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Paul Klee, instructions to draw dreams
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by Carlos Yusti (Chile), exclusively for Stylusart..
Surrealists (as well as in painting, literature and photography) handled the dissection of dreams - they had Freud on their backs and intellectualized that need to dreaming. But there is a painter that assumed dreams in his paintings from a limpid point of view and no intellectual cunning of any type. I refer to Paul Klee whose painting is a subtle song to that essential capacity to dream that we all have.
The artistic activity of Paul Klee (1879-1940) starts in 1898. He studies painting. After two years the attends the Munich Academy , there his teacher was Franz Von Stuck. He travels to Italy and Paris. In 1906 he marries with pianist Lily Stumpf. Klee assumes with strictness his career as painter. He takes part of the fluttering artistic life of Munich with passion, then an important centre, where you can meet the rising tendencies of modern art. |
1914
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The Golden Fish
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The pictorial work of Klee in the beginning was graphic. Composed by drawings and etchings he works only with blacks and greys. His drawing is somewhat caricatural and it has a wicked ironical touch. During his second trip to Paris he is impressed by Cezanne's work. He likes that fragmentary treatment of colour the French master makes. But Klee does not like to imitate so he restricts to experiment. Instead of working with pieces of colour he works with big blocks of colour. He synthesizes as much as he can and concentrates on the small format and watercolour painting. In works such as "In the Quarry"(?) and "Houses by the Stony Ground" (?) the chromatic range and the stains of colour distinguish space or add outlining the light and shadow to the landscape as well as the objects. |
The abstractionism in Klee has its main support in colour, however, it neither excludes figurative elements with fantastic features nor reverie. The figuration in this colour has, as in his first drawings, much of caricature, some expressionism and a certain almost childish humour. In Klee figuration is not narrative, far from traced reality. His figures coming out of an intimate imaging ("Genius/Spirit serving a light breakfast"(?))
with the peculiarity that they are characters independent (autonomous) of the chromatic combinations.
Klee experimented (tested, tried) on the canvass surface to create textures. Even some of his paintings have clear reference to cubism with the peculiarity the landscapes and figures integrate with much harmony to the geometric figures. |
Ad Parnassum
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The Embrace
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The handbooks of history of art assure that to Klee painting was a way of interior meditation. What those manuals do not make clear is the economy of pictorial media he used to obtain such profound and sublime results. In fact, Klee evaded, he took refuge in miscellaneous and he rejected big formats to assume painting as a child's play. His painting seems an idyllic dream. It seems a gateway to escape from reality. And maybe it was a tunnel to escape from a grotesque and absurd reality. It is no surprise Nazis included many of his paintings in the exposition of degenerate art. The last four years of his life have a Kafkian tint. On one hand the illness and on the other hand the fossilized bureaucracy around his work.
Klee knew how to draw dreams with an unrivalled childish candour, he found the magnificent without becoming obstreperous. His painting is a manual with instructions on how to be able to draw what we dream. His painting is the remembrance of the best we have within us: creatures of colour trying to win the treat of darkness and shadows.
Carlos Yusti ( Chile)
carlosyusti@cantv.net
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