent as formal notifications to his relatives.” Werckmeister, Making of Paul Klee’s Career, 139. Other artists working in Germany during the war and its aftermath, from Käthe Kollwitz to George Grosz, also drew upon the Gedenkblatt in a wide variety of ways. It might be interesting to compare Klee’s Centrifugal Memorial Page as a memorial to reading, as will be discussed below, to the Berlin Dadaist Johannes Baader’s collage with photomontage Gutenberggedenkblatt (1919), also known as the Ehrenporträt von Charlie Chaplin. 115. Klee, Tagebücher, 549. 116. Although I cannot make out the title of the paper, obscured, it seems, by the dark brown at the center of the bottom of the work, the date (December 14, 1922) and page number (6) are legible. 117. “Weißt Du es Anna, weißt Du es schon, / Man kann Dich auch von hinten lesen. . . . Du bist von hinten, wie von vorne: / A-­N-­N-­A,” writes Schwitters in “An Anna Blume.” Kurt Schwitters, Das literarische Werk, ed. Friedhelm Lach, vol. 1, Lyrik (Cologne: DuMont, 1973), 58–­59. On the relation between Anna Wenne and Anna Blume, see Paul Bauschatz’s insightful article, “Paul Klee’s Anna Wenne and the Work of Art,” Art History 19, no. 1 (March 1996): 86–­92. Although Schwitters did not begin designing advertisements professionally until 1924, he was beginning to involve himself in avant-­garde typography around 1922–­23 (for an overview, see John Elderfield, Kurt Schwitters [New York: Thames and Hudson, 1985], 187–­88), as Klee might conceivably have known; he gave Schwitters a faux-­Merzbild, C ( for Schwitters) (1923, 161), attesting to their friendly relations at that moment. See Ann Temkin, “Klee and the Avant-­Garde, 1912–­40,” in Paul Klee, ed. Carolyn Lanchner (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1987), 18. 118. Tschichold, The New Typography, 218. Die Neue Typographie, 224. 119. Tschichold, The New Typography, 218. Die Neue Typographie, 223. 120. “Die alte Typographie ist . . . auf den früheren Menschen zugeschnitten, der  . . . beschaulich Zeile um Zeile lesen konnte.” Tschichold, The New Typography, 64. Die Neue Typographie, 65. 121. Tschichold cites printed matter in display windows as one of the many sources of textual overload he sees as causing reading’s modernization: “Der moderne Mensch hat täglich eine Unmenge von Gedrucktem aufzunehmen, das, bestellt oder umsonst, ihm ins Haus geliefert wird und ihm außer Hause in den Plakaten, Schaufenstern, der Wanderschrift usw. entgegentritt.” Die neue Typographie, 65. 122. “Damit wird auch die Rolle des vielumstrittenen Tafelbildes bzw. des für sich stehenden optischen Gebildes (wie das Buch ein selbständiges Gebilde ist, welches unabhängig von Natur oder Architektur seine Existenzberechtigung hat) auf die richtige Bahn gebracht.” Moholy-­Nagy, Painting, Photography, Film, trans. J. Seligman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969), 16. Malerei, Fotografie, Film (1927 edition), facsimile republication (Mainz: Florian Kupferberg, 1967), 14. 241

EPILOGUE 1. Charles W. Haxthausen, “Between Representation and Parody,” Study of Art History 1, no. 3 (2001): 6. 2. Ibid., 15. See also “‘Abstract with Memories: Klee’s ‘Auratic’ Pictures,” in Paul Klee: Phil-

Notes to Pages 177–184

osophical Vision; From Nature to Art, ed. John Sallis (Chestnut Hill, MA: McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, 2012), Haxthausen’s reworked and shortened version of this essay. 3. Haxthausen, “Between Representation and Parody,” 16. The corresponding passage may be found in his “‘Abstract with Memories,’” 75. 4. Paul Klee: Catalogue raisonné, ed. Josef Helfenstein and Christian Rümelin, vol. 4, 1923–­ 1926 (Bern: Benteli, 2000), no. 3917 (“Ölfarben abstrakt . . . auf schwarz Pappe.”) 5. See Yve-­Alain Bois, “The De Stijl Idea,” in Painting as Model (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 102, on the foundational historicism and essentialism of De Stijl theory. 6. For instance, Wassily Kandinsky, “Über die Formfrage,” in Der Blaue Reiter, ed. Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc, Dokumentarische Neuausgabe ed. Klaus Lankheit (Munich: Piper, 1984), 155. 7. Clement Greenberg, “An Essay on Paul Klee,” in The Collected Essays and Criticism, ed. John O’Brian, vol. 3, Affirmations and Refusals, 1950–­1956 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 12–­13. 8. Klee’s friend Max Pulver, whose role in arranging for Klee’s safe job at Schleißheim was mentioned in chapter 1, wrote a dissertation, Romantische Ironie und romantische Komödie (St. Gallen: Zollikofer & Cie., 1912), which Benjamin cited in his own dissertation, in which Romantic irony plays an important part: The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism (first published in 1920), in Selected Writings, vol. 1, 1913–­1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996), 116–­200. Marcel Franciscono connects Klee’s written assertions of the artist’s sovereignty over his creation with Romantic irony, Paul Klee: His Work and Thought, 169. Sebastian Zeidler has detected an implicit critique of Klee’s work in Greenberg’s discussion of his irony, which Zeidler glosses as follows: “Klee starts with a negation of the given world but ends with its affirmation. And what enables the transition between these two stances is a compromised kind of irony,” one that is “quaintly gemütlich when really it should be grandly annihilating.” “Form as Revolt: Carl Einstein’s Philosophy of the Real and the Work of Paul Klee,” RES 57–­58 (Spring–­ Autumn 2010): 259. Although nihilism was in 1950 not yet the term of abuse it later became for Greenberg, neither was it the value for him that Zeidler claims. The reservations about Klee’s irony that Zeidler is right to sense in Greenberg’s words are better accounted for in terms of the long history of the critique of Romantic irony initiated by Hegel, as well as arguments that gained great currency after the Nazi seizure of power linking German Romanticism with a quietist withdrawal from politics. See Karl Heinz Bohrer, Die Kritik der Romantik: Der Verdacht der Philosophie gegen die literarische Moderne (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1989), 9–­16 and 142–­57. 9. Athenaeum Fragment, no. 238, in Friedrich Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, trans. Peter Firchow (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 51.

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Notes to Pages 184–186

Index

abstraction, 5, 9, 17, 27, 31, 33, 55, 60, 62–­63, 92, 112, 145, 152, 184–­85; abstract, as term, 77; and architecture, 145–­46; and graphic art, 7–­8, 10, 13–­14, 26, 30, 50, 53–­54, 57, 65, 138–­39 acheiropoetoi, 114 Adorno, Theodor W., 5, 93–­95, 113, 196–­97n49, 216n90 Aesthetic Theory (Adorno), 93 Aged Phoenix (Klee), 90 Aichele, K. Porter, 5, 110, 187n1, 189n15, 224–­25n174 Albers, Josef, 217n99, 236n76 Amorpha, fugue in two colors (Kupka), 110 Angelus Novus (Klee), 66–­67, 82 Anger, Jenny, 9, 62, 192n25 Another Dance of Death (Rethel), 120 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 189n15, 238n84 Aquarell (wie 1914 85) (Klee), 152 architecture, 57–­58, 146–­47 Arndt, Gertrud, 160 Arnheim, Rudolf, 37 Arp, Hans, 19, 31, 136

“L’Art philosophique” (Baudelaire), 120–­25 Avenarius, Ferdinand, 96–­97, 99–­ 100, 103, 219n119 Baader, Johannes, 241n114 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 184 Ball, Hugo, 19–­20 Barr, Alfred, 94–­95 Bartsch, Adam von, 29 Baudelaire, Charles, 8, 57, 105, 120–­25, 129 Bauhaus, 7, 11, 18, 57, 133, 145, 152–­53, 158–­59, 161–­62, 175, 181, 236n76, 237n79, 239n99; Bauhaus Books, 156; book, as object of interest in, 155; easel painting at, 160; grid, as structural tool at, 160; and New Typography, 155 Bavarian Republic, 27, 143, 148, 196–­97n49 Bayer, Herbert, 155–­56 Bayersdorfer, Adolf, 203n111 Begräbnis (Welti), 90 Behne, Adolf, 20, 142

243

Benjamin, Dora, 67 Benjamin, Walter, 10, 66, 74, 76–­77, 125, 156, 183, 208–­9n6, 209n13, 210n19, 210–­ 11n25, 211n33, 212n39, 212n49, 222n148, 234n49; abstraction, 77; book, crisis of, 153–­54; on cubism, 67, 69, 73, 81–­82; Klee, 9, 66–­69, 82, 154–­55; on language, 75; on name, 75, 77–­79; on painting, 66, 73–­75, 77–­79, 81–­82; on picture-­ books, 78–­80; on picture-­writing (Bilderschrift), 154; on reading, 154 Berlin (Germany), 18, 20, 67, 97; Dadaists in, 25 Berna, Marie, 101 Biedermeier, 133, 135–­36, 142, 227n198, 227n201 Blätter (Klee), 8, 17–­21, 23–­25, 65, 82, 107, 118–­19, 120, 123, 125, 133–­34, 146, 151–­ 52, 190n20; exhibition of, 14, 16; fairy-­ tale quality of, 138–­39 Blaue Reiter: almanac, 135, 142; exhibition, 40, 127 Bloesch, Hans, 125–­26 Böcklin, Arnold, 42, 45–­47, 95, 97–­98, 100–­ 103, 113, 218n107 Böhm, Gottfried, 168, 170 Bois, Yve-­Alain, 131, 160, 177, 213n51, 222n148, 236n73 book: at Bauhaus, 155; crisis of, 152–­54; future of, 156; and mass media, 154, 156 Bosch, Hieronymus, 94 Braque, Georges, 40, 71–­72, 192n2 Brod, Max, 238n84 Bruegel, Pieter, 1–­3, 5, 187n1 Brühlmann, Hans, 45–­46 Burger, Fritz, 218–­19n115 Bürger, Peter, 229n4 Burial (Welti), 45

244 INDEX

Callot, Jacques, 29, 66, 83–­89 Camel (and Camel-­Schema) (Klee), 129 Campendonk, Heinrich, 19 Candide illustrations (Klee), 19, 133 Carpet of Life (George), 63 Carpet of Memory (Klee), 8, 57, 59–­60, 62–­ 63, 90, 115, 183 Case of Böcklin and the Doctrine of the Unities, The (Meier-­Graefe), 42, 46, 98, 101 Caylus, comte de, 84–­85

Centrifugal Memorial Page (Klee), 175, 177, 179–­81, 241n114 Cernuschi, Claude, 189n15 Cézanne, Paul, 8, 40–­41, 46, 143, 150, 205n137, 222n148 Chagall, Marc, 66 Chardin, Jean-­Baptiste-­Siméon, 89–­90 Chenavard, Paul, 120, 124 Concentrated Novel (Klee), 110, 133 constructivism, 20, 154–­55, 158 Cornelius, Peter, 42, 106, 120 Corrinth, Curt, 134 Creative Credo (Edschmid), 31, 39, 83 Creative Handwritten (Klee), 33 “Critical Illusion, A” (Haxthausen), 229n7 Crone, Rainer, 5 Crow, Thomas, 89 cubism, 29, 67, 69–­73, 77, 82, 131, 210–­11n25 Dadaists, 30; in Berlin, 25; in Zurich, 19, 149 Damisch, Hubert, 5 Däubler, Theodor, 16–­17, 83, 133–­34, 213n58, 226n186 Daumier, Honoré, 29 Decline of the West (Spengler), 229n7 Delacroix, Eugène, 21, 151 Delaunay, Robert, 7–­10, 30–­31, 33, 35–­36, 40, 48–­50, 53–­55, 60, 145, 185, 192–­ 93n5, 200n74, 205n137 Derain, André, 131 Dessau Bauhaus, 218n103. See also Bauhaus De Stijl movement, 158–­59, 160–­62, 184 Deutsches Warenbuch (Book of Commodities), 96 Development of Drawing Talent, The (Kerschensteiner), 127–­30 Dickerman, Leah, 157–­58, 160 Display Window for Ladies’ Underclothing (Klee), 179, 181 Doherty, Brigid, 196n46, 212n39, 212n49, 234n56 drawing, 3, 45, 71; aesthetics of, 105; children’s drawing, 118, 121, 127–­29, 131–­33, 136; graphic arts, 52, 96, 103; intermediality, 106; painting, 26–­30, 37, 70, 74, 93, 96, 152; poetry, 112; and reading, 96; schematic drawing, 127–­29, 132; and writing, 165, 169, 171 Dresdner, Albert, 97–­98, 100, 103

Dürer, Albrecht, 29, 52, 103, 115, 125, 223n155 Dürerbund (Dürer Association), 96, 223n155 “Écart” (Lebensztejn), 222n150 Edschmid, Kasimir, 31, 36, 49, 54–­55, 83, 143, 200n74 Eisner, Kurt, 143 Ensor, James, 29 Eva und die Zukunft cycle (Klinger), 93 Expressionism (Walden), 54 expressionism, 9, 25, 145, 147, 150–­51, 229n4, 229n7; avant-­garde, 142; denunciation of, 28, 143–­44; and Klee, 27 fairy tales, 10, 53, 118, 137–­39, 142, 185; Märchenbild, 136 Fantastic, The (Todorov), 216n90 fantastic art, 8, 17, 29, 46, 113; fantastic, as term, 95; and modern art, 93–­94 Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism (exhibition), 94 Fantasy Pieces in Callot’s Manner (Hoffmann), 66, 85, 87 Faust (Goethe), 133, 192n2 Fechter, Paul, 142 Federal Republic of Germany, 6, 18. See also Germany; Wilhelmine Germany Feininger, Lyonel, 20, 145 Fenollosa, Ernest, 238n84 Feuerbach, Anselm, 36, 47 Filloeul, Pierre, 89 Finnegans Wake (Joyce), 152 First Future (Klinger), 92–­93 First World War, 9, 13, 19, 21, 23, 37, 55, 218n103, 238n85 Flechtheim, Alfred, 210n19 Flower Bed (Klee), 33, 35, 41 Foucault, Michel, 3–­5 France, 19; impressionism, 95, 97, 99 Franciscono, Marcel, 6, 93, 125, 192n2, 196n46, 213n58, 225n179 Frank, Joseph, 37 Frege, Gottlob, concept writing of, 72 Friedrich, Caspar David, 113, 147 Froebel, Friedrich, 212n49 From the Tally Stick to the Alphabet (Weule), 169

Fugue in Red (Klee), 110 futurists, 30, 40, 156 Gainsborough, Thomas, 52 Galerie Dada, 19, 145 Galerie Thannhauser, 60 Galerie Van Diemen, 20 Gasché, Rodolphe, 202n103 Gauguin, Paul, 28 Gautier, Judith, 168 Gedankenmalerei (thought-­painting), 42 Gedenkblätter, 241n114 George, Stefan, 63 German and His Art, The: A Necessary Polemic (Scheffler), 42 German Painter-­Poets (Wolf), 113 German Romans, 47 Germany, 11, 16, 18–­19, 27–­28, 97, 115, 117, 154, 220n135, 227n201, 241n114; avant-­garde, 142, 145; fantastic art, 95; German art, 20, 24, 42, 104–­5; German art criticism, 6, 51, 65–­66; graphic art in, 65–­66; and speculating, 65; tactile vision, celebration of in, 218–­19n115. See also Federal Republic of Germany; Wilhelmine Germany Gesamtkunstwerk, 92, 145, 219n119 Glaesemer, Jürgen, 6, 152, 175, 224n170, 227n195 Gockel, Bettina, 214n60 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 133, 237–­ 38n83 Goodman, Nelson, 63 Goya, Francisco, 216n82 graphic art, 9, 10, 27, 29, 53, 74, 83, 85, 87, 90, 92, 105, 138; abstraction, 7, 9, 13, 26, 30, 50, 53–­55, 65, 138–­39; cubism, 67, 82; drawing, 103; fantastic subjects, 8, 93–­94; form-­elements of, 48–­49, 138; Klinger’s theory of, 106–­7, 112; as “making visible,” 84, 91; as non finito, 53, 106; painting, 51, 54–­55, 79, 96; Phantasiekunst (art of the imagination), 96, 113; poetry, 53; reading and viewing, relation between, 96; as term, 7; and writing, 8, 91, 118 “Graphic Art [Graphik]” (Klee), 30, 36, 47–­ 48, 50, 92–­93, 133, 138, 148, 191n21 Greenberg, Clement, 4–­5, 37, 151–­53, 184–­86

245 INDEX

Greyerz, Dr. Otto von, 37, 39 Griffelkunst (stylus-­art), 103, 112; aesthetics of, 104–­5; Phantasie, 106–­7, 139; poetry, comparison between, 106; reading, 104 Grohmann, Will, 6, 18–­20, 110 Gropius, Walter, 145, 155, 160, 236n76 Grosz, George, 241n114 Grünewald, Matthias, 151

246 INDEX

Haftmann, Werner, 18 Haller, Hermann, 195n39 Han Fei, 165, 169 Hansen, Miriam, 237n82 Hartlaub, Gustav, 143, 197n54 Hausenstein, Wilhelm, 9, 27–­29, 41–­42, 49, 60, 123–­24, 132–­34, 139, 147, 149–­ 51, 197n54, 229n7; on drawing and painting, demarcation between, 30; on expressionism, 142–­44; Klee, relationship with, 144, 197–­98n57, 205n137 Haxthausen, Charles W., 6, 17, 21, 26, 57, 63, 74, 116, 143–­44, 183, 190n20, 203n111, 207n156, 222n152, 229n4, 229n7, 237n79 Heartfield, John, 234–­35n58 Heemskerck, Jacoba van, 19 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 37, 219n119 Heilmann, Hans, 169, 172–­73, 238n84; and antithetical parallelism, 165, 167, 171; and illustrative translation, 168 Helbig, Walter, 31 Heuss, Theodor, 97, 99 hieroglyphics, 2–­5, 8, 10, 48, 49, 65, 84, 118–­ 19, 123, 156, 173; as childish, 120–­21, 125, 129; cinema, comparison with, 237n82; photography, comparison with, 162–­63 Hieroglyph with Fish and Bird (Klee), 123 Hieroglyph with the Parasol (Klee), 123 High and brightly shining . . . (Klee), 169–­70, 172–­73 High Renaissance, 74. See also Renaissance Hildebrand, Adolf von, 203n111 Hoffmann, E. T. A., 8, 53, 66, 83–­88, 93, 214n60 Hölzel, Adolf, 144 Homer, 84 (Klee), 152 Hopfengart, Christine, 18

House of Cards (Filloeul), 89 Hubert, Renée Riese, 110 Interior Architecture (Klee), 58–­60 Inventions (Klee), 90, 124–­25, 224n170 Isle of the Dead, The (Böcklin), 100–­101 Isle of the Dead, The (Klinger), 100 Italy, 19, 45 Itten, Johannes, 155 Jawlensky, Alexei von, 66 J.D. (Klee), 14, 119 Jollos, Waldemar, 19, 145 Jordan, Jim M., 23, 26, 120 Joyce, James, 152 Justi, Ludwig, 107 Kafka, Franz, 94, 216n90, 238n84 Kahnweiler, Daniel-­Henry, 70–­73, 78, 131–­ 32, 210n19 Kairuan, or a Story of the Painter Klee and of the Art of This Age (Hausenstein), 27–­30, 144, 147, 149, 151 Kaiser Friedrich-­Museum, 77 Kames, Lord, 51 Kandinsky, Wassily, 8–­9, 19–­20, 40, 50–­51, 60, 66, 135, 139, 145, 149, 185, 192n2, 195n39, 217n99; children’s drawings, 127; fairy tales, 136–­38, 142; inner sound, 184; pure painting, 54–­55; rotation, 59 Kant, Immanuel, 77, 129, 150 Kaulbach, Wilhelm von, 42, 106, 120 Kerschensteiner, Georg, 8, 131–­32, 225n179; on schematic drawing, 127–­29 Klee, Felix, 227n195 Klee, Lily, 13, 21, 23, 44–­45, 54, 56, 66, 83–­ 84, 90, 92–­93, 146, 149, 196n41. See also Stumpf, Lily Klee, Paul, 1–­4, 6, 9, 23, 26–­27, 35, 42, 49, 52, 62–­63, 66, 79, 84–­85, 107, 110–­12, 113–­17, 124, 154, 170, 180, 183, 189n15, 190–­91n20, 192n25, 192n2 (chap. 1), 192–­93n5, 196n41, 196n46, 196–­97n49, 200n74, 203n111, 205n137, 207n156, 209n13, 213n58, 214n60, 216n82, 217n99, 222n152, 225n179, 239n91, 240n103, 240n112; and abstraction, 7, 10, 13–­14, 30, 36, 50, 53–­56, 145–­46,

195n39; and architecture, 57–­58; at Bauhaus, 11, 18, 57, 153, 155, 160–­61, 169, 175, 237n81; book illustrations of, 133–­34; and children’s art, 118, 121, 125–­29, 132–­33, 225n176; Chinese pictograms, translating of, 164–­65, 167, 169, 172–­73, 238n84; cloister, and cathedral, as counterterm to, 147–­48; “color-­writing” of, 163–­65, 169, 171, 237–­38n83; and comic illustrations, 224n170; commercial breakthrough of, 14, 16–­17; contemplative withdrawal of, 25; and design theory (Gestaltungslehre), 155; detractors of, 20, 142; diaries of, as source, 187n1; and easel painting, 4, 145; and fairy tales, 10, 118, 138–­39, 226n186; and fantastic art, 46, 94–­95, 118; formalist ideals, ambivalence toward, 44–­46; in German military, 19, 21–­22; graphic abstraction of, 7–­8, 57, 65, 118, 152; and graphic art, 7, 45, 50–­51, 53–­54, 65, 83, 132, 138–­39; and grids, 10, 141, 152, 157–­59, 161–­63, 173–­ 74, 236n76; Hausenstein, relationship with, 144, 197–­98n57; hieroglyphs, use of, 8, 10, 48, 65, 118–­21, 123, 125, 129, 163; human grotesques, drawing of, 56; and illustrative painting, 24; irony, use of, 4, 184–­86; Jena lecture of, 57, 225n176; Klinger, attitude toward, 92–­ 93; on Lessing’s Laocoon, 36–­37, 39–­40, 47–­48, 65, 83; on looking, 10–­11, 177; and “making visible,” 91; “memorial pages” of, 181; method of estrangement of, 59; oil-­transfer technique of, 17, 30, 82, 152, 199n69; as painter-­draftsman, 9, 29–­30; paintings of, as page-­like, 151–­53; and Phantasiekunst (art of the imagination), 96, 118; on “picture-­ writing,” 162; plant still lifes of, 33; and privateness, 10, 141, 152; and reading, 8, 152, 174–­75, 179; rotation of, 58–­59; and schematic drawing, 10, 129, 131–­33; on seeing-­as, 138; and speculation, 25, 41, 44–­45; square pictures of, 173–­75, 177, 179, 181, 239n101; subjectivity of, 143–­44, 147, 149–­50; titles, fascination with, 90; and tonality, 17–­18; Tunisia, trip to, 28; uncolorful painting of,

Walter Benjamin on, 67–­68, 82; on vision, 31–­32, 36, 47; work, changes in, 13–­14, 17–­18, 20–­21, 23–­24, 59–­60, 151; on writing, 5, 10, 91, 169, 171 Klinger, Max, 8, 29, 53, 66, 92–­97, 100–­102, 110, 113, 117, 217n93, 218n107, 223n155; theorization of Griffelkunst (“stylus-­ art”), 103–­7, 139 Koerner, Joseph Leo, 115, 151–­53, 239n101 Kokoschka, Oskar, 117 Kollwitz, Käthe, 241n114 Komposition Nr. 2 (Kandinsky), 60 Krauss, Rosalind, 157 Kubin, Alfred, 94, 148–­49, 217n93 Kulhoff, Birgit, 99 Kunstwart, Der (Guardian of Art) (magazine), 96–­99, 101, 104; art of imagination (Phantasiekunst), 97; educated bourgeoisie (Bildungsbürgertum), 99; ideological role of, 99; and mass reproduction, 102–­3 Kupka, František, 110 Landscape Hieroglyph with Emphasis on Sky-­ Blue (Klee), 14, 123 Landscape of the Past (Klee), 226n186 Landscape with Gallows (Landschaft m. d. Galgen) (Klee), 1, 3, 5, 119–­20, 224–­ 25n174 language, 5, 7, 80, 82, 112, 128, 131, 152, 155; and cubism, 72; and name, 77–­79; and painting, 75, 77–­78; and picture books, 78; and prints, 88–­89; and seeing and vision, 10, 65, 174–­75 Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (Lessing), 8, 38, 84–­86, 88, 220n135; and Klee, 36–­37, 39–­40, 47–­ 48, 65, 83; poetry and painting, differentiation in, 106; relevance of, 37 Lattice Picture (Albers), 236n76 Lectures on Aesthetics (Hegel), 37 Lee, Rensselaer W., 47 Léger, Fernand, 66 Leonardo da Vinci, 56 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 8, 36–­37, 40–­41, 44, 47–­48, 51, 65, 87, 95, 104, 106, 185–­ 86, 220n135; on arbitrary signs versus natural signs, 84–­86; on imagining, and seeing, distinction between, 88;

247 INDEX

Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim (continued) on poetic paintings and illusion, 85; on poetry and plastic arts, division between, 38–­39, 83, 88–­89, 106; on Rembrandt’s prints, 88; on visible and invisible, 84–­85 Lewes, George Henry, 72; preperception, theory of, 73 Lewis, Beth Irwin, 97 Lied von der Erde, Das (Mahler), 238n84 Lissitzky, El, 153, 155–­56, 237n82 Li-­Tai-­Pe, 168, 170 Livre de jade (Gautier), 168 Locke, John, 71 “Lonely Wife, The” (Wang Seng Yu), 169 Longinus, 85 Loos, Adolf, 227n201 Luther, Martin, 202n103 Lüthy, Oscar, 31 Lyrisches (Kandinsky), 135

248 INDEX

Macke, August, 40, 66 Madonna and Child (Raphael), 77 Madonna and Child with Saints Hieronymus and Francis (Raphael), 77 Madonna and Child with St. John the Baptist (Raphael), 77 Magpie on the Gallows (Bruegel), 1, 3, 187n1 make visible (Klee), 90 Making of Paul Klee’s Career, The, 1914–­1920 (Werckmeister), 6–­7, 23–­27, 83, 187n1, 190n17, 192n3 Malevich, Kazimir, 50 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 152, 222n150 Maquette for Guitar (Picasso), 131 Marc, Franz, 9, 21, 40, 60, 66, 127, 135–­ 36, 142, 145, 147, 149, 192n2, 195n39, 211n28, 226n186 Marées, Hans von, 8, 40, 46, 143, 150 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 234–­35n58 Marx, Karl, 143 Masheck, Joseph, 62 Matisse, Henri, 70, 136 Max Klinger as a Poet (Avenarius), 103 Meier-­Graefe, Julius, 8, 40–­42, 44–­46, 51, 65, 93, 98, 101–­2, 105, 118, 203n111 Melencolia (Dürer), 125 Memorial Page (to Gersthofen) (Klee), 22 Mendelsohn, Moses, 88

Merz (journal), 153 Meyer, Theodor A., 37 Meyrink, Gustav, 94 Michelangelo, 151 Michelet, Jules, 125 Mitchell, W. J. T., 47–­48 Mit silberner Sichel (Däubler), 134 “Moderne Bund,” 31, 33, 40, 60; exhibition, 148 “Modern Graphic Artist, A” (Bloesch), 126–­27 modernism, 14, 24, 40, 44, 62, 93, 99, 141, 148 Moholy-­Nagy, László, 155–­56, 173–­74, 234–­35n58, 239n99, 240n103; on photography, and hieroglyphics, 162–­63; “picture-­writing,” concept of, 162 Molzahn, Johannes, 157 Mondrian, Piet, 50, 234–­35n58 Morning Toilette (Chardin), 90 Mot (Klee), 121 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 111 Muche, Georg, 20 Munch, Edvard, 29 Munich (Germany), 7, 9, 21, 27–­28, 40, 60, 62, 96–­97, 127, 136, 151, 192n27, 199n69, 201n96, 202n99, 203n113, 217n99, 221n139, 224n170, 227n197 Munich Policeman in Conversation (Klee), 224n170 Münter, Gabriele, 127 Museum für Völkerkunde, 169 Museum of Modern Art, 94, 113–­14 Muthesius, Hermann, 227n201 Naked Person in the Art of All Eras and Nations, The (Hausenstein), 144 Nationalgalerie, 102, 107 Nazarenes, 125 Neue Jugend (magazine), 234–­35n58 Neurath, Otto, 156 “New Laocoön: Artistic Composites and the Talking Film” (Arnheim), 37 New Munich Secession, 60, 149, 209n13 New Typography, 155–­57, 162, 181, 234–­ 35n58, 237n81 New Typography, The (Tschichold), 234–­ 35n58 Niesen, Der (Klee), 118

Nietzsche, Friedrich, 231n24 Nolde, Emil, 28 non finito, 53, 86–­88, 106 Okuda, Osamu, 57, 59–­60 Old Sound (Alter Klang) (Klee) 183–­86 Once emerged from the grey of night (Klee), 165, 169, 172–­74, 177, 239n101 One-­Way Street (Benjamin), 153–­55 “On Expressionism in Painting” (Hausenstein), 149–­50 “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man” (Benjamin), 74–­77 “On Light” (Klee), 9–­10, 30–­31, 36, 47, 49–­ 51, 55 “On Painting” (Benjamin), 73–­74, 78–­79 “On the Concept of History” (Benjamin), 66–­67 “On the Question of Form” (Kandinsky), 127 On the Spiritual in Art (Kandinsky), 136–­37, 205n132 “On the Surface of the Uncolorful Picture-­ Book” (Benjamin), 78, 80–­81 Overbeck, Johann Friedrich, 120 painting, 32, 70–­71, 78, 80–­81, 97, 98; and architecture, 144–­45, 147, 160–­61; carpet metaphor, 62–­63; collectivity, 143; colorful and colorless, 66–­69, 71, 74; drawing, 28–­30, 37, 47–­48, 50, 53, 70, 73–­74, 93, 152; fairy tales, 139, 142; graphic art, 29, 51, 54–­55, 74, 79, 82, 96, 105; Griffelkunst (“stylus-­art”), 104–­5, 107; and language, 72, 75, 77; and light, 31–­32; and modernism, 99; and music, 112; and names, 75; Phantasiemalerei (painting of the imagination), 103; and poetry, 5, 36, 38, 45, 47, 84–­85, 95, 106, 185–­86; pure painting, 54–­55; and text, 112; and vision, 33, 36; and writing, 131, 170 Painting, Photography, Film (Moholy), 156, 181 “Painting and Drawing” (Klinger), 66, 92, 96, 103–­4, 106 “Painting as Pure Art” (Kandinsky), 54 Pan (journal), 105 Panofsky, Erwin, 218–­19n115

Paris (France), 18 Parshall, Peter, 215n79 Paul Klee (Grohmann), 19 Paul Klee, Poet/Painter (Aichele), 189n15 “Paul Klee 1923/24” (Grohmann), 18–­20 Paul Klee’s Pictorial Writing (Aichele), 189n15 Pedagogical Sketchbook (Klee), 175 Perugino, Pietro, 79 Pestalozzi, Johann Heinrich, 212n49 Phantasie, 86, 97–­98, 103–­5, 112–­13, 117; Griffelkunst (“stylus-­art”), 106–­7, 139 Phantasiekunst (art of the imagination), 99, 106, 111–­12, 118, 218n107, 223n155; German bourgeoisie, as appealing to, 97; Griffelkunst (“stylus-­art”), importance of to, 103–­5; media, interrelations among, 100–­101; reading and viewing, relation between in, 96; as term, 95 Phantasiemalerei (painting of the imagination), 95, 104; Griffelkunst (“stylus-­ art”), importance of to, 103; as repeatable and reproducible, 101–­2 Philosophy of History (Chenavard), 124 photography: and hieroglyphics, 162–­63; and typography, 156 Picasso, Pablo, 29, 40, 66–­67, 69–­72, 131–­32, 136, 151, 192n2, 211n28, 213n51, 222n148 Picture-­architecture red yellow blue (Klee), 159–­60, 162, 183–­84, 237n79 Picture of Dorian Gray, The (Wilde), 45 Pierce, James Smith, 239n91 Piles, Roger de, 52 Pinder, Wilhelm, 218–­19n115 Plastic Art of the Present, The (Hausenstein), 150 Play of Forces of a Lech Landscape (Klee), 14 Pliny the Elder, 52 Plutarch, 85 Poe, Edgar Allan, 93 poetry, 39, 52, 63, 83, 86, 88–­89, 101, 112, 186; Chinese poetry, 164–­65, 167, 169, 172–­73, 238n84; and graphic arts, 53; and Griffelkunst (“stylus-­art”), 106; and painting, 5, 36, 38, 47, 84, 106, 185 Point and Line to Plane (Kandinsky), 55 “Porcelain Pavilion” (Li-­Tai-­Pe), 168 Potsdamer Platz (Corrinth), 134 Pound, Ezra, 238n84

249 INDEX

Presentation of the Miracle (Klee), 33, 67 printmaking, 103, 133; prints, and language, 88–­89; woodcuts, 197n54 Pulver, Max, 21, 242n8 Raphael, 74–­79, 103 reading, 6, 11, 49, 79, 141, 153, 180; as auditory experience, 117; as collective activity, 153; future of, 154; the gaze, 179; as leisurely, 181; modes of, 154; as movement, 179; newspapers, as modernized object of, 179, 181; New Typography, 155, 157; opticality of, 117, 156–­57, 181; and writing, 131, 153, 155, 177 Redon, Odilon, 29, 213n58 Reger, Max, 100 Rembrandt, 29, 88, 151 “Reminiscences” (Kandinsky), 59 Renaissance, 3–­5, 74–­75, 121. See also High Renaissance Rethel, Alfred, 120 Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 52 Richter, Ludwig, 113 Riegl, Alois, 62 Rise of Cubism, The (Kahnweiler), 131 Romanticism, 52, 97, 121, 125, 139, 144, 147, 185, 242n8 Rops, Félicien, 29 Rose, Margaret, 184 Rosenkavalier, Der (Strauss), 110–­11 Rothstein, Eric, 51–­52, 86–­87, 205–­6n140 Rousseau, Henri, 81, 136 “Rowing Song” (Wu-­ti), 169, 172–­73 Runge, Philipp Otto, 113, 125 Rupf, Hermann, 210n19

250 INDEX

Saint-­Simon, Henri de, 143–­44 Saint Veronica (Master of Saint Veronica), 115 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 131 Scheffler, Karl, 8, 41–­42, 44–­46, 65, 118, 223n155 Schiller, Friedrich, 93 Schlegel, Friedrich, 52, 144–­45, 186 Schleifer, Fritz, 173 Schlemmer, Oskar, 144, 160–­61 Schmidt, Joost, 155 Scholem, Gershom, 66–­67, 69–­70, 72–­74,

78, 82, 208–­9n6, 209n13, 210–­11n25, 211n33, 234n49 Schreyer, Lothar, 155 Schwartz, Frederic J., 154 Schwind, Moritz von, 113 Schwitters, Kurt, 153, 155, 179 Self-­Portrait with Death Playing the Fiddle (Böcklin), 42 Ship-­star-­festival (Klee), 107 socialism, 28, 142–­43, 150, 229n7 Social Palingenesis (Chenavard), 124 “Spatial Form in Modern Literature” (Frank), 37 speculation, 8, 10, 25, 29, 41, 44–­45, 62–­63, 65, 104, 118, 139, 151; Griffelkunst (“stylus art”), 112; as word, 42, 202n103 Stars above evil houses (Klee), 107 Steiner, Rudolf, 196n41 Still Life with Chair Caning (Picasso), 213n51 Strauss, Richard, 110–­11 Stuck, Franz von, 95–­96, 217n99 Stumpf, Lily, 39. See also Klee, Lily Sturm Gallery, 16–­19, 24–­25, 66–­67, 69, 83, 107, 110, 160, 164, 209n13 Stuttgart Art Academy, 144 Stylistic Law of Poetry, The (Meyer), 37 Sully, James, 127 Summer Landscape, March 20 (Klee), 226n186 surrealism, 18, 94 Switzerland, 19, 42 symbolism, 69, 71, 97, 206n146, 213n58 “Task of the Translator, The” (Benjamin), 82 Täuber, Sophie, 19 Taut, Bruno, 145, 147 Temptation of St. Anthony (Callot), 86, 89 “Theory of Pictorial Form” (course), 169 Thoma, Hans, 95, 97, 113, 218n107 “Thoughts about the Battle” (Klee), 60 “Thoughts at the Open Window of the Accounting Office” (Klee), 55 Todorov, Tzvetan, 216n90 To the roar of the water . . . (Klee), 171–­72 “Towards a New Laocoön” (Greenberg), 37 Triska, Eva-­Maria, 175 Tschichold, Jan, 155–­57, 179–­81, 234–­35n58, 241n121

Tunisia, 7, 17, 28 “Two Pictures” (Marc), 135–­36, 142 typography, 155–­57, 165, 167 Un Coup de dés (Mallarmé), 152 United States, 18–­19 Universal Exposition, 120 Ut Pictura Poesis (Lee), 47 van der Leck, Bart, 236n73 van Doesburg, Theo, 160, 162, 173, 186 van Gogh, Vincent, 41, 45 Vasari, Giorgio, 70 verism, 20 Veronica, sudarium (sweat cloth) of, 114–­17 Veronika mit dem Schweisstuch (Veronica with the Sudarium) (Kokoschka), 117 Vienna Secession, 92 “View from a Forest” (Klee), 60 viewing, 5, 10–­11, 65, 72, 96, 104, 112–­13, 125, 151–­52, 154, 157, 173, 177, 179, 186 Virgil, 38–­39, 84–­85, 88 Vlaminck, Maurice de, 131 Vocal Fabric of the Singer Rosa Silber, The (Klee), 96, 107, 110–­14, 184, 222n150 Voltaire, 133 Wagner, Richard, 196–­97n49, 219n119 Walden, Herwarth, 16, 24–­25, 54, 62, 226n186 Wang Seng Yu, 169, 172, 238n84 Wanze, Die (The Bug) (newspaper), 37, 39 Warton, Joseph, 52 Webern, Anton, 238n84 Wedderkop, Herman von, 27, 192n27 Wellbery, David E., 37, 219n119 Welti, Albert, 29, 45, 90

Werckmeister, Otto Karl, 6–­7, 23–­27, 83, 107, 110, 120, 128–­29, 196n46, 196–­ 97n49, 197–­98n57, 200n74, 213n58, 225n179, 226n186, 241n114 Werkbund, 96, 218n103, 227n201 Westheim, Paul, 139, 143, 159, 197–­98n57 Weule, Karl, 169, 239n91 Wilde, Oscar, 45, 203n111 Wilhelmine Germany, 42, 96. See also Federal Republic of Germany; Germany Wille, Johann Georg, 88 Windows (Delaunay), 7, 33, 35, 60 Wingler, Hans M., 240n103 Wolf, Georg Jakob, 60, 113 Wölfflin, Heinrich, 74–­75, 212n36 Woman Playing the Violin (Picasso), 69–­71 Wood, Christopher S., 218–­19n115 “Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, The” (Benjamin), 154 Worringer, Wilhelm, 23, 142, 144, 195n39, 218–­19n115, 229n4, 229n7 writing, 3–­10, 41, 85, 101, 131, 173, 179; at Bauhaus, 153; color-­writing, 163, 165, 168, 171; and drawing, 90, 169, 171; future for, 154–­55; and graphic art, 91, 118; literature, 96; and mass media, 154; New Typographers, 155–­57; origin of, 169; and painting, 170; picture-­ writing (Bilderschrift), 154, 157, 162–­63, 169; and reading, 177; reform of, 156; and speech, 156 Wu-­ti, 169 Zahn, Leopold, 27, 197–­98n57 Zelter, Friedrich, 237–­38n83 Zurich (Switzerland), 19, 149

251 INDEX