Painter

PAUL KLEE POET/PAINTER

K. Porter Aichele Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture

Paul Klee, Poet/Painter

Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture

Paul Klee, Poet/Painter

K. Porter Aichele

CAMDEN HOUSE

Copyright © 2006 K. Porter Aichele All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation, no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded, or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. First published 2006 by Camden House Camden House is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt. Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA www.camden-house.com and of Boydell & Brewer Limited PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK www.boydellandbrewer.com ISBN: 1–57113–343–7 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Aichele, Kathryn Porter, 1947– Paul Klee, poet/painter / K. Porter Aichele. p. cm. — (Studies in German literature, linguistics, and culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–57113–343–7 (hardcover: alk. paper) 1. Klee, Paul, 1879–1940 — Criticism and interpretation. 2. Concrete poetry, Swiss — History and criticism. 3. Visual poetry, Swiss — History and criticism. I. Title. II. Series. PT2621.L255Z565 2006 831⬘.912—dc22 2006020519 A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library. This publication is printed on acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America.

Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view these images please refer to the printed version of this book.

Contents List of Illustrations

vi

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction: The Artist (Poet/Painter)

1

1: “I Am a Poet, After All”

20

2: The Poetic and the Pictorial

65

3: A Poetic-Personal Idea of Landscape

93

4: Harmonizing Architectonic and Poetic Painting

122

5: Poems in Pictorial Script

154

Conclusion: Klee and Concrete Poetry

185

Appendix: What Counts as Poetry?

191

Works Cited

195

Index

213

Illustrations 1. Paul Klee, Sketches Illustrating Structural Rhythms

24

2. Christian Morgenstern, “Fisches Nachtgesang,” 1905

25

3. Paul Klee, Lady Bell-Tone Bim, 1922/258

26

4. Christian Morgenstern, “Bim, Bam, Bum,” Galgenlieder, 1922

27

5. Paul Klee, Entries 295–97 from the Diaries

37

6. Paul Klee, Entries 947–52 from the Diaries

38

7. Paul Klee, Entry 1081 A from the Diaries

39

8. Paul Klee, Fall, 1912/130 and Woe Is Me in the Gale Wind, 1912/131

40

9. Paul Klee, Emilie, 1917/48

43

10. Paul Klee, Once Emerged from the Gray of Night, 1918/17

44

11. William Blake, “Holy Thursday,” Plate 19 from Songs of Innocence and of Experience

49

12. Paul Klee, Memorial Sheet (of Gersthofen), 1918/196

51

13. Paul Klee, Éhatévauih, 1925/124

53

14. Paul Klee, Alphabet AIOEK, 1938/227

54

15. Kurt Schwitters, “Register [elementar],” 1922

55

16. Paul Klee, The War Strides over a Village, 1914/179

67

17. Paul Klee, View of the Severely Threatened City of Pinz, 1915/187

68

18. Paul Klee, When I Was a Recruit, 1916/81

70

19. Paul Klee, ab ovo, 1917/130

71

20. Paul Klee, Flower Myth, 1918/82

73

21. Paul Klee, Cathedral, 1924/138

77

22. Lyonel Feininger, Cathedral, 1919

78

23. Kurt Schwitters, “Doof,” 1922

79

LIST

OF ILLUSTRATIONS




vii

24. Paul Klee, ORCHS, as Relative, 1940/61

84

25. Paul Klee, Landscape with Gallows, 1919/115

96

26. Carl Blechen, Gallows Hill under Storm Clouds, c. 1835

97

27. Antoine Court de Gébelin, Illustration from Histoire naturelle de la parole, 1816

101

28. Paul Klee, View from a Window, 1920/27

102

29. Paul Klee, A Garden for Orpheus, 1926/3

107

30. Paul Klee, Park Near Lu, 1938/129

111

31. Paul Klee, Two-Dimensional Diagrams Illustrating Structural Rhythms in Three- and Four-Part Time

123

32. Paul Klee, Mural, 1924/128

126

33. Kurt Schwitters, “Wand,” 1922

127

34. Paul Klee, Cathedrals, 1925/65

130

35. Ernst Stadler, “Fahrt ueber die Coelner Rheinbruecke bei Nacht,” 1913

131

36. Paul Klee, River Spirit, 1920/233

135

37. Paul Klee, Long Hair and Soulful, 1929/299

138

38. Paul Klee, Illustrative Sketch from the Beiträge zur bildnerischen Formlehre

139

39. Paul Klee, Palace, 1928/133

140

40. Paul Klee, Stricken City, 1936/22

144

41. Paul Klee, Tree Nursery, 1929/98

156

42. Paul Klee, Entry 902 from the Diaries

160

43. Paul Klee, Album Leaf, 1935/6

162

44. Joan Miró, Lithograph from The Lizard with Golden Feathers, 1971

166

45. Paul Klee, Park N, 1935/15

167

46. Paul Klee, Growth Is Stirring, 1938/78

171

47. Paul Klee, Poem in Pictorial Script, 1939/170

175

Acknowledgments

D

2004 I completed research for this study at the Paul Klee Foundation in Bern, Switzerland. Staff members graciously provided research services, including access to archival material, at a time when they were preparing to move from facilities at the Bern Museum of Fine Arts to the new Zentrum Paul Klee. Since that time, Fabienne Eggelhöfer, Heidi Frautschi, Christine Hopfengart, and others have kindly responded to my requests for information and reproductions. I very much appreciate their patience and assistance. I am also very grateful for the generosity of the Paul Klee family estate and the Zentrum Paul Klee, which graciously waived copyright fees. The Office of Research Services at the University of North Carolina Greensboro subsidized research travel, copyright fees, and other production costs. Many supportive colleagues at this university contributed in other ways. The staff of Jackson Library helped with tracking down bibliographical references and ordering books. My colleague Heather Holian shared her superior skills in the academic use of computer technology. Andreas Lixl, head of the Department of German, Russian, and Japanese Studies, expertly edited transcriptions and translations of German texts, and Allison Seay, assistant editor of The Greensboro Review, carefully checked my manuscript for typographical and other errors. For additional assistance with this task, I extend thanks to Catherine Lafarge, professor emerita of French at Bryn Mawr College. Over the years I have profited from exchanges about Klee’s poetry with numerous scholars, including Paul Bauschatz, Heide Bideau, Karel Citroen, Sara Henry-Corrington, Stefan Frey, Robert Knott, Robert Newton, Gail McDonald, and Marianne Vogel. I am also grateful for the knowledge acquired in the course of lively post-conference discussions with members of the International Association of Word & Image Studies. I am very pleased to have this book published by Camden House and wish to express my gratitude to the readers whose insightful queries and inspired suggestions helped me write a better book than the one I originally submitted. I am equally indebted to editor James Walker, who offered indispensable help at every stage of the review process, from the first reading to the last revision. He proposed smart, sensible solutions to every editorial conundrum I encountered along the way and made tactful suggestions about translations. As a copyeditor, Henry Krawitz was both diligent and diplomatic, offering suggestions that improved the style and the content of my work. URING THE SUMMER OF

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It is with particular pleasure that I thank the poets I am privileged to know, especially those who took time from their own work to comment on mine. Fred Chappell’s critique of my first chapter is far more learned than anything I could ever hope to write about poetry. Mark Smith-Soto, editor of the International Poetry Review, generously commented on the same chapter, giving it his undivided attention at a time when he had more on his mind. Like Klee, Fritz Janschka began his creative life as a poet before realizing that he was meant to be a painter after all. He has shared my curiosity about Klee’s work for thirty years, and he knows that I could not have completed this book without the benefit of his extraordinary intellect, his Morgensternian humor, and his culinary skills (in that order). Concerning translations of poetry, only the graceless ones in this book are mine. Those distinguished by wit and elegance are the work of Fred Chappell, Fritz Janschka, and the authors I credit individually in notes and acknowledge collectively here. In addition to copyright holders named in the captions of illustrations, I gratefully acknowledge the following institutions, individuals, and publishers: the Klee family estate and the Zentrum Paul Klee for permission to quote passages from Paul Klee, Tagebücher, 1898–1918, Stuttgart: Gerd Hatje, Teufen: Arthur Niggli, 1988; Arche Verlag AG, Zürich-Hamburg, for permission to quote poems in Paul Klee, Gedichte, ed. Felix Klee, © 1960, 1996, 2001; the University of California Press for permission to quote passages in The Diaries of Paul Klee, 1898–1918, by Paul Klee, ed. Felix Klee, © 1968 The Regents of the University of California, University of California Press, and Calligrammes, Poems of Peace and War, 1913–1916, by Guillaume Apollinaire, trans. Ann Hyde Greet, introd. S. I. Lockerbie, © 1991 The Regents of the University of California, University of California Press; DuMont Literatur und Kunst Verlag for permission to quote and reproduce poems from Kurt Schwitters, Lyrik, vol. 1 of Das literarische Werk, © 1973 DuMont Literatur und Kunst Verlag, Cologne; the Metropolitan Museum of Art for permission to quote Guillaume Apollinaire’s “Le Poulpe,” in Le Bestiaire, ou Cortège d’Orphée, trans. Lauren Shakley, © 1977 The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Yale University Press for permission to quote a passage from Christian Morgenstern, Songs from the Gallows, trans. Walter Arndt, Yale University Press, 1993; Patrick Bridgwater for permission to quote from his translations of poems in The German Poets of the First World War, New York: St. Martin’s, 1985; Nicholas Jacobs for permission to quote from Patrick Bridgwater, Poet of Expressionist Berlin: The Life and Work of Georg Heym, London: Libris, 1991; Lucia Getsi for permission to quote her translations from Georg Trakl, Poems, Athens, Ohio: Mundus Artium Press, 1973. P. A. June 2006

Introduction: The Artist (Poet/Painter)

I

1908 PAUL KLEE PAINTED A FIGURE study entitled The Artist (Poet/ Painter) (Der Künstler [Dichtermaler], 1908/72). This watercolor has been missing for years, so it cannot be compared to photographs or known self-portraits of Klee.1 Assuming that The Artist (Poet/Painter) was a portrait of the artist as a young man, it would have visually reinforced the multiple identities Klee constructed for himself in his Diaries (Tagebücher). Since Klee did not begin keeping a journal until 1898, he was faced with the task of reconstructing the first nineteen years of his life, beginning with his birth near Bern, Switzerland, in 1879. The earliest numbered entries in the Diaries seem to have been assembled from memory and various written records. As a result, they take on the character of “a system of fragments,” which is how Friedrich von Schlegel described the literary genre of memoirs.2 There is every indication that Klee’s systematically organized fragments were the product of selective recall. It is surely not coincidental, for example, that early entries in the Diaries contain numerous allusions to his aspirations as a poet and his training as a musician. It is clear from their placement and their tone that Klee intended to chart a course of indecision about his choice of a profession. In a dramatic show of resolve, he claimed to have “said goodbye to literature and music” (“der Literatur[,] der Musik Valet gesagt”) when he left Bern in 1898 to study the visual arts in Munich.3 He then admitted somewhat sheepishly that he had continued to compose poetry as a creative outlet for his anxieties and frustrations, apparently undeterred by the realization that his efforts were little more than “studies, exercises in style” (“Studien, Stil-Versuche”).4 Reluctant to relinquish his literary ambitions, in the early spring of 1901 he drafted a program for future development that still accorded primacy to poetry: “as ideal profession, poetry and philosophy; as real profession, the plastic arts” (“als idealer Beruf: Dichtkunst und Philosophie, als realer Beruf: die Plastik”).5 A few months later reluctance gave way to fleeting regret: N

I should have written many poems to give form to my newly gained creative strength. Of course, this intention was not realized. For to be a poet and to write poetry are two different things. However that strength and tranquility has [sic] remained dear to me even in my later life, and I don’t intend to mock at it. [Viele Gedichte sollten der neugewonnenen Kraft Form verleihen. Natürlich kam es nicht zu einer Verwirklichung dieser Absicht. Denn

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INTRODUCTION: THE ARTIST (POET/PAINTER)

Dichter sein und dichten ist zweierlei. Jene Kraft und Ruhe aber ist mir auch für mein späteres Leben teuer geblieben, und ich möchte hierauf keine Travestien leben lassen.]6

By 1901, then, Klee had acknowledged that his future as a poet held little promise, even though his claim to being a poet implies that he still considered poetry an avocation. As indicated by the title The Artist (Poet/Painter), he clung to a dual identity as late as 1908, by which time his professional ambitions were focused exclusively on his visual production. To prepare the reader of the Diaries for the inevitability of his commitment to the visual arts, Klee peppered his memoirs with statements that distill years of vacillation into flashes of insight: “The recognition that at bottom I am a poet, after all, should be no hindrance in the plastic arts!” (“Im Grunde Dichter zu sein, diese Erkenntnis sollte in der bildenden Kunst doch nicht hinderlich sein!”).7 Once Klee made the transition from poet to painter, he continued to write occasional poetry for particular circumstances and experimental verses for his own purposes. Some of these were copied into a notebook he labeled “Geduchte,” which can be translated either as “Poams” or “Poums.”8 His vowel displacement is indicative of the self-deprecating irony that characterizes much of Klee’s verbal poetic production — even before he relegated it to the status of playful pursuit. This is not to suggest that Klee ever thought of poetry as a trivial pursuit. On the contrary, he took time to play only with what he valued and always with a purpose. His playful engagement with poetry challenged him to match wits with poets he admired; his purpose was to master skills and internalize ideas he could apply either to writing poetry or to composing poems in his unique pictorial script. Klee’s conceptual understanding of what it meant to write poetry was shaped by such canonical aesthetic treatises as Horace’s Ars Poetica, which he quoted in the title of the painting ab ovo (1917/130), as well as by his knowledge of a broad spectrum of poetry, from classical epics to the shaped poetry of Guillaume Apollinaire and the sound poems of Kurt Schwitters. His rigorous Gymnasium training gave Klee a strong foundation in the history of literature. A brief survey of his exposure to the creative practices of early modernist groups and artists confirms that he was equally well versed in the experimental poetry of his contemporaries, including the German expressionists, the dadaists, and the surrealists. During the second decade of the twentieth century, German expressionist poetry proliferated in the periodicals that promoted the literary avant-garde. Although Klee referred only to Gottfried Benn by name, he could hardly have avoided the works of other German expressionist poets even if he only skimmed through the influential magazine Der Sturm. The context in which Klee mentioned Benn confirms that he would have been familiar with the poets whose works appeared in Der Sturm. Writing to his

INTRODUCTION: THE ARTIST (POET/PAINTER)




3

spouse Lily Klee-Stumpf in March 1916 from Landshut, the military post where he was stationed as a recruit, he referred to a plethora of correspondence from “Walden, Moilliet, Benn etc.”9 As founder and editor of Der Sturm, Herwarth Walden provided an outlet for some of the most innovative expressionist poets, including Benn, Alfred Lichtenstein, and August Stramm.10 Klee himself had graphic work published in Der Sturm, as well as his translation of an essay by Robert Delaunay, so it is plausible to assume that he paged through the magazine regularly as a way of keeping up with the latest trends in art and literature. Beginning in 1913, Klee also showed work at Walden’s Sturm Gallery, initially participating in an exhibition of the Swiss Moderne Bund artists, among whom was Hans Arp. Although Arp maintained ties with Der Sturm into the early twenties, in 1916 he joined forces with other mavericks to found the Zurich-based dada group. Like Arp, Klee exhibited with the dadaists, but his participation in their group activities was limited. In his Memoirs of a Dada Drummer, Richard Huelsenbeck casually recalled that “Klee popped up in Zurich every so often during our dada period there.”11 Typically, Klee was more precise in recording his personal contact with the dadaists. Writing to Lily Klee from Zurich on 22 June 1919, he noted that he had sought out Waldemar Jollos, who had lectured on his work at a Dada Gallery exhibition in 1917, and had also met with Arp, Marcel Janco, and Tristan Tzara. He described the dada circle as quite interesting (“sehr interessant”) and the people as lively (“voller Leben”).12 He made no mention of the antics of dada performances or the poems that had been recited at earlier dada soirées. Even so, he would have been familiar with dada poetry through the group’s publications, including the 1919 Anthologie Dada, and possibly through performances sponsored by the Berlin dadaists during the early twenties. The surrealists were another group with which Klee established a tangential alliance. In a letter dated 27 November 1924 and written on the letterhead of the “Bureau de Recherches Surréalistes,” Louis Aragon chided Klee for not reading his mail or the copies of articles written about him. Clearly unaccustomed to the role of supplicant, Aragon nevertheless entreated Klee to provide reproductions of his work for a new journal, La Révolution surréaliste.13 Klee responded promptly, agreeing to send photographs. Presumably he did so, for reproductions of his work were subsequently published in La Révolution surréaliste, along with surrealist manifestos, reviews, and poetry. In October 1925 Klee’s first solo exhibition in Paris opened at the Vavin-Raspail Gallery, which produced a small catalogue with an introduction by Aragon and a poem by Paul Eluard. The following month his work was also included in the first group exhibition of surrealist art. Klee’s name, among others, was accorded footnote status in André Breton’s first surrealist manifesto, and throughout the twenties surrealist writers paid homage to what they perceived as the poetic qualities

4




INTRODUCTION: THE ARTIST (POET/PAINTER)

of Klee’s visual images.14 Klee would respond in his own fashion to the poetry of the surrealists, and even to their critical prose, but he persisted in preserving his independence from this group — or any other one, for that matter. Despite Klee’s apparent aversion to typecasting and group solidarity, he was in contact with a number of individual artists who moved within the intersecting circles of modernism. Like Klee, many of them were poets as well as visual artists. Some, notably Wassily Kandinsky, composed poetry for only a relatively short period of time, whereas others, such as Arp and Schwitters, pursued parallel paths of creative activity on a more sustained basis. Arp, in fact, went so far as to admit that had he been obliged to make a choice between poetry and sculpture, he would have chosen to write poetry.15 As for Joan Miró, he claimed that in his experience painting and poetry were virtually indistinguishable creative impulses.16 Throughout this study of Klee as a poet/painter the work of these and other dual practitioners will serve as focal points of comparison. A few general observations about their work in relation to Klee’s will introduce some of the theoretical principles and compositional devices that were common to modernist practices in multiple spheres of creative activity. As early as 1903 Arp had a poem and drawing published together, thereby initiating a lifetime of reciprocal exchange between the recurring themes of his verbal and visual compositions — and, most significantly, their methods of construction. Between 1915 and 1920 he wrote and rewrote the poems that would be published in 1920 under the title The Cloud Pump (Die Wolkenpumpe). By his own account, he composed these poems by tearing apart and rearranging sentences, words, and syllables.17 This process anticipated the production of his torn drawings (“dessins déchirés”), which were based on the creative principle of “constellation.” Arp’s technique originated in the act of destroying works to generate the materials that were recycled into new works.18 Klee independently arrived at a similar compositional technique, applying the term “productive ruin” (“produktive Ruine”) to works he subjected to the process of destruction as a constructive approach to pictorial composition.19 Klee’s carefully edited Diaries and selected examples of his poems in both textual and visual settings provide evidence that he applied variations on this technique to his writing as well. With the clearly focused perspective of hindsight, Arp himself acknowledged that Kandinsky was the first artist who consciously produced poems and paintings that marked the transition from “abstract” to “concrete,” by which he meant autonomous compositions that were not based in direct reference to observable reality.20 Sounds (Klänge), Kandinsky’s only published volume of poetry, was issued in 1912 in a limited edition of thirtyeight poems paired with fifty-six woodcuts that complement rather than illustrate the texts. The most readily apparent correspondences between

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5

verbal and visual images are the use of patterned repetitions and a tendency to fragment syntactical units, both linguistic and pictorial.21 By comparison, surviving examples of Klee’s earliest poems are far more traditional in their formal structures, although he did use the same techniques in his later, more experimental poetry. Similarly, a comparison between the woodcuts in Sounds, which date from about 1907, and Klee’s View from a Window of My Parents’ Home in Bern (Fensteraussicht der elterlichen Wohnung in Bern, 1909/25) indicates that Klee’s early graphic vocabulary is more representational than Kandinsky’s.22 However, as Klee subsequently negotiated constant shifts between figurative and nonobjective abstraction, he deployed repetition and fragmentation with as much inventive variety as Kandinsky. Klee’s path first crossed Kandinsky’s in Munich, where both were affiliated with Der Blaue Reiter, and again at the Bauhaus, the experimental design school where they taught and lived in close proximity during the twenties. Klee did not see Schwitters with as much frequency, but his name is invoked no fewer than ten times in reviews and articles Schwitters published in Der Sturm between 1920 and 1926. Schwitters mentioned Klee in a response to what he perceived as G. F. Hartlaub’s overwrought analogies between art and music.23 Although sarcastic, the tone of this commentary pales in comparison to the virulence directed against “Dr. Weygandt,” the Hamburg physician who resorted to yet another critical cliché, namely, the analogy that paired modern art with madness. Composed as a verbal and visual collage, this Merz diatribe contains Weygandt’s critiques of Klee and Schwitters lifted from an issue of the Berlin newspaper Germania dated 27 November 1921.24 Evidently pleased with the visual effects of his polemical collage, Schwitters continued the practice in his tirade against a “Herr Lange,” whose choice of words for a 1922 article in the Göttinger Zeitung gave Schwitters the opportunity to play with variations on the noun “Kalk” (lime), “Kalkklees” being an irresistible combination.25 Klee’s poetry and picture titles offer ample evidence that he shared Schwitters’s propensity for wordplay. There are also parallels between some of Klee’s experiments with visual poetry and the typographic innovations of Schwitters’s experimental verse. Nevertheless, any claim that the two exchanged ideas about creative strategies must remain speculative. In contrast, the relationship between Klee and Miró is more straightforward. Although the two never actually met, Miró frankly admitted that he was profoundly influenced by Klee’s work.26 Klee’s influence on Miró’s formal vocabulary has been well documented. More relevant to this study is Miró’s remark that he made “no distinction between painting and poetry” (“aucune différence entre peinture et poésie”).27 He was, in effect, invoking poetic license to characterize a working process that privileged neither words nor images in the formulation of poetic ideas. Miró began to formulate these ideas in paintings of the early twenties, where there is a

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fluid interplay between lines that form words and those that shape images. Although Klee had begun to forge semantically reciprocal relationships between poetic texts and pictorial symbols a decade earlier — by which time he had already shifted his focus from poetry to painting — he was still coming to terms with the theoretical concept of the poetic as it applied to the visual arts. As a dual practitioner, Klee used “poetic” not as a vaguely descriptive adjective but rather to convey specific meaning. Specificity should not, however, be confused with singularity. For Klee, as for other modern artists, the term “poetic” had different connotations at different times and in different contexts. In a letter to his then fiancée Lily Stumpf dated 11 July 1902, he referred to a conflict between his predilection for the poetic (“das Poëtische [sic]”) and his frustrating search for pictorial themes (“malerische . . . Motive”).28 In a lecture delivered in the early thirties and transcribed by one of his students at the Düsseldorf Academy, where he taught after leaving the Bauhaus, he rephrased the poetic-pictorial polarity to privilege “the poetic, not the literary” (“ich sage Dichterisches, nicht Literarisches”).29 Drawing on the verbal art of analogy, he advised his students that artists could achieve the multiplicity of meaning inherent in poetry by adapting poetic language to visual images. The changes of meaning in Klee’s references to the poetic can be contextualized by examining some of the theoretical and critical precedents that would have been familiar to him. The frequent use of “poetic” as a descriptive modifier of painting was an extension of the assumptions underlying the ut pictura poesis tradition initiated by Renaissance writers, who turned to classical treatises on poetry in the absence of ancient theoretical texts on the visual arts. The theorists who developed the concept and perpetuated the tradition cited Aristotle’s observation that poetry and painting are both arts of ideal imitation and quoted the simile ut pictura poesis from Horace’s Ars Poetica.30 Over time these sources were inventively reworked to support the theory that there are intrinsic correspondences between the sister arts of poetry and painting. As Rensselaer Lee explained in his introduction to Ut Pictura Poesis: The Humanistic Theory of Painting, the theorists who wrote about art expected that ut pictura poesis (“as is painting so is poetry”) would be interpreted to mean “as is poetry so is painting.”31 In practice it was generally assumed that painters would look to poetry as models of appropriate themes, subjects, and modes of expression. Despite occasional objections, the theory of ut pictura poesis dominated critical discourse in the visual arts until the eighteenth century, when it was challenged in Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (Laokoon, oder Über die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie) and Denis Diderot’s voluminous and highly subjective salon criticism. Twice in his commentary on the Salon of 1767 Diderot famously

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7

countered the concept of ut pictura poesis, noting that “what works well in painting always works well as poetry, but the relation isn’t reciprocal.”32 Like Diderot, Lessing pointed to differences in the languages of poetry and painting, arguing that while both are arts of imitation, they imitate in different ways.33 A century later the poet and critic Charles Baudelaire distinguished between poetic painting and painting that attempted — invariably without success — to illustrate poetry. He criticized academic artists like Ary Scheffer, who depended on subject matter borrowed from poetry rather than based on visual experience.34 In contrast, Baudelaire ascribed positive connotations to the poetic, which he associated with an expressive quality conveyed through an artist’s visual vocabulary and technique. This was the meaning he applied to the work of Eugène Delacroix.35 Delacroix himself used much the same terminology, drawing a distinction between prosaic and poetic painting that would be reiterated by Klee and others of his generation.36 By the early twentieth century the opposition between literary and poetic painting was an established critical paradigm. The advocates of modern art adopted and reinterpreted this theoretical contrast in the interest of promoting the radical idea that poetic painting was altogether different from painting that imitated objects in the visible world. In “Light” (“La Lumière”), which Delaunay wrote in 1912, he applied the terms “descriptive” (“descriptif”) and “literary” (“littéraire”) to the art of imitation, meaning images that literally resemble the objects they represent.37 In his translation of Delaunay’s essay for Der Sturm, where it was published as “Über das Licht,” Klee replaced Delaunay’s adjectives with the nouns “Beschreibung” and “Literatur,” while retaining the pejorative implications of mimetic painting.38 The same year Delaunay wrote “Light” Kandinsky published “On the Problem of Form” (“Über die Formfrage”) in Der Blaue Reiter. In this important essay he proposed theoretical alternatives to the tradition of visual art that privileged the representation of objects in the visible world. Kandinsky acknowledged this tradition in naming two polar opposites of pictorial form: “1– the great abstraction [and] 2– the great realism” (“die grosse Abstraktion [und] die grosse Realistik”).39 Among modern artists, Kandinsky noted, the ideal was no longer a perfectly calibrated balance between these two equally viable forms of expression, as it had been in the past. He knew from his own practice that artists were exploring “many combinations of different harmonies of the abstract with the real” (“viele Kombinationen der verschiedenen Zusammenklänge des Abstrakten mit dem Realen”).40 These new combinations, he added, would not be understood by most critics. The ideal critic in Kandinsky’s view “would need the soul of a poet” (“eine Dichterseele brauchen”).41 Just such a critic came to the defense of modern art in the person of Apollinaire, who was as prolific a critic as he was a poet. In “Die moderne Malerei,” an article first published in Der Sturm in 1913,

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Apollinaire contrasted the art of imitation with modern art that is created with formal elements borrowed from conceptual rather than visual reality. This approach, he noted, leads to “poetic painting that is independent of all visual perception” (“einer poetischen Malerei, die ausserhalb der Betrachtung steht”).42 The kind of painting Apollinaire had in mind in 1913 was poetic in that it substituted the language of visual metaphor for literally descriptive imagery. This is essentially the same meaning Klee attached to the term poetic in his lecture dating from the early thirties. Many of the ideas Klee developed in his lectures at the Bauhaus in the twenties and at the Düsseldorf Academy in the early thirties are introduced in an essay originally drafted in 1918 and entitled “Graphic Art” (“Graphik”) but better known in its final version as the “Creative Credo” (“Schöpferische Konfession”). Although in this essay, published in 1920, Klee did not use the designation poetic, he did use metaphorical language to add his own ideas to the theoretical foundations of modern art. After introducing the dot, line, plane, and space as formal elements of the visual arts in section 1, he demonstrated how they might be used on “a little trip into the land of deeper insight” (“eine kleine Reise ins Land der besseren Erkenntnis”), a metaphor he developed throughout section 2 and picked up again in section 4.43 At the beginning of section 4 he specifically cited Lessing’s Laocoön, in which “much fuss is made about the difference between temporal and spatial art” (“wird viel Wesens aus dem Unterschied von zeitlicher zu räumlicher Kunst gemacht”). Dismissing that idea as nothing more than a “scholastic delusion” (“nur gelehrter Wahn”), Klee made the claim that “space, too, is a temporal concept” (“auch der Raum ist ein zeitlicher Begriff”). To undermine Lessing’s insistence that the painter must renounce the element of time, Klee pointed to the temporal processes of making and looking at a work of art.44 In section 5 he proceeded to contest other aspects of Lessing’s theoretical distinctions between painting and poetry. Seemingly in response to Lessing’s observation that painting cannot convey the invisible because “everything in painting is visible” (“bei ihr ist alles sichtbar”), Klee countered that modern art can reveal “other, latent realities” (“andere Wahrheiten latent”) that are veiled by the visible world.45 One of the arguments Lessing mounted most forcefully was that the signs of poetry are not only successive but arbitrary, whereas those used by the painter must bear a “suitable relationship to the thing signified” (“ein bequemes Verhältnis zu dem Bezeichneten haben müssen”).46 Klee implicitly dismissed this distinction, characterizing a visual image as “a formal cosmos” (“ein formaler Kosmos”) created from “abstract elements” (“aus abstrakten Formelementen”).47 Although the ideas in the “Creative Credo” evolved from Klee’s own experiments with pictorial abstraction, nowhere in this essay did he state explicitly that for decades artists had been systematically challenging the established tradition of pictorial illusionism that had dominated artistic

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practice since the Renaissance. This tradition values an artist’s ability to construct a pictorial space that is a convincing representation of actual three-dimensional space and to fill it with objects that resemble things visible in the world. Klee was among those artists who challenged that longstanding tradition. Without question, Klee and other innovators would not have been recognized as such had they not developed unique styles of expression and made singular contributions to the diversity of modernism. Individually and collectively they brought about revolutionary changes that cannot be attributed to any single factor. It is nevertheless a matter of historical fact that many of the modernist innovators worked across media, the most frequent combination being the visual arts and poetry. It is, of course, possible that this was a coincidence, but that seems unlikely given the numbers of painters who wrote poetry and poets who painted. Not all dual practitioners were doubly talented, and even those who were tended to favor one creative pursuit over another. Most of the poet/painters of Klee’s acquaintance established their reputations as visual artists. Other dual practitioners, including Hermann Hesse and Else Lasker-Schüler, became known as writers. Comparing the visual and verbal production of any individual artist, the most readily apparent parallels pertain to isolated examples of imagery. To cite but one example, the urban types that are savagely caricatured in George Grosz’s paintings and drawings are easy to recognize in his word pictures of postwar Berlin because they are subjected to the same treatment. More complicated is the question of whether the poetry written by artists in the vanguard of European modernism had a significant and sustained impact on other aspects of the visual work they produced. In Klee’s case there is sufficient evidence — verbal as well as visual — to support the thesis that any assessment of his role in articulating a modernist aesthetic must consider his early efforts as a poet and his continued engagement with poetry until his death in 1940 at the age of sixty. Verbal evidence is found throughout Klee’s published writing, including the critical edition of the Diaries. This edition contains Klee’s edited entries and variations on these entries written as autobiographical statements for Wilhelm Hausenstein and Leopold Zahn, both authors of early monographs on his work. Klee’s statements for Hausenstein and Zahn are carefully crafted attempts to exert control over how his artistic development would be recorded for his contemporaries and for posterity. He called attention to 1902 as a pivotal year in his early career, focusing on the struggle to reconcile his dual allegiances to the poetic and the pictorial in his search for an artistic identity.48 Once Klee acknowledged that he had greater potential as a visual artist than he did as a poet, his poetic production became sporadic but by no means inconsequential. For most of his life he wrote poetry only intermittently, occasionally incorporating some of his poetic verses into visual frames of reference. However, he applied his knowledge of poetics to

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his visual compositions with increasing frequency. As early as 1912 he wrote a poetic text into the space of a drawing. At that point his graphic imagery was still recognizably figurative, but by 1915 he was pairing letter forms with visual abstractions, appropriating the most basic units of the language of poetry to invent his own form of pictorial abstraction. During the postwar years Klee continued to incorporate verbal signs into visual images, and in the twenties he experimented with the pictorial equivalents of the formal structures of poetry. By the thirties he had developed the pictorial writing system that allowed him to make a definitive transition from writing poetry to composing “poems in pictorial script,” to use the plural form of the title he gave to a drawing dating from 1939. This study will retrace Klee’s steps — not along a direct, linear path but meandering through the circuitous byways of modernism in its multiple manifestations. Because this work was conceived and written as a case study, I am using the particularities of one artist’s theories and practices to frame some general observations about the relationship between the visual and verbal arts in the history of modernism as it developed in Europe during the first four decades of the twentieth century. I propose that Klee could critique Lessing’s theoretical distinctions with such conviction because his practice of both art forms made him aware of commonalities rather than differences in the languages of poetry and painting. Even before challenging Lessing in his “Creative Credo,” Klee cited Horace’s Ars Poetica in his work entitled ab ovo.49 This reference to one of the principal sources of the ut pictura poesis tradition lends support to the theory that Klee was consciously rethinking the implications of ut pictura poesis. For Klee it was again possible — and even desirable — for painting to be like poetry, albeit in ways that would have been unthinkable to those who originally perceived similarities between the sister arts. Klee’s work exemplifies what can be called a new, modernist concept of ut pictura poesis, one that is fundamentally different from the traditional model in rejecting the assumption that painting is an art of imitation. Klee and other modernists who equated poetic with nonmimetic painting were actually taking much the same degree of liberty with their sources as Renaissance theorists had.50 Their new concept of ut pictura poesis was based on perceived parallels between painting and poetry that Lessing had defined as differences when he took issue with ideas that had prevailed since the Renaissance. In dismantling Lessing’s defense of the distinctions between painting and poetry, Klee constructed a theoretical framework for painting that is similar to poetry in its use of arbitrary signs arranged in a nonillusionistic space and its ability to communicate what can be known and felt in addition to or in lieu of what can be seen. How Klee put this theory into practice is what I intend to explore. My purpose is twofold: to contextualize selected examples of Klee’s poetry and to demonstrate how one poet-turned-visual artist transferred theoretical concepts, structural principles, and thematic currents from

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various written forms to the semantic spaces of drawings and paintings. Recurring themes in his career as a poet/painter are charted by chapter titles that quote or paraphrase his own words. Each chapter is organized chronologically and analyzes selected representative examples of Klee’s poetic images, both verbal and visual. Chapter 1 surveys examples of the traditional and experimental poetry Klee composed between 1895 and 1938, some of which was recorded in textual spaces, such as the Diaries and the notebook of “Geduchte,” while other examples were incorporated into visual settings. In this chapter I identify recurring features of Klee’s practice as a poet: his method of composing by editing and condensing; his evident delight in playing with language; and his attention to the elements of linear structure. In subsequent chapters I examine visual analogues of these characteristic features, emphasizing symbolic imagery, structural relationships, and compositional techniques common to Klee’s poetry and painting. I pair Klee’s visual images dating from 1914 to 1940 with poetic texts from a number of sources, including librettos of operas he knew, as well as books in his personal library and poetry published in contemporary literary magazines. The works discussed in chapter 2 illustrate how Klee mediated the shift from literary to poetic content, transforming verbal images into visual equivalents. In chapter 3 I propose that he modernized a traditional concept of landscape painting by adapting poetic forms and devices. In chapter 4 I examine Klee’s process of “harmonizing architectonic and poetic painting” by considering a number of sources for the unique compositional structures he first developed while teaching at the Bauhaus and subsequently reworked during his last years in Bern. In chapter 5 I discuss works with rhythmic structures generated by the doubly coded language Klee had invented by the last decade of his life. In the chapters devoted primarily to Klee’s visual production, my intention is not to identify a particular literary model for every drawing and painting. In some cases I do make such claims, but this is often impossible with Klee’s own poetry. Since he rarely dated his poems, it is difficult to establish firm chronological links to what appear to be related visual images. Instead, my intention is to analyze examples of reciprocity in the processes of making verbal and visual art and to examine commonalities in works of poetry, drawing, and painting. I do not restrict comparative analyses to pairings between Klee’s own poems and pictures. Rather, I draw widely from the cultural milieu that, by all accounts, he absorbed with unstinting intellectual curiosity. His Diaries and the letters written to Lily Klee-Stumpf whenever the two were apart confirm that he read voraciously and was an equally avid aficionado of concerts and theatrical productions. Although I cite this kind of documentation when it is available and pertinent, I also make some assumptions about what Klee may have read, including such readily accessible periodicals as Die Aktion and magazines that featured reproductions of his work, among them Der Sturm and the Cahiers d’art.

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Throughout this study I reproduce entire poems or quote excerpts in English as well as the language in which they were originally written, using published translations when available. Similarly, when quoting directly from any of Klee’s published writings, I cite the standard German and English editions. Exceptions are his poems and letters, most of which have not been translated. When not otherwise attributed, translations are mine. To preserve the flow of a text written in English, I generally use English translations of titles and prose passages followed by German, French, and other foreign-language citations in parentheses or brackets. The one exception pertains to poetic verse, which I always quote first in its original language. Klee’s picture titles constitute a category all their own. Unlike the poems, which were usually untitled, his visual images were almost always given titles. These titles are occasionally descriptive, but sometimes they bear no obvious relationship to the image depicted. Often they are poetic figures that verbally complement and therefore reinforce meanings inherent in the visual images. A number of scholars have examined Klee’s titles,51 but they are not the primary focus of this study. I discuss titles only when they elucidate the strategies Klee applied in developing a sign system and compositional structures that oscillate between verbal and visual forms of expression. With few exceptions, I cite the German and English titles listed in the multivolume catalogue raisonné of Klee’s work, along with the number assigned to each work in Klee’s own oeuvre catalogue.52 In cases where I briefly discuss visual images that are not illustrated, I refer the reader to reproductions in the catalogue raisonné or other available sources. Despite a vast body of Klee scholarship, relatively little attention has been paid to his poetry. This is probably due to the fact that the reputations of historical figures tend to be constructed within the confines of disciplinary niches, and most Klee scholars are art historians, like myself. Because my academic training and interests encompass the history of literature as well as art, I have gravitated to the interdisciplinary field of word and image studies. The interpretive methods applied by scholars in this field have proved to be particularly useful in analyzing Klee’s creative activity. In this first book-length study of Klee’s poetic production, I again examine his work from the critical perspective of word and image studies. Although it contains translations of poems that have never been translated into English and new versions of some that have been previously translated, it makes no pretense at being a comprehensive edition of Klee’s poetry in translation. This would require both a critical edition of the poems in German — which has not yet been compiled — and the dedicated talents of a bilingual poet. One such poet, Roman Jakobson, initiated scholarly inquiry into Klee’s poetic practice. A practicing poet as well as a scholar and critic, Jakobson applied his structuralist method to what he called an “octastich” from Klee’s Diaries in an essay that first appeared in the inaugural issue of

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Linguistic Inquiry and was reprinted in the collection entitled Hölderlin, Klee, Brecht: zur Wortkunst dreier Gedichte.53 A less technical and more accessible form of Jakobson’s methodology has served as a model for other authors, including Marianne Vogel and Paul Bauschatz. Vogel’s valuable contributions to Klee research include an unpublished paper that proposes a semiotic-structuralist interpretation of twenty poems, as well as her published dissertation, which establishes scholarly guidelines for determining an inventory of Klee’s poetry.54 In conference papers and publications on Klee’s work, Bauschatz retains the rigor of Jakobson’s structural linguistics while expanding the scope of his perceptive textual analyses to include selected visual as well as verbal texts.55 My own study focuses on one artist’s engagement with the kind of cross-fertilization that is generally considered a hallmark of modernism as a pluralistic aesthetic. Dual practitioners are not, of course, unique to modernism, but they have generated artistic innovation down through the centuries. In this respect I am indebted as much to Deborah Parker’s monographic study Bronzino: Renaissance Painter as Poet as I am to Renée Riese Hubert’s essay “Paul Klee: Modernism in Art and Literature.”56 Other scholarly models include: Harriett Watts’s Three Painter-Poets: Arp, Schwitters, Klee — Selected Poems; Marjorie Perloff’s numerous publications on modernist poetry and painting; and Clara Orban’s close readings of futurist and surrealist word-image relationships in her Culture of Fragments.57 Whereas my motivation in undertaking this study was to present a substantive analysis of Klee’s multimedia poetic practice, my inspiration in writing has been the challenge of affirming the following aphorism found in Keith Haring’s journals: Poems do not necessarily need words. Words do not necessarily make poems.58

Notes 1

This work is listed among lost self-images of Klee in Michele Vishny’s essay “Paul Klee’s Self-Images,” in Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Art, ed. Mary Mathews Gedo (Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press, 1985), 1:165 n. 5; hereafter cited as “Klee’s SelfImages.” The object file in the Zentrum Paul Klee contains no photograph of the work but does document that it was sold to A. J. Eddy in Chicago. This would have been Arthur Jerome Eddy, author of Cubists and Post-Impressionism (Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1914), a copy of which is in the Klee library, currently housed in the Zentrum Paul Klee. 2

Friedrich von Schlegel, “Athenäums-Fragmente,” #77, in Charakteristiken und Kritiken 1 (1796–1801), ed. Hans Eichner, in Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe (Munich: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1967), 2:176.

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3 Paul Klee, Tagebücher, 1898–1918, new critical edition, ed. Paul-Klee-Stiftung, Kunstmuseum Bern, comp. Wolfgang Kersten (Stuttgart: Gerd Hatje / Teufen: Arthur Niggli, 1988), #83, 1899–1900, 41; see also The Diaries of Paul Klee, 1898–1918, ed. Felix Klee (Berkeley: U of California P, 1964), 33. Subsequent references to the Tagebücher include the entry number, the date indicated in the critical edition, and the page number; only page numbers are given for the Diaries. 4 Klee, Tagebücher #120, 1900, 52 (Diaries, 42); for other references to Klee’s efforts at composing poetry, see Tagebücher #92, January–March 1900, 44; #110, summer 1901, 50; #129, January–February 1901, 57 (Diaries, 35, 39–40, 46). 5

Klee, Tagebücher #137, 1901, 60 (Diaries, 48).

6

Klee, Tagebücher #172, 70 (Diaries, 57). Although included in the Diaries under a section labeled “Before Italy (Summer 1901),” the reference to “my later life” clearly indicates that it was written in retrospect, perhaps when Klee was rewriting the original version of this passage in 1904, or possibly as late as 1921, when he completed another round of editing and transcription. For documentation of this activity, see chapter 1, note 3. 7

Tagebücher #121, summer 1900, 52 (Diaries, 42).

8

Marianne Vogel calls attention to the idiosyncratic spelling in her book Zwischen Wort und Bild: Das schriftliche Werk Paul Klees und die Rolle der Sprache in seinem Denken und in seiner Kunst (Munich: Scaneg, 1992), 16; hereafter cited as Zwischen Wort und Bild. 9 Paul Klee, Briefe an die Familie, 1893–1940, ed. Felix Klee (Cologne: DuMont, 1979), 16 March 1916, 2:791. Subsequent references to Briefe include volume number, date, and page number. A few years later Klee became familiar with the essays contributed by Benn, Johannes R. Becher, and other expressionist writers to the Schöpferische Konfession (1920), in which he published the essay cited in note 43. 10

For a comprehensive survey and checklist of artists and writers featured in Der Sturm, see Georg Brühl, Herwarth Walden und “Der Sturm” (Cologne: DuMont, 1983).

11

Richard Huelsenbeck, Memoirs of a Dada Drummer, ed. Hans J. Kleinschmidt, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (New York: Viking, 1974), 66. 12

Briefe, vol. 2, 22 June 1919, 954.

13

A photocopy of the letter from Aragon and Klee’s handwritten reply are in the documentary file of the Zentrum Paul Klee. The letter from Aragon is reproduced and transcribed in Jürgen Glaesemer, Paul Klee — Handzeichnungen: 1921–1936 (Bern: Kunstmuseum, 1984), 2:94–96. On Klee’s presence in La Révolution surréaliste, see Ann Temkin, “Klee and the Avant-Garde, 1912–1940,” in Paul Klee, ed. Carolyn Lanchner (New York: Museum of Modern Art and New York Graphic Society, 1987), 21–23. Subsequent references to this catalogue are abbreviated MoMA, Klee. 14 For the note that mentions Klee and other visual artists, see André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1969), 27. On the surrealist poets’ responses to Klee’s work, see Temkin, “Klee and the Avant-Garde,” 28.

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15

15 Quoted in Marcel Jean’s preface to Jean Arp’s Jours effeuillés: Poèmes, essais, souvenirs, 1920–1965 (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), 25; hereafter cited as Jours effeuillés. 16 This opinion was expressed in “Where Are You Going, Miró?,” interview with Georges Duthuit (“Où allez-vous Miró?,” Cahiers d’art, 1936), in Joan Miró: Selected Writings and Interviews, ed. Margit Rowell, trans. Paul Auster and Patricia Mathews (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986), 151; hereafter cited as Rowell, ed., Miró: Selected Writings. 17

Jean Arp, “Dada Was Not a Farce” (1949), in The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology, ed. Robert Motherwell, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, Belknap Press, 1989), 294. 18

See Harriett Watts, “Hans Arp and the Principle of Constellation,” in Arp, 1886–1966, Minneapolis Institute of Arts and Württembergischer Kunstverein (New York: Cambridge UP, 1987), 112–21. 19

The term “productive ruin” is cited by Jürg Spiller, the editor of selections of Klee’s pedagogical and theoretical notes, in his introduction to The Nature of Nature, vol. 2 of Paul Klee Notebooks, trans. Heinz Norden (New York: George Wittenborn, 1973), 32; hereafter cited as Spiller, ed., The Nature of Nature. It also appears in Paul Klee: Unendliche Naturgeschichte: Prinzipielle Ordnung der bildnerischen Mittel, verbunden mit Naturstudium, und konstruktive Kompositionswege, ed. Jürg Spiller (Basel: Schwabe, 1970), 32; hereafter cited as Spiller, ed., Paul Klee: Unendliche Naturgeschichte. The most comprehensive study of Klee’s technique of composing by cutting is contained in Wolfgang Kersten and Osamu Okuda, Paul Klee / Im Zeichen der Teilung: Die Geschichte zerschnittener Kunst Paul Klees, 1883–1940; mit vollständiger Dokumentation (Stuttgart: Gerd Hatje, 1995); hereafter cited as Im Zeichen der Teilung. This catalogue accompanied an exhibition that opened at the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf in January 1995 and traveled to Stuttgart’s Staatsgalerie. 20

Jean Arp, “Kandinsky, le Poète” (1951), in Jours effeuillés, 369.

21

For the English and German texts of Kandinsky’s poems, see Wassily Kandinsky, Sounds, trans. Elizabeth R. Napier (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1981). 22

For a reproduction of View from a Window of My Parents’ Home in Bern, see Paul-Klee-Stiftung, Paul Klee: Catalogue raisonné, 1883–1912 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1998), 1:292; hereafter cited as Catalogue raisonné, followed by individual volume numbers. 23 Kurt Schwitters, Manifeste und kritische Prosa, vol. 5 of Das literarische Werk, ed. Friedhelm Lach (Cologne: M. DuMont Schauberg, 1981), 66; hereafter cited as Manifeste und kritische Prosa. The article was originally published as “Tran Nummer 13, Das Privatscheuertuch,” Der Sturm (October 1920): 114–16. 24

Schwitters, Manifeste und kritische Prosa, 103; originally published as “Tragödie Tran No. 22, gegen Herrn Dr. phil. et med. Weygandt,” Der Sturm (May 1922): 72–80. 25

Schwitters, Manifeste und kritische Prosa, 110; originally published as “Tran 25, Sämischgares Rindleder,” Der Sturm (June 1922): 84–92.

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26

Miró’s remark is cited in Brassaï, The Artists of My Life, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Viking, 1982), 143. For other versions of Miró’s remarks about Klee, see Carolyn Lanchner, “Klee in America,” MoMA, Klee, 109 n. 33.

27

Rowell, ed. Miró: Selected Writings, 151.

28

Briefe, vol. 1, 254. This letter is discussed in greater detail at the beginning of chapter 2. 29

Cited in Petra Petitpierre, Aus der Malklasse von Paul Klee (Bern: Benteli, 1957), 32. In this book Petitpierre, who studied with Klee, published her transcriptions of lectures Klee delivered at the Dessau Bauhaus and later at the Düsseldorf Academy. 30

On poetry and painting as having the common goal of imitation, only achieved by different means, see part 1 of Aristotle’s Poetics in The Poetics of Aristotle, trans. Preston H. Epps (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1942), 2. For the Horace quotation, see The Art of Poetry, a verse translation with introduction by Burton Raffel, with the original Latin text, a prose translation, and biographical note by James Hynd (Albany: State U of New York P, 1974), line 361, 39. 31

See Rensselaer W. Lee, Ut Pictura Poesis: The Humanistic Theory of Painting (New York: Norton, 1967), 3; hereafter cited as Ut Pictura Poesis. For extensive bibliographies of the ut pictura poesis tradition, see: Arno Dolders, “Ut Pictura Poesis: A Selective, Annotated Bibliography of Books and Articles, Published between 1900 and 1980, on the Interrelation of Literature and Painting from 1400 to 1800,” Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature 32 (1983): 105–24; and Ulrich Weisstein, “Literatur und bildende Kunst — Eine Bibliographie,” in Literatur und bildende Kunst: Ein Handbuch zur Theorie und Praxis eines komparatistischen Grenzgebietes, ed. Ulrich Weissten (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1992), 320–43. 32 Denis Diderot, The Salon of 1767, vol. 2 of Diderot on Art, ed. and trans. John Goodman (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1995), 65; see also 230–31. 33 See Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, trans. Edward Allen McCormick (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1984), 78–84; hereafter cited as Laocoön. This work was originally published as Laokoon [sic]: oder, Über die Grenzen der Mahlerey und Poesie (Berlin: C. F. Voss, 1766). 34 Charles Baudelaire, “Salon de 1846,” in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Claude Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), 2:474. 35 See Baudelaire, “L’Oeuvre et la vie d’Eugène Delacroix” (1863), in Oeuvres complètes, 2:745. 36

Eugène Delacroix, The Journal of Eugène Delacroix, trans. Walter Pach (New York: Grove, 1961), 19 September 1847, 173.

37

Robert Delaunay, “La Lumière,” in Du Cubisme à l’art abstrait, ed. Pierre Francastel (Paris: S.E.V.P.E.N., 1957–58), 147. Delaunay’s essay was first published in Klee’s German translation; see n. 38.

38

Klee, “Über das Licht,” Der Sturm (January 1913): 255–56. Klee’s translation is also reprinted in Christian Geelhaar, ed., Paul Klee — Schriften: Rezensionen und Aufsätze (Cologne: DuMont, 1976), 116–17; hereafter cited as Schriften.

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39 Wassily Kandinsky, “On the Problem of Form,” in Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics, ed. Herschel B. Chipp (Berkeley: U of California P, 1968), 161; hereafter cited as Theories of Modern Art. The essay was originally published in 1912 as “Über die Formfrage,” in Der Blaue Reiter, ed. Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc (Munich: R. Piper, 1965), 147. 40

Kandinsky, “On the Problem of Form,” 161 (Der Blaue Reiter, 148).

41

Kandinsky, “On the Problem of Form,” 165 (Der Blaue Reiter, 166).

42

Guillaume Apollinaire, “Die moderne Malerei,” Der Sturm (February 1913): 272. This was not Apollinaire’s only publication in Der Sturm; a look through the index confirms that he contributed other articles and poems in 1913–14. In Apollinaire’s collected works “Die moderne Malerei” is translated as “La Peinture moderne.” The sentence cited in the text reads: “Cette tendance mène à une peinture poétique qui est indépendante de toute perception visuelle.” See Oeuvres complètes de Guillaume Apollinaire, ed. Michel Décaudin (Paris: A. Balland and J. Lecat, 1965–66), 4:282.

43 As already noted, the title of Klee’s first draft of this essay is “Graphic Art,” but it has become known as “Creative Credo,” which is a variant of the title of the volume in which the essay was originally published: Schöpferische Konfession, ed. Kasimir Edschmid (Berlin: E. Reiss, 1920). Photographs of the original manuscript version are reproduced in Geelhaar, Schriften, pl. 51–58. This version is translated as “Thoughts on Graphic Art and Art in General” in Paul Klee: Documents and Pictures from 1896–1930, trans. Ralph Manheim (Bern: Klee-Gesellschaft, 1951); hereafter cited as “Thoughts on Graphic Art.” Throughout this study I cite the translation of the final version by Norbert Guterman, reprinted in Theories of Modern Art, 182–86. The German text is taken from Geelhaar’s edition of Klee’s writings: “Beitrag für den Sammelband ‘Schöpferische Konfession,’ ” in Schriften, 118–22. See “Creative Credo,” sec. 4, 183 (Schriften, 118). 44

“Creative Credo,” sec. 4, 184–85 (Schriften, 119–20).

45

“Creative Credo,” sec. 5, 185 (Schriften, 120). Cf. Lessing, Laocoön, 66. For the German edition, see Laokoon oder über die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie, vol. 2 of Gesammelte Werke, ed. Wolfgang Stammler (Munich: C. Hanser, 1959), 862; hereafter cited as Laokoon. Invoking Lessing has become a favorite critical device among twentieth-century critics and historians. For example, see Clement Greenberg’s essay on midcentury modernists entitled “Towards a Newer Laocoon,” in Clement Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 1, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986); and Richard Brilliant, My Laocoön: Alternative Claims in the Interpretation of Artworks (Berkeley: U of California P, 2000). 46

Lessing, Laocoön, 78 (Laokoon, 875).

47

“Creative Credo,” sec. 5, 186 (Schriften, 121).

48

See Tagebücher #429, July 1902, 155 (Diaries, 125); for variants of entry #429, see pages 488 and 521 of the German ed. Neither author picked up on the poeticpainterly opposition as a theme, although both combined a brief biography with chapters devoted to themes. Zahn used “Mystik und Abstraktion” and “Das kosmische Bilderbuch” as thematic chapter titles in his Paul Klee: Leben — Werk — Geist (Potsdam: G. Kiepenheuer, 1920). Hausenstein chose the thematic titles

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“Musik und Malerei” and “Physik und Metaphysik” in his Kairuan, oder, Eine Geschichte vom Maler Klee und von der Kunst dieses Zeitalters (Munich: Kurt Wolff, 1921). On how these two publications shaped Klee’s reputation, see Christine Hopfengart, Klee, vom Sonderfall zum Publikumsliebling: Stationen seiner öffentlichen Resonanz in Deutschland, 1905–1960 (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 1989), 23–46. 49

This painting is discussed in detail in chapter 2.

50

Lee illustrates the point about Renaissance theorists with numerous examples in Ut Pictura Poesis, 3–7. 51 See, e.g., Manfred Faust, “Entwicklungsstadien der Wortwahl in den Bildtiteln von Klee,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 48 (1974): 25–46, and Matthias Kühn, “‘Gewagte Symbiosen,’ Bild und Bildtitel im Spätwerk Klees,” in Paul Klee: Das Schaffen im Todesjahr, ed. Josef Helfensten and Stefan Frey (Bern: Kunstmuseum/Stuttgart: Gerd Hatje, 1990), 93–99; hereafter cited as Das Schaffen im Todesjahr. See also Vogel, Zwischen Wort und Bild, 149–51. 52 The nine-volume Klee catalogue raisonné was published simultaneously in German (Bern: Benteli) and English (London: Thames and Hudson). Volume 1 appeared in 1998, volume 9 in 2004. Volumes list works chronologically and contain titles, dates, catalogue numbers, provenance, current locations, exhibition histories, and bibliographical references for all of Klee’s works. In those cases where the English translation differs from the one used consistently in previous Klee scholarship, I opt for the more familiar translation. 53 See Roman Jakobson, “On the Verbal Art of William Blake and Other PoetPainters,” Linguistic Inquiry 1 (January 1970): 3–23; Hölderlin, Klee, Brecht: Zur Wortkunst dreier Gedichte, ed. Elmar Holenstein (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1976). More recently Jakobson’s essay has itself become the subject of critical scrutiny; see Sarah Wyman, “The Poem in the Painting: Roman Jakobson and the Pictorial Language of Paul Klee,” Word & Image 20 (2004): 138–54. 54 A copy of Vogel’s typescript is on file in the library of the Zentrum Paul Klee; it is dated 1985 and is entitled “Eine semiotisch-strukturalistische Interpretation von 20 Gedichten Paul Kees und eine teilweise Interpretation seines gesamten poetischen Werkes”; hereafter cited as “Eine semiotisch-strukturalistische Interpretation.” I wish to thank to Marianne Vogel for permitting me to cite from this unpublished work. For the sections of Vogel’s published dissertation that pertain to Klee’s poetry, see Zwischen Wort und Bild, 15–18, 82–87, 101. In the pages devoted to an assessment of Klee’s poetic practice Vogel quotes from unpublished correspondence with his friend Hans Bloesch. 55

See Paul Bauschatz, “Paul Klee’s Anna Wenne and the Work of Art,” Art History 19 (March 1996): 74–101; idem, “Paul Klee’s Speaking Pictures,” Word & Image 7 (1991): 149–64. In the 1996 article Bauschatz links the name “Anna Wenne” in two paintings by Klee to the “Anna Blume” of Schwitters’s poetry. 56

Deborah Parker, Bronzino: Renaissance Painter as Poet (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000); Renée Riese Hubert, “Paul Klee: Modernism in Art and Literature,” in Modernism: Challenges and Perspectives, ed. Monique Chefdor, Ricardo Quinones, and Albert Wachtel (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1986), 212–37.

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57 See Harriett Watts, Three Painter-Poets: Arp, Schwitters, Klee — Selected Poems, trans. Harriett Watts (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1974). Marjorie Perloff’s relevant publications include Frank O’Hara: Poet Among Painters (New York: Braziller, 1977) and The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986). See also Clara Elizabeth Orban, The Culture of Fragments: Words and Images in Futurism and Surrealism (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997), hereafter cited as The Culture of Fragments. 58

Keith Haring Journals, with an introd. by Robert Farris Thompson (New York: Viking, 1996), 10.

1: “I Am a Poet, After All” — Tagebücher #121, 52 (Diaries, 42)

A

Klee’s poetry would be a critical edition of the extant poems. Unfortunately, no such edition exists, in part because Klee left this segment of his creative output in relative disarray. Although he complained about becoming a bureaucrat when he began compiling the oeuvre catalogue of his drawings, paintings, and prints in 1911, he nevertheless kept meticulous records, assigning a title, date, and number to each work.1 He was no less methodical when it came to transcribing his Diaries, which he edited repeatedly between 1904 and 1921, possibly with eventual publication in mind.2 By contrast, the only attempt to collect his poetic production for posterity was rather desultory. Sometime during the twenties he wrote twenty-nine poems onto nine pages of the notebook of “Geduchte.”3 Except for six minor corrections, the handwritten texts read as clean copy, so they were probably transcribed from other sources. Four loose sheets tucked into the back of the notebook indicate that Klee intended to add other entries. Evidently, he either lost interest in the project or lost track of the notebook, for by the late twenties he had resumed the habit of jotting down poems in piecemeal fashion. Just as Klee did not make any systematic effort to record his poetry for posterity, neither, apparently, did he seek opportunities for publication during his lifetime. Once he shifted his creative activity from poetry to the visual arts, he continued to incorporate selected poems into drawings and paintings but otherwise seems to have kept his poetic production to himself. After his death, Lily Klee discovered the notebook of “Geduchte” among his papers. The poems recorded in this notebook were anthologized by Carola Giedion-Welcker in 1946.4 Klee himself had incorporated earlier poems and poetic fragments into his diaries, where they would be preserved as integral parts of his multifaceted activity as a writer. These selections were published in the 1957 edition of the Tagebücher. Other poems were found in letters and in pocket diaries dating from the late twenties and early thirties. Drawing from all these sources, Klee’s son, Felix, edited and published a collection of Gedichte in 1960.5 Although this publication has been reprinted periodically there is still no critical edition of Klee’s poetry. Establishing a definitive catalogue of Klee’s poems will require reconciling the list of manuscripts compiled in Vogel’s publication (Zwischen Wort und Bild: Das schriftliche Werk Paul Klees und die Rolle der Sprache in seinem Denken und in seiner Kunst) with the considerably longer list of poems in LOGICAL POINT OF DEPARTURE FOR ANALYZING

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the index of the published Gedichte.6 I have collated these two very different inventories of Klee’s scattered poetic output in the appendix to this study, entitled “What Counts as Poetry?” The response to this query is a modest but respectable body of work consisting of at least seventy-seven poems, twenty-seven sets of line endings, and no fewer than nine additional poetic texts incorporated into visual frames of reference. Since it is entirely possible that some manuscripts were either lost or destroyed, those documented in the appendix may represent only a portion of Klee’s actual production over the course of a lifetime. In any case, what has survived suffices to situate Klee in a historical context that includes predecessors as well as contemporaries. The following survey of Klee’s poetic production considers poems that he identified as such and acknowledges the different contexts that he himself indicated, namely, textual spaces and pictorial settings.

Poems in Textual Spaces The earliest surviving example of Klee’s poetry dates from 1895, when he was sixteen. It is a predictable effusion of wishful thinking committed to verse in the no less predictable form of ballad quatrains with cross-rhymes: In später Stunde sitze ich hier in dem kahlen Zimmer den ganzen Tag dacht’ ich an Dich, ich seh Dein Bild noch immer.

The hour grows late, I sit alone, here in this cold, bare room I thought of you the whole day long, your image I still see.

Ich seh’die Locken herunter wallen, ich seh’ das blasse Rot der Wangen, Du bist das schönste Mädchen von allen. Warum doch staun’ ich so mit Bangen?

I see your tresses, how softly they fall, I see the pale red of your cheek, You are the fairest maiden of them all. Why do I gaze wide-eyed, still so meek?

Beim Spiele hab’ ich Dich heut’ gesehn. Wir haben gesprochen von vielen Dingen, beinahe konnt’ ich nicht widerstehn, das Gespräch bis auf die Liebe zu bringen.

I saw you today, so carefree at play. Together we talked of so many things, I almost couldn’t resist

Wir sahen uns innig an als wir schieden,

When we parted our glances were passionate,

bringing up the subject of love.

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und drückten uns warm die Hand, doch mein stürmischer Geist war nicht zufrieden und in mir tobte ein feuriger Brand.

warm, too, the clasp of our hands, yet my stormy spirit was not satisfied and inside me raged a furious fire.7

By his own admission Klee penned sophomoric verses such as these to compensate for his “too meager satisfactions” (“zum Ausgleich mangelhafter Befriedigungen”).8 He was under no illusion about their merits. On the contrary, he was the first to suggest that they be relegated to a category of poetry he labeled “as authentic as it was bad” (“ebenso echt als schlechte Kunst”).9 Klee must have saved this particular example either out of sentimental attachment or, more likely, from a proclivity for documentation. It is tempting to suggest that he kept it over the years because its rhythmic structure proved to be a convenient point of reference in calculating the rhythmic patterns that he diagrammed for his students at the Bauhaus and incorporated into his own pictures of the twenties. Some of Klee’s early efforts at writing poetry may have been inspired by good-natured classroom competition with his school chum Hans Bloesch, who shared his literary ambitions. After completing their Gymnasium studies, the two occasionally sent each other poems, no doubt conscious of continuing a long tradition of exchanges between fellow poets. Poems are interspersed throughout their correspondence, from 1898 to 1901. Judging from three published examples of Klee’s contributions to the exchange, the two friends must have been intent on regaling each other with cheeky imitations of the German classics. One of these poems was written as a variation on the free-verse forms used by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Hölderlin, both of whom would have represented unattainable ideals for would-be poets.10 As Jürgen Glaesemer has suggested, others are distantly related to the early poetry of Heinrich Heine, another luminary in the pantheon of German poets whose names recur in Klee’s Diaries and correspondence.11 Klee inserted one such poem in the Diaries as “a short sample of the way I used . . . to rhyme in the popular vein” (“eine kleine Probe wie ich damals im Volkston reimte”):

I Nun hat dich genommen der Tod, Now Death has taken thee, der rosenrote Schein the rosy red tone ist falsch, nur hingeworfen. is thrown on falsely. Gardinen zauberfein Curtains magic in their delicacy färbten mein Lieb, was tot colored my love, who was dead, gestorben nie zu erwachen. dead never to awake.

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II Sagt an ihr Leut was soll ich tun ihr Leut? Mein Herz das brennt so sehr, nun hab ich kein Liebchen mehr, und zum Küssen und wieder zum Küssen, o dass ich ein Vöglein wär, als Vöglein wüsst ich Bescheid ans rauschende Meer flög ich weit, mein Herz darin zu kühlen.

Tell me, you people, what shall I do, people? My heart burns so, now I have no sweetheart more, to kiss and kiss again. Oh, if I were a little bird, a little bird would know, I would fly to the distant seas that roar and cool my heart therein.12

This travesty of a poetic lament is reminiscent of any number of entries in Heine’s Book of Songs (Buch der Lieder), with its double-edged theme of loss and longing liberally laced with irony. Klee achieved this effect, as Heine himself had, by playing with poetic form. Included in the Book of Songs is a group of “Fresco Sonnets to Christian S.” (“Fresko-Sonette an Christian S.”). The fifth and sixth exemplify Heine’s deft use of the octave/sestet division to counter the expected sentiments of love poetry.13 Klee took a different approach to ironic inversion, using an inverted sonnet form and disregarding traditional metrical counts as well as rhyme schemes. Content adds another twist to Klee’s spoof of Heine’s sonnets. Knowing that the poems in the Book of Songs were ideal texts for lush Romantic lieder, he penned words fit for a street-song. Klee’s move from Bern to Munich exposed him to every aspect of contemporary culture, including new poetry. During the years he lived in Germany (from 1898 to 1901 and again from 1906 to 1933), the lyrical tradition of German poetry was upheld by Stefan George and his circle of doting disciples. Klee never mentioned this elite literary coterie in any of his published writings, nor did he acquire any of George’s numerous publications for his personal library.14 There is little doubt that Klee’s poetic sensibilities were more attuned to the work of Christian Morgenstern. Whereas George’s steady poetic output over four decades perpetuated and renewed established traditions, Morgenstern’s ironic voice exemplified the idea of renewal through innovation. This ideal Klee found especially compatible. In what was probably intended as a facetious allusion to turning thirty as well as a statement of fact, the last line in his Diaries for 1909 reads: “Ended the year with Morgenstern’s Gallows Songs” (“Mit Morgenstern[s] Galgenlieder sei das Jahr beschlossen”).15 Klee sustained a lasting interest in Morgenstern’s poetry. His library contains Bruno Cassirer’s editions of Morgenstern’s Palmström and Palma Kunkel, as well the collected Gallows Songs (Galgenlieder), all well thumbed and, in some instances, liberally annotated. He even occasionally took the liberty of

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Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Fig. 1: Paul Klee, Sketches Illustrating Structural Rhythms, Static and Dynamic (PN 17a M20/59a). Graphite and colored pencils on paper, 27.4 ⫻ 21.8 cm. Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern. © 2006 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Photograph courtesy of the Zentrum Paul Klee.

crossing out Morgenstern’s choice of words and substituting others, as in the case of the fourth line of “Noon News” (“Die Mittagszeitung”) where he changed “Ganz ohne Zubereitung” (“Entirely without preparation”) to “Ohne alle Zubereitung” (“Without any preparation”).16 Klee was just as intrigued by Morgenstern’s typographic innovations as he was by the poet’s verbal dexterity. A case in point is the fish that surfaces in Klee’s teaching notes, collectively known as the “Pedagogical Estate” (“Pädagogischer Nachlass,” usually abbreviated as PN) (fig. 1). The schematically rendered fish scales are a variation on the same combination of visual notations that make up Morgenstern’s “Fish’s Night Song” (“Fisches Nachtgesang”) (fig. 2). In Lady Bell-Tone Bim (Glockentönin Bim, 1922/258) (fig. 3) Klee appropriated other aspects of Morgenstern’s experimental language. His drawing gives whimsical graphic expression to Morgenstern’s poetic equivalents of bell tones. Moreover, the title words “Bim, Bam, Bum” are written out to approximate the spatial distribution

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Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book. Fig. 2: Christian Morgenstern, “Fisches Nachtgesang,” 1905. Reproduced from Alle Galgenlieder (1950) with permission of Suhrkamp/Insel Verlag. Digital image by Dan Smith.

of the same words as they appear in typeset form in the 1922 edition of the Galgenlieder in Klee’s library (fig. 4). Many of Klee’s own poems also bear the stamp of Morgenstern’s distinctive style. On the first page of the notebook of “Geduchte” one encounters the vivid image of a donkey that is as succinctly and wittily rendered as any of the beasts in Morgenstern’s poetic menagerie: Esel seine Stimme macht mir Grausen während lange Ohren schmausen.

Donkey his voice gives me the creeps while Long Ears feasts.17

A caricature honed on Morgenstern’s verbal wit, Klee’s donkey makes an altogether suitable companion for the two who grouse in Morgenstern’s poem “The Two Donkeys” (“Die beiden Esel”).18 Another short poem in the notebook of “Geduchte” indicates that Klee appreciated the subtle inflections that add variety to Morgenstern’s wry poetic voice: Einst werd ich liegen im Nirgend bei einem Engel irgend.

Someday I’ll lie nowhere next to an angel somewhere.19

This sanguine prediction suggests that Klee was rehearsing ideas for an epitaph. The celestial consort he envisioned for himself is quite unlike the angels that figure prominently in his visual production. There they pertly serve food (An Angel Serves a Small Breakfast / Ein Genius serviert e. kl. Frühstück, 1915/29) or watchfully stand guard (Vigilant Angel / Wachsamer Engel, 1939/859). In contrast to these mutable graphic configurations, all of which assume recognizable forms and specific identities, the angel evoked in Klee’s poem is one of the dematerialized spirit

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Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Fig. 3: Paul Klee, Lady Bell-Tone Bim (1922/258). Ink on paper mounted on cardboard, 22.5 ⫻ 41.6 cm. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, U.S.A. Acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest (9.1950). © 2006 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

that hover over the point of a needle in Morgenstern’s “Scholastic Conundrum I” (“Spitzfindiges”): . . . Denn die nie Erspähten Können einzig nehmen Platz auf Geistigen Lokalitäten.

. . . Remote from human foci Surely they can only sit on Rarefied spiritual loci.20

Klee was seduced not only by Morgenstern’s poetic images but also by his facility for rhymes based on wordplay. The end rhymes that initiate the wordplay in Morgenstern’s “Nein!” (“Pfeift der Sturm?/ Keift ein Wurm?”) are transposed as internal rhymes in word pairs that Klee entitled “Motto”: Sturm und Wurm Sang und Drang Wurm und Sang Drang und Sturm

Storm and worm Song and stress Worm and song Stress and storm21

Klee’s sequence of word pairs was neatly inscribed on the title page of Georg Büchner’s Danton’s Death (Dantons Tod), a historical drama based on documents from the French Revolution. On first reading, the four lines of verse are as light as the Büchner play is weighty, suggesting that they were intended as an incisive bit of literary criticism. This may well have

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Fig. 4: Christian Morgenstern, “Bim, Bam, Bum,” Galgenlieder (1922). Digital image by Dan Smith.

been the case, but it is also likely that Klee’s play on the literary usage of Sturm und Drang encoded personal meaning and perhaps a private jest.22 The worm that inches its way into the first line of Klee’s short poem is a recurring figure of speech throughout Büchner’s play, most memorably in the revolutionary street song from act 1, scene 2: Die da liegen in der Erden Von de Würm gefresse werden.

They who’re lying underground Soon by all the worms are found.23

Not coincidentally, “Wurm” is also the name of a particularly slimy character in Friedrich von Schiller’s Intrigue and Love (Kabale und Liebe), which has been cited as an example of the stylistic excesses of Sturm und Drang.24 Borrowed from the title of a drama by Friedrich Maximilian Klinger, the oftquoted phrase was originally used to characterize a group of writers whose works heralded the spirit and language of German Romanticism. In its more general descriptive usage, Sturm und Drang is as applicable to the revolutionary rhetoric in Büchner’s play as it is to Schiller’s dramatic style. What meanings these allusions had for Klee when he wrote down his “Motto” sometime between 1913 and 1914 remains a matter of conjecture.25 The fact that the first word is “Sturm” opens up the possibility that the word pairs are a covert allusion to the beginning of Klee’s association with the periodical Der Sturm, the gallery of the same name, and the entrepreneurial Walden, who presided over both.26 It is perhaps also significant that Der Sturm championed expressionist writers who inherited aspects of the Sturm und Drang tradition and revived the literary reputation of Büchner. Framed in this context, the multiple allusions encoded in “Motto” attest to Klee’s awareness of the theoretical foundations and stylistic precedents of the kind of

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expressionist poetry with which he himself would experiment once he came to terms with Morgenstern. Klee’s playful gloss on the literary cliché Sturm und Drang strives for the same effect Morgenstern achieved in marshaling wordplay to give unexpected twists to the conventional language of German lyric poetry. On one of the loose sheets slipped into the back of the notebook of “Geduchte” is another poem that juggles internal and end rhymes. A rare example of Klee’s unedited drafts, this working copy confirms that he acquired the knack for verbal sleight of hand only through laborious practice. He wrote out three stanzas with a fountain pen, then added two additional possibilities in pencil, numbering the lines of one variation to indicate a change of sequence. The first quatrain introduces the two sets of spoonerisms that recur in all the variations: Rach [sic] und Degen ein Dach dem Regen Schurm und Stirm im Sturm ein Schirm

Shoof and rowers A roof for showers Shorm and stelter In storm a shelter27

Subsequent stanzas were constructed by rearranging lines and transposing words in much the same way that Morgenstern used reiteration and transposition in “The Snail’s Monologue” (“Gespräch einer Hausschnecke mit sich selbst”).28 By extending four lines of wordplay into a sequence of stanzas, Klee created what Vogel characterizes as a “serial text.”29 At his best Klee rose to Morgenstern’s level of linguistic virtuosity without depending on serial transpositions. In one poem in the notebook of “Geduchte” Klee cleverly manipulated language to undermine the logic of philosophical inquiry: Es war mal was und fragte das: es gelte was? von nein zu kein liegt zwischen kein ein von immer zu hin gewann es Sinn bis ging ein Schein in wahrlich ein.

It was once such and was a question of: what does it matter? from no to none with not one in between from always to that way it made sense until it appeared to be true.30

Another example of Klee’s acquired mastery of the poetic devices that Morgenstern deployed with seemingly effortless skill is “1/1000,” which he jotted down in a pocket diary in 1928: 1/1000 Ein Tausend Schwein

One Thousand swine

“I AM

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stand and pine without nine hundred nine and ninety being equal to one swine alone.31

Here wordplay extends to numbers in a variation on the unorthodox syntax, reiterative rhyme scheme, and typographic structure that Morgenstern perfected in “The Does’ Prayer” (“Das Gebet”): Die Rehlein beten zur Nacht, hab acht! Halb neun! Halb zehn! . . .

The does, as the hour grows late, med-it-ate; med-it-nine; med-i-ten . . .32

Morgenstern, it seems, was the poet Klee wanted to be. Like countless others who have made the effort, Klee learned how fiendishly difficult it is to trump a master wordsmith at wordplay. Sustained by equal measures of pluck and perseverance, he continued to try, occasionally matching Morgenstern’s dazzling gift for manipulating every aspect of language. However, he never quite managed to impose his own imprint on Morgenstern’s innovations. The dada poets were more successful in this regard, not simply because they were daring to the point of being outrageous but because they borrowed more sparingly from Morgenstern’s repertoire of poetic devices and images. Despite Klee’s limited engagement with dada as a collective, he had cordial relations with individual members of the group — especially Schwitters and Arp — and briefly flirted with the kinds of verbal assemblages they composed. By the time Schwitters began writing shaped poetry in 1921, he had thoroughly assimilated the multiple influences of the arbitrary word constructions introduced in Morgenstern’s poem “Das grosse Lalula,” the columnar verbal structures of Stramm, and the sound poems of dada grand master Hugo Ball. These influences are evident in his “Cigars [elementary]” (“Cigarren [elementar],” 1921), which consists of various permutations of the title word, the first being: Ci garr ren, the last printed with instructions that it be sung: “Cigarren . . . (Der letzte Vers wird gesungen).”33 Arp, who likewise experimented across a range of contemporary innovations, felt a particular affinity for the sound effects of dada poetry. His “Second Hand,” (“Sekundenzeiger,” c. 1924) could well

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replace one of the two pairs of hands on Morgenstern’s “Korf’s Clock” (“Die Korfsche Uhr”),34 but the onomatopoeic meter is unmistakably dada: dass ich als ich ein und zwei ist dass ich als ich drei und vier ist . . .

That I when I it’s one and two that I when I it’s three and four . . .35

Compared with the inventive variety of these poems by Schwitters and Arp, Klee’s “Abel and His Brothers” (“Herr Abel und Verwandte”) is tame and tentative, even if it does evade predictability.36 Beginning “A -bel / Be -bel / Ce -bel,” Klee did not proceed, as might be expected, through the entire alphabet, but rather chose to eliminate “Ef -bel,” “Jot -bel,” and “Ypsilon -bel” from Abel’s alphabetic progeny. Considered in historical context, “Abel and His Brothers” would have seemed quaintly behind the times in 1933, when it was written into a pocket diary. Like much of Klee’s experimental poetry, this alphabet poem, begotten of biblical allusion, is derivative in its style and structure. There is, however, one category of Klee’s poetic production that does not seem dated or derivative even though it fits neatly into the framework of modernist experimentation. This category comprises the line endings recorded in the Diaries between the summer of 1901 and December of the same year. Klee’s decision to channel his poetic instincts into forms other than written poems can be validated by some general observations concerning these fragments. Of the nine diary entries that list line endings, most refer to short verses Klee identified as either poems or epigrams, although on three occasions he recorded the rhyme schemes with no editorial comment. Some of the line endings are simple end rhymes, while others fall into more complex patterns. Klee himself was all too aware that the making of a poem required far more than a facility for rhyme. He acknowledged as much when he dismissed the poem represented by the following words and phrases as “too contrived, too well rhymed and too little dreamed” (“zu sehr erdacht, zu sehr gereimt, und zu wenig geträumt”): An Gottes Stell / grell / eigene Schöne / Töne In God’s abode / too loud / beauty of one’s own / tones.37 Since the lines are reduced to strings of words, the reader of the Diaries must accept Klee’s assessment of what he perceived as weaknesses of poetic form in the original version. In no other case did he pass judgment on a poem in its entirety, but it does seem probable that other sets of line endings were likewise salvaged from discarded poems. If so, Klee apparently deconstructed his epigrammatic verses by using an examination technique perfected during years of drilling in classical studies. As a Gymnasium student he would have demonstrated a command of Greek or Latin verses

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committed to memory by writing out the first and last words of each line.38 In adapting this technique to editing poems that failed to measure up to his exacting standards, Klee may well have discovered the technique of composing by cutting. Yet another possibility is that at least some of the line endings were composed as such, making them bouts-rimés, which are sets of rhymed words from which poems could be written — in theory if not in practice. Boutsrimés were exchanged among amateur literati in the eighteenth century and were subsequently popularized as parlor games in the nineteenth.39 This tradition of popular verse would have given Klee license to indulge his penchant for wordplay even as he came to realize that he had limited talent for writing poetry. Why he included so many of the rhymed line endings in his carefully edited Diaries is a question that warrants further investigation. Based on an assessment of the fragments Klee preserved, he could not have been motivated by the compulsion to leave evidence of his universal appeal as a poet or his originality. Some of Klee’s epigrammatic fragments can be characterized as too self-indulgent, others as too familiar. No fewer than six are ironic reflections on Klee’s chronic state of indecision about the focus of his creative activity. One example suffices to demonstrate the wisdom of his choice of the palette over the pen: Palette / errette / behagte mir nie / Greisenpoesie Palette / save (it) / never suited me / hoary poesy.40 Another set of line endings cited in the Diaries resorts to the banality of rhymes pairing “Brust” (“Breast”) with “Lust” (“Desire”) and “Bäumen” (“Trees”) with “Träumen” (“Dreams”).41 Isolated as end rhymes, these word pairs seem trite because they have been used so often. They would have been familiar to Klee not only from poetry by amateurs but also from the work of Joseph von Eichendorff, whose poetry epitomizes the German Romantic tradition. Klee unquestionably knew Eichendorff’s work, which was standard fare in Gymnasium curricula and was well represented in his personal library. Eichendorff’s “Evening” (“Der Abend”) contains variants of the same rhymed pairs listed in the Diaries, with “Lust” and “Brust” framing “Träumen” and “Bäumen.”42 If Klee consciously extracted these rhymes from Eichendorff’s poem, it is not impossible that some of his verse fragments were conceived as parodic allusions to the Romantics’ cult of the literary fragment. If so, he probably would not have felt compelled to record the fragments with caveats such as: “I believed I should at least succeed in making myself ridiculous” (“Ich glaubte es müsste mir wenigstens gelingen, mich selber lächerlich zu machen”).43 Since there is no indication that Klee ever intended his laconic line endings to be read as a new form of poetry, the most likely explanation for why he retained them is that he was giving priority to process over product. He understandably did not wish to preserve poems that he felt might be held up to ridicule,

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but he did want to leave tangible traces of his sustained efforts to write poetry. An emphasis on process would be consistent with the principle that shaped much of his work and has since been recognized as a defining characteristic of any modernist aesthetic. Placed in this context, Klee’s verse fragments stand as evidence of the techniques of composing by editing and cutting, which he would apply to both his poetic and pictorial practice. It is not known whether Klee applied a variation on the compositional technique of editing to the epigrams in the original version of his Diaries or whether the truncated versions emerged from subsequent transcriptions of the text. However, it seems likely that many of the twenty-nine poems recorded in the notebook of “Geduchte” were composed in this way. The final poem in the notebook is unusual in that it is parenthetically titled yet typical in terms of its landscape imagery and compact form: (helft bauen) Vogel der singest Reh das springest Blume am Fels im See der Wels im Boden der Wurm zu Gott helft bauen den Turm echo: “zu Gott”

(help build) Bird that sings deer that springs flower on the rock in the sea the fish in the ground the worm to God help build the tower echo: “to God.”44

Although rhythm, rhyme, and nuances of phrasing give formal coherence to this poem, it does not represent a complete word picture but rather a sequence of image fragments. Almost a third of the other poems in the notebook of “Geduchte” are even more condensed, consisting of images compressed into rhymed couplets that have the pithiness of aphorisms. They read like self-contained poetic ideas rather than excerpts from longer poems or verbal sketches for visual ideas; many are distillations of images that appear elsewhere in Klee’s oeuvre. Just how inventively Klee recast poetic figures in aphoristic form can be illustrated by examining three motifs that recur in both his poetry and paintings. All three are introduced in the first section of a poem recorded as diary entry #1081 A, dated August 1917: Weil ich kam erschlossen sich Blüten, Die Fülle ist ringsum weil ich bin Zum Herzen zaubert meinem Ohr Nachtigall sang Vater bin ich allem Allen auf Sternen und in letzten Fernen . . .

Because I came, blossoms opened, Fullness is about, because I am. My ear conjured for my heart The nightingale’s song. I am father to all, All on the stars, And in the farthest places . . .45

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With a change in its material structure, the blossoming plant in the first line continues to flourish in another poetic setting, where brevity of form is paired with precision of imagery: Was artet einsam und allein? es ist die Planze Elfenbein.

What thrives alone, just let it be? A plant made out of ivory.46

Here, as in many of his paintings, Klee transformed a natural object into a poetic figure by endowing it with a strange specificity unrelated to natural appearances. He applied a variation on this device in depicting the nightingale conjured in the 1917 poem. In Persian Nightingales (Persische Nachtigallen, 1917/92) the legendary songbirds would seem to be deprived of their distinctive voices, but Klee provided an alternative. To circumvent the difficulty of visualizing sound, he added two letters with sound values that substitute for the sounds of a song, thus restoring the voice of the nightingale described in another short poem: Als verstummte Nachtigall war einst ein beträchtlich Nichts der Fall.

As a silenced nightingale was once a considerable nothing, of no avail.47

The star, a ubiquitous image in Klee’s oeuvre, often signifies an analogy between the poet/painter and a divine creator. This is the meaning implicit in the 1917 poem and in Klee’s postwar nocturnal landscapes. In the poem quoted below, the star is isolated as a symbol of the spiritually detached self and cosmic perspective is synonymous with aesthetic distance: Alle alle hatt ich gern und jetzt bin ich kühler Stern.

All, I loved all of it now removed, a distant star I admit.48

The number of short poems like this in the notebook of “Geduchte” begs the inevitable comparison with Else Lasker-Schüler, for whom the two-line strophe was a poetic staple. Although she never used this verse form alone, her two-line stanzas are often complete semantic units that can be excerpted from their poetic contexts. One of many examples is the fourth of the six strophes that constitute her “But Your Brows Are a Storm” (“Aber deine Brauen sind Unwetter”), in which she characteristically gave original form to the same metaphor Klee would use: Ich bin ein Stern In der blauen Wolke deines Angesichts.

I am a star In the blue cloud of your face.49

Since Klee never mentioned Lasker-Schüler in any of his published writings, there is no way of knowing whether or not her poetry influenced his preference for condensed forms and images. Circumstantial evidence nevertheless points to the likelihood that he was familiar with her poetry and may have met her. She was married to Walden, and even after the two separated

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and then divorced, her works appeared regularly in Der Sturm until 1913, the year Klee began his professional association with Walden and published his translation of Delaunay’s essay in Der Sturm. Unfettered by the constraints of domestic responsibility, Lasker-Schüler moved freely in those quarters of Munich and Berlin where writers and artists mingled. Like Klee, she was in contact with the painter Franz Marc, and when he died on the battlefront, she memorialized him in her writing, as Klee did.50 Though less accomplished as a visual artist than as a poet, she, too, was a dual practitioner and knew other poet/painters, including Grosz, whom she sketched in one of her many portrait poems.51 Grosz seems not to have responded in kind, evidently preferring the verbal energy of German expressionism to the imagistic concentration of Lasker-Schüler as a model for his own poetry. Klee’s association with Walden’s journal and gallery leaves no doubt that he, too, was exposed to German expressionism, although the impact of this exposure is more difficult to gauge than in the case of Grosz. In Grosz’s poetry, as in his drawings and paintings, he responded with gusto to the sordid social realities and frenetic pace of life in urban Berlin. His poem “From the Songs” (“Aus den Gesängen”), a veritable catalogue of expressionist vocabulary and stylistic devices, presents a verbal lineup of unsavory urban types: Ihr Hundesöhne, Materialisten, Brotfresser, Fleischfresser — Vegetarier!! Oberlehrer, Metzgergesellen, Mädchenhändler!

You sons of a bitch, conspicuous consumers, Bread stuffer, meat eater — vegan!! Schoolmaster, apprentice hacker, girl trafficker!52

The only example of Klee’s poetry that is comparable is a string of seven slang epithets separated by exclamation points, a favorite form of punctuation among expressionist writers. With characteristic irony Klee entitled his jeers “Cheers” (“Zurufe”): Krummfahrer! Bösharrer! Schmutzstarrer! Sloucher! Bad ass! Smut lover! Pelzläuser! Wissbesser! Louse! Know it all! Schmerling! Schmoozer! Duckmäuserlehrling!! Brown-nosing little punk!!53 Because these compound invectives are not in the context of a longer poem, they lack the aggressiveness of Grosz’s taunts. The perfunctory nature of Klee’s poetic exercise in name-calling suggests that the verbal provocations of expressionist poetry held limited appeal for him. Judging from two poems recorded in the notebook of “Geduchte,” other aspects of German expressionist poetry were more to his taste. The most obvious points of comparison pertain to composition and grammar. The following poem is reproduced as Klee recorded it in manuscript form:

“I AM

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as I walked evening came cloud cover veiled the light then there was no shadow over all.54

This is an abbreviated version of the second section of the longer poem recorded in the Diaries as entry #1081 A: Und And weil ich ging ward es Abend Because I went, evening came und Wolkenkleider And cloud garments hüllten ums Licht Robed the light. weil ich ging Because I went, Schattete das Nicht Nothing threw its shadow über allem . . . Over everything . . .55 Klee’s model for composing by editing seems to have been the poetry of Stramm. The irregular verse lengths and the absence of internal punctuation marks in both versions of Klee’s poem are common to “Dream” (“Traum”) and other poems by Stramm.56 The juxtaposition of syntactic fragments in the short version gives it the truncated structure and condensed imagery that are likewise signatures of Stramm’s experimental poetry, most of which was composed the year before he was killed on the front in 1915. Klee must have known Stramm’s poetry, which, beginning in 1914, regularly appeared in Der Sturm and was collected in a posthumous anthology published by Walden in 1918. Stramm’s experimental poetic forms resulted from a process of distillation inspired by the realization that essence of meaning could be contained in and extracted from brevity of form. There is no evidence that Klee adopted Stramm’s most radical innovation, namely, the columnar word chain, although the line endings are arranged this way in the collected Gedichte. Klee himself never invited such a direct comparison with Stramm, but many of the rhymed couplets and image fragments in the notebook of “Geduchte” indicate that he appropriated the compositional technique of poetic distillation used by Stramm and his contemporaries.57 Another poem in the notebook of “Geduchte” experiments with the formal idiosyncrasies and elliptical language of expressionist poetry: Der Wolf spricht, am Menschen kauend, und im Hinblick auf die Hunde:

The wolf, chewing on humans and looking at dogs, speaks:

Sag mir wo ist dann sag mir wo? ist dann ihr Gott?

Then tell me where is tell me where? is their god then?

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wo ist ihr Gott? nach dem . . .

where is their god? after this . . .

du siehst ihn hier ganz dicht bei dir liegen im Staub vor dir den Gott der Hunde

you see him here so very near lying in the dust the god of the dogs

Sehn und wissen ist eins dass wer von mir zerrissen ein Gott nicht ist.

To see and to know is one that who is torn apart by me is no god.

Wo ist dann ihr Gott?

Where then is their god? 1926

192658

Here Klee asked a question that could be answered by the statement that dramatically ends chapter 2, part 1, of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Also Sprach Zarathustra): “This old saint in his forest has not yet heard of it, that God is dead!” (“Dieser alte Heilige hat in seinem Walde noch nichts davon gehört, dass Gott tot ist!”).59 Klee’s persistent questions exude spiritual skepticism, which is reinforced by an image that is as horrific as any in Benn’s collection The Morgue and Other Poems (Morgue, und andere Gedichte), a slim volume of expressionist poetry published in 1912 and reissued in 1923. Benn’s visceral description of baby rats feeding on the organs of a dead girl in “Beautiful Youth” (“Schöne Jugend”) is unmitigated by any reassuring conventions of poetic structure.60 On the contrary, the shock value of the image is underscored by an unconventional stanzaic form without a traditional metric structure or rhyme scheme. Klee’s poem is no less shocking in its abrupt transition from the description of a gruesome tableau to an ostensibly logical sequence of rhetorical questions and cynical observations. Like Benn, Klee eschewed conventional stanzas, but he scrupulously observed metric stresses. Stressed syllables are actually marked in the manuscript version of the poem, suggesting that Klee was trying to replicate the rhythmic chewing of an animal gnawing on human flesh. Moreover, the scanned meter and rhythmic repetition of phrases give the wolf’s relentless monologue the cadence and ironic moral authority of a fable. Since Klee seldom dated his poems, it seems likely that the prominence of the date “1926” was intended to provide a specific frame of reference. Interpreted in the context of the turbulent history of Weimar Germany, Klee’s contemporary fable reads like an arch commentary on the political conditions and spiritual climate of the mid-twenties. The staggered lines of the manuscript layout of “Der Wolf spricht” illustrate yet another aspect of German expressionist poetry that Klee adapted to his own purposes. A rethinking of the visual elements of poetic form was common even among those expressionist poets who did not radically depart

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from the stanzaic and linear structures of traditional lyric poetry. The most innovative of the expressionists in this regard was Stramm. In his novel poetic constructions — with their long, unbroken left margins, repetitive sound patterns, and unconventional syntax — layout emanates from and reinforces carefully calculated semantic structures. Stramm’s keen sensitivity to the spatial structure of poetry was informed by his practice as a visual artist. Klee, a fellow dual practitioner, would have appreciated the integral relationship among the linguistic, aural, and visual properties of Stramm’s concentrated verse forms. He would have recognized that one of the theoretical premises underlying Stramm’s typographic structures paralleled his own assertion that “space is a temporal concept.”61 He might also have perceived in Stramm’s new poetic forms a denial of Lessing’s theoretical distinctions between the verbal and visual arts.62 At the very least he would have intuited that Stramm was also attempting to bring verbal and visual elements together in a new structural harmony.63 It is entirely likely that such commonalities predisposed Klee to experiment with the layouts of contemporary poetry as he channeled his poetic instincts into his other writings and visual production. During the postwar years, when Klee was preparing what is the only extant clean copy of the Diaries, he applied techniques of poetic composition to the formatting of selected entries. One example is entry #295,

Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Fig 5: Paul Klee, Entries 295–97 from the Diaries (Tagebücher, II, Rome, November 1901). Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern. © 2006 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Photograph courtesy of the Zentrum Paul Klee.

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Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Fig. 6: Paul Klee, Entries 947–52 from the Diaries (Tagebücher, III, Munich, 1914–1915). Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern. © 2006 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG BildKunst, Bonn. Photograph courtesy of the Zentrum Paul Klee.

where lines of prose are concentrated into what look like stanzas to make room for the insertion of the four-leaf clover that serves as a visual signature (fig. 5). Another variation on a verbal text that is spatially distributed to resemble the typographic structure of a poem is found on the manuscript page where entries #950–52 are written out (fig. 6). These entries, which include self-consciously quotable passages on memory and abstraction, as well as the phrase “I crystal” (“ich Kristall”), are presented with as much attention to visual design as the manifestos issued by the futurist poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti or the covers of literary magazines such as Dada. That Klee used poetic form as his model for the layout of entries #950–52 is affirmed by referring to entry #1081 A (fig. 7) as a basis for comparison. This later entry represents the only instance in the Diaries where Klee devoted an entire page to a single poem. The rhythmical distribution of indented lines, centralized placement of selected words, and use of asterisks as indicators of textual breaks are remarkably similar on both pages. Klee underscored the visual impact of prose texts in poetic layouts by using the collage technique of cutting and inserting in the case of the four-leaf clover, or by cutting and pasting in the second illustrated example, where the words “ich Kristall” were cut out — presumably from

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Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Fig. 7: Paul Klee, Entry 1081 A from the Diaries (Tagebücher, IV, Gersthofen, August 1917). Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern. © 2006 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Photograph courtesy of the Zentrum Paul Klee.

an earlier version of the Diaries, and affixed to the clean copy. Klee was, in effect, applying to the compositional layout of his Diaries a variation on the technique of composing by editing that he had applied when he reduced his epigrams to line endings; he would use this method again in writing the poems recorded in the notebook of “Geduchte” and his pocket diaries. The more literal variation on composing by editing — composing with scissors — is a technique he was applying in his visual practice as early as 1910.64 His adaptation of this technique to the final editing of the Diaries suggests that by the postwar period he was thinking of his writing as an extension of his activity as a visual artist.

Poems in Pictorial Settings As documented by Wolfgang Kersten and Osamu Okuda, there are numerous examples of drawings from 1912 that were cut apart. In two cases fragments were recombined to create new ensembles.65 One of these new groupings also combines verbal and visual imagery in a drawing that depicts a figure juxtaposed with the following poem:

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Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Fig. 8: Paul Klee, Fall (1912/130). Pen on paper, 8.6 ⫻ 14 cm., mounted on cardboard with Woe Is Me in the Gale Wind of Forever Fleeing Time (1912/131), pen on paper, 4.1 ⫻ 18 cm. Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern. © 2006 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Photograph courtesy of the Zentrum Paul Klee.

Weh mir unter dem Sturmwind ewig fliehender Zeit

Woe is me in the gale wind of forever fleeing time.

Weh mir in der Verlassenheit ringsum in der Mitte allein Weh mir tief unten auf dem vereisten Grunde Wahn.

Woe is me abandoned all around isolated and alone. Woe is me deep down in the frozen depths of madness.66

Klee’s poem is not exceptional in its formal structure, which pairs the standard convention of short parallel constructions with free verse. Nor is it original in its content, which combines the related themes of flight and isolation. These themes were common to German Romanticism and expressionism, although they were not usually expressed there with such economy. The brevity of Klee’s poetic indulgence in self-pity is, however,

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a distinction it shares with Lasker-Schüler’s “Flight from the World” (“Weltflucht”).67 What makes Klee’s poem unique is the way it is combined with drawing. The text is handwritten, which reinforces the authenticity of the firstperson voice, and also implies a relationship between the author of the poem and the drawing of the figure, with its hands raised in a gesture of consternation, desperation, or despair (1912/131) (fig. 8). Another drawing, entitled Fall (Sturz, 1912/130), is mounted above, on the same underlying support, and is aligned so that the right border is flush with the right margin of the text below.68 Despite the fact that the falling figure is stylistically similar to the one below, there does not appear to be an illustrative relationship between this second drawing and the poetic text within the same visual frame of reference. In Sounds Kandinsky likewise avoided an illustrative relationship between his poems and the accompanying woodcuts, although he did so by using visual abstractions instead of recognizable figurative imagery.69 Klee’s experiment in combining a poetic text with visual representation falls chronologically between Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem A Throw of the Dice (Un Coup de dés, 1897) and Apollinaire’s Calligrammes (1913–16). Although it is neither as typographically radical as Mallarmé’s poem nor as visually integrated as Apollinaire’s shaped texts, it does address issues that were central to a modernist agenda. Apollinaire’s pattern poems, which he called “lyrical ideograms” (“idéogrammes lyriques”) until he coined the term “calligramme,” were recognized in avant-garde circles as graphic images that transcended traditional distinctions between spatial and temporal forms of expression.70 Visual and verbal evidence indicates that Klee was familiar with Apollinaire’s calligrammes. He stenciled an uppercase ‘E’ into the center of a small painting entitled E (1918/199) as a linguistic substitute for the bird’s-eye view of the Eiffel Tower in Apollinaire’s “Ocean-Letter” (“Lettre-Océan”).71 An untitled and undated prose poem leaves little doubt that Klee also knew Apollinaire’s “It’s Raining” (“Il Pleut”): In einem Zimmer gefangen. Grosse Gefahr. Kein Ausgang. Da: ein offenes Fenster, hinauf, abstossen: ich fliege frei, aber es regnet fein, es regnet fein, es regnet, regnet, regnet . . . . . . regnet . . . . . . [Caught in a room. Great danger. No exit. There: an open window, upward, jump: I am flying free, but it’s drizzling, it’s raining gently, it’s raining, raining, raining . . . . . . raining . . . . . .]72 Klee avoided the temptation to imitate the spatial configuration of Apollinaire’s “It’s Raining,” which visually represents the falling rain

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described in his text. Instead, he opted to evoke the sensory perception of a drizzle with unexpected syntactical breaks and ellipses, suggesting raindrops and, at the same time, indicating temporal duration. Similarly, in the 1912 combination of words and images, he experimented with the spatial distribution of graphic marks. Fall was cut from a larger multifigured composition and was further altered by the erasure of a second form barely visible slightly above and to the right of the free-falling figure. The staggered configuration of marks and blank spaces leaves an opening for another handwritten text and also suggests a temporal sequence within the new composite text. Fall thus becomes the visual substitute for unwritten lines of poetry, with the space between the two juxtaposed fragments functioning like ellipses or a stanza break. Klee’s experiments in cutting and recombining were initiated independently of the cubists’ experiments with collage. For the cubists collage provided a vehicle for exploring fundamental questions about the conventions of drawing and painting.73 Klee constructed a context for exploring some of these same questions on his own terms. Whereas the cubists relished the juxtaposition of fragments taken from disparate contexts and consisting of different materials, Klee restricted himself to words and images of his own making. In the course of combining Fall and Woe Is Me in the Gale Wind, he quite literally, if unintentionally, put into practice the roots of the term “script,” a noun that brings together the manual activities of drawing and writing (“scribere”) with that of cutting (“skeri”).74 The outcome of these manual activities is a hybridized text that reflects on the origins of writing. The similarity between the letter forms written in Klee’s cursive script — notably the “f’s” and “h’s” — and the loopy limbs of the drawn figure references a manuscript culture in which writing historically evolved from drawing. The visual analogies between letter forms and figurative images also pose a possibility that would have far-reaching implications for Klee’s script pictures of the twenties and thirties, namely, that poetic metaphors can be constructed by juxtaposing symbols from different sign systems. Even after Klee abandoned any serious ambitions as a poet, he continued to amuse himself with nonsense poems in the spirit of Morgenstern. One such poem is a nursery rhyme that reads as if it were written for an occasion, then copied and colored by hand. The delightful text and its colorful embellishment set this work apart from the banality of commercial greeting cards. Unfortunately, the original, possibly made to be given as a gift but subsequently sold, is now missing. A photographic reproduction (fig. 9) shows that the text was inscribed twice on a single sheet of paper — in cursive script at the bottom of the sheet, in lieu of a title, and hand-printed above, where uppercase letters are incorporated into the image of a child, presumably the “Emilie” to whom the visual/verbal text was dedicated (1917/48):

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Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Fig. 9: Paul Klee, Emilie; Widuwilie / Widuwintu Kantilie / Widumops / Katops / anatolischer Mops (1917/48). Watercolor and pen on paper mounted on cardboard, 24 ⫻15.4 cm. Location unknown. © 2006 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Photograph courtesy of the Zentrum Paul Klee.

EMILIE WIDUWILIE WIDUWINTU KANTILIE WIDUMOPS KATOPS ANATOLISCHER MOPS Using rhyme, assonance, and alliteration, Klee concocted a frothy play on words that would have delighted the recipient with its reference to a pug dog (“anatolischer Mops”). Contained within undulating bands of color that serve as the ribboned adornment of an occasional poem, the words function graphically as well as aurally. This small watercolor illustrates one of Klee’s standard techniques for imposing visual structure on a poetic text. With few exceptions, in his own

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Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Fig. 10: Paul Klee, Once Emerged from the Gray of Night (1918/17). Watercolor, pen, and pencil on paper mounted on cardboard, 22.6 ⫻ 15.8 cm. Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern. © 2006 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Photograph courtesy of the Zentrum Paul Klee.

poetic practice he conscientiously observed the rhythmically modulated lines of poetic form. For Klee this was an essential and inviolable element of poetic structure. In composing visual settings for his own poetic texts or for textual fragments from other sources, he adopted the linear structure of poetry. The lines arranged across the surface of Emilie can be read simultaneously as freehand substitutes for the lined pages of the kind of notebook in which Klee would copy the “Geduchte” and as the formal components of an abstract graphic language that delineates a spatial setting without describing the objects it contains in any literal way. Here the linear supports of a poetic text double as the skeletal structure of a visual image. Although the integration of pictorial image and verbal text takes place only at the most superficial level, Emilie anticipates the structural rhythms that would characterize Klee’s subsequent efforts to bring together the poetic and the architectonic.

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Klee had added color to visual settings for poetry as early as 1916, when he produced six word pictures incorporating selected verses from Chinese poems in German translation. In these works he tapped into two established traditions. While conscious of adding to a rich history of Chinese “poem-paintings” that combine poetic texts with visual imagery, he also took the opportunity to reconsider the practice of Western manuscript illumination from a modernist perspective. In 1918 Klee continued to pursue this avenue of investigation with Once Emerged from the Gray of Night (Einst dem Grau der Nacht enttaucht, 1918/17) (fig. 10), which provides a visual setting for a poem that is very likely his.75 In October 1917 he wrote to Lily Klee from his military post, floating the idea of compiling an anthology of poetry that might include his own work, verbal as well as visual (“Ich werde gelegentlich eine Sammlung guter Gedichte anlegen und eventuel componieren, wenigstens teilweise. Andere nur leicht illustrieren”).76 This project — probably hatched as a diversion from the tedium of office work at his military base — may have prompted him to write “Once Emerged from the Gray of Night” and to try his hand at a new approach to illustration. Like Emilie, Once Emerged from the Gray of Night contains not one but two autograph copies of the poem. At the top of a cardboard support, where illustration conventions would have dictated a headpiece, the poem is carefully written out in Klee’s cursive hand: Einst dem Grau der Nacht enttaucht Dann schwer und teurer und stark vom Feuer Abends voll von Gott und gebeugt Nun ätherlings vom Blau umschauert, entschwebt über Firnen zu klugen Gestirnen. [Once emerged from the gray of night Then ponderous and prized and strengthened by fire Evenings bowed by the fullness of God Now heavenly showered with blue, vanished over snow-covered mountains to the knowing stars.]77 According to literary practice, the handwritten text would be considered fair copy, so it is logical to assume that there were earlier drafts, although Klee seems not to have saved them. The text he preserved is a finely crafted exercise in expressionist word painting that envisions evenings experienced

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as sensory extremes of heat and cold. With the exception of the warm orange-red associated with fire, the color palette is cool, ranging in tone from a relatively light celestial blue to the darker, achromatic gray of night. Blue and gray, the only two colors specified by name, recur in a full spectrum of contemporary poetry — from the phonetic tongue twister in Morgenstern’s “Jingle of the Gallows Brothers” (“Bundeslied der Galgenbrüder”): “da tauts, da grauts, da brauts, da blauts!” (“it dews, it grays, it brews, it blues!”)78 — to the second version of Georg Trakl’s “Music at Mirabell” (“Musik im Mirabell”): Ein Brunnen singt. Die Wolken stehn Im klaren Blau, die weissen, zarten. Bedächtig stille Menschen gehn Am Abend durch den alten Garten.

A fountain sings. Clouds hover In clear blueness, white and delicate. At evening quiet people Wander thoughtfully through the old garden.

Der Ahnen Marmor ist ergraut. Ein Vogelzug streift in die Weiten. Ein Faun mit toten Augen schaut Nach Schatten, die ins Dunkel gleiten.

Ancestral marble fades to gray, A flight of birds vanishes in the distance. With dead eyes a faun gazes After shadows gliding into darkness.79

Like the two stanzas quoted from “Music at Mirabell,” Klee’s poem evokes nature in an accumulation of discrete images that have no obvious temporal or spatial continuity. The internal structural coherence of both poems results from a rhythmic flow achieved by coordinating metric stresses, rhyme, and assonance. Rhythm also contributes to a consistency of mood, as does color imagery. Klee adapted these same poetic devices to the reiteration of his text in its visual setting. The second copy of the poem was hand-printed in blocky letters inscribed within colored squares that are similar though not uniform in shape. By substituting the squared units of a grid for the curvilinear supports of Emilie, Klee segmented his text into letters that are easily legible as words only by referring to the cursive text written above. The letters are formed with a combination of vertical, horizontal, diagonal, and curved lines, making some of the letter forms as difficult to decipher as the words they constitute. Compartmentalized in the individual units of the grid, the letters are even more disjointed than the sequence of verbal images that make up the text. However, like the poem itself, the visual setting is structurally coherent. Order is visually imposed not only by the grid, which functions like the linear and stanzaic structures of a poem, but also by the rhythmic repetition of straight and curved lines and by the distribution of color in patterns that are comparable to assonance and end rhyme. The

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specific colors named in the text are also used in the grid, with strong contrasts of color values in the upper section and a more even distribution of value in the lower half. This results in the visual appearance of a tonal shift that relates to the text. Despite these correspondences between visual and verbal signifiers, color values and words are not illustratively paired, as is evident by the yellow, violet, blue, and green washes in the squares that contain the word “Grau.” Nor are there exclusive correspondences between specific colors and letters. Apparently, the logic of Klee’s color scheme was dictated by external factors. A diagram from one of the standard sources of color science would have been a readily accessible model for a grid with color notations. Hermann von Helmholtz, author of the comprehensive Treatise on Physiological Optics (Handbuch der physiologischen Optik), plotted the wavelengths of complementary colors on a grid, naming colors rather than showing them.80 In Once Emerged from the Gray of Night Klee visualized the hues that Helmholtz indicated only by name, thereby introducing the distinction between experience and sensation to which Helmholtz also referred.81 The reader of Klee’s poem makes color associations based on experience. By contrast, the viewer responds to the sensations evoked by colors, which communicate independently of a text that is intentionally obscured. The color palette of Once Emerged from the Gray of Night is, in fact, integrally related to the text, albeit conceptually rather than literally. It is significant that Klee chose a color scheme dominated by the complementary pairs of blue/orange, yellow/violet, and red/green. Helmholtz and other color theorists defined complementary colors as those that produce white when mixed in specific ratios. Klee, like other practicing artists, had learned from experience that mixing a primary color with its secondary complement produced not white but gray.82 In theory a mixture of all the complementary colors in Once Emerged from the Gray of Night would produce the gray named in the poem. Klee led his students through such exercises in color theory while teaching at the Bauhaus in the twenties. Knowing that artists usually apply color theory more intuitively than scientifically, he cautioned his students to beware of those who “give us laws instead of works” (“Gesetze geben an Stelle von Werken”),83 specifically citing those who advised against the use of gray. He could have used Once Emerged from the Gray of Night as an illustrative example. In combining complementary colors with washes of gray, he defied theoretical precepts in favor of the principle of harmony. The colors are not paired in equal ratios or repeated at regular intervals but are instead distributed over the surface to establish a balanced color scheme that corresponds to the balanced relationship of the lines that form the letters of the text. In calculating this relationship between color and text, Klee extended the principle of pictorial harmony to establish a harmonious relationship between a poetic text and its visual setting.

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Because Klee’s working process is revealed beneath the transparent watercolor washes, it is clear how carefully he calculated the relationship between the handwritten words and their color complements. He first printed the text in pencil, which is still visible beneath the India ink overlay of the letter ‘S’ in EINST. The illuminated version of the text was copied on a sheet of paper, which Klee cut in two and mounted with a strip of silver-colored paper between them, giving visual shape to the compositional break in his poem.84 In customary fashion, he signed and dated the work on a neatly ruled line at the bottom of the cardboard support. Ordinarily he would have included a title on the same line, but in this case he did not. Perhaps Klee conceived this word picture as a substitute for the manuscript copy that might otherwise have been recorded in the Diaries or the notebook of “Geduchte.” He would not have known that William Blake often followed a similar practice, preserving his illuminated texts only in the handwritten versions he copied onto plates prepared for a process he called “Illuminated Printing.”85 Klee was, however, familiar with Blake’s work, and there are parallels between Once Emerged from the Gray of Night and the first project Blake executed using his experimental printing process. Blake invented “Illuminated Printing,” a relief etching process, in 1788 and used it the following year to print the mirror-written texts of a collection of poems he entitled Songs of Innocence. By 1793 he had further developed the process so that he could print the illustrations to his Songs of Experience in opaque pigments. In the interim, he issued a limited edition of the Songs of Innocence, with copies hand-colored in watercolor as orders were received.86 Had Klee delved into the collection of the Bavarian State Library in Munich while living there, he could have perused one of twentysix extant copies of this first edition of the Songs of Innocence.87 Although Klee does not seem to have made this discovery, he was nevertheless exposed to Blake’s work, if only through photographic reproductions. In 1904, when he was at work on the etchings that would comprise his Opus One, he visited Munich’s Kupferstichkabinett. There he was shown a book about Blake in English, possibly Richard Garnett’s popular illustrated monograph.88 Although he admitted to being briefly diverted by Blake’s unique vision, he quickly regained his own sense of direction. Klee never again mentioned Blake in either his Diaries or letters, but it is plausible that Blake’s work surfaced in his memory when he engaged in experiments designed to channel his early practice as a poet into his visual production. Blake had been similarly intent on finding a single vehicle for unifying his doubly coded artistic production. In focusing on the technical problems of how to reproduce texts without typesetting and letterpress printing, and how to replicate images without printing separate plates, Blake was challenging the way that illustrated books had always been produced. Klee formulated a different but equally daunting challenge for himself.

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Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Fig. 11: William Blake, “Holy Thursday,” Plate 19 from Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Collection of King’s College, Cambridge, United Kingdom. Photograph courtesy of Peter Jones, Librarian, King’s College Library.

Given his experience with book illustration, Klee knew that commercial publishers were reluctant to trifle with readers’ customary expectations of an illustrative relationship between literary texts and accompanying visual imagery. In Once Emerged from the Gray of Night he took on the problem of how to reinfuse generally accepted assumptions about illustration with the medieval concept of illumination as a form of visual enhancement. He would have found some adaptable visual precedents in Blake’s early printed books. One pertinent example is the illustrated text of “Holy Thursday,” plate 19 from Songs of Innocence (fig. 11). To the extent that its head- and tailpieces literally depict “the children walking two & two in red & blue & green,” this plate is conventionally illustrative. Close scrutiny reveals a more innovative use of line and color to design a visual structure that reinforces the structure of the poetic text. The linear registers that regulate the spacing and alignment of Blake’s handwritten text are disguised by vines that meander between lines and occasionally stray into margins. To visualize stanzaic breaks, Blake introduced dense concentrations of the vine motifs and a subtle change in color. Klee contemporized these devices in his Once Emerged from the Gray of Night, reducing the tendriled vines to a linear grid and adding the wide strip of metallic paper. In the absence of any documentation about his intentions, it is impossible to ascertain why or if Klee was experimenting with modern

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variations on Blake’s illuminated texts. Perhaps he was curious about Blake’s mechanical process as a viable alternative to commercial publishing for his projected anthology. It is also possible that Klee thought of his hand-colored word picture as another one of his modernist interpretations of the traditional Chinese poem-painting. In China, as in the West, there is a long tradition of reciprocity in the relationship between the arts of painting and poetry. Klee would have been knowledgeable about this tradition, having read Hans Heilmann’s Chinesische Lyrik vom 12. Jahrhundert Chr. bis zur Gegenwart, which Lily Klee gave to him as a gift in 1916.89 In Heilmann’s lengthy introduction to his anthology, he noted that each word of a Chinese poem “has its own painterly sign” (“sein eigenes malerisches Zeichen hat”).90 With the emergence of what Jonathan Chaves has called the “integral poem-painting” during the Song Dynasty (960–1279), the Chinese added the dimension of calligraphy to this relationship.91 The artist capable of composing a poem, envisioning its visual equivalent, and rendering both the poetic text and its pictorial counterpart on the same support was said to have mastered the “three perfections” — poetry, painting, and calligraphy. The preferred subject matter of the Chinese poet/painter was nature, invoked in concise, imagistic phrases that challenge the conventions of visual coherence. In imagining visual parallels for such language, the poet/painter might choose to bypass illustrative imagery in favor of correspondences between compositional layouts and rhythmic patterns. The technical skills required for calligraphic writing expanded the potential for parallels to include analogies based on expressive brushwork. Klee could have discovered a model for rethinking the Western tradition of ut pictura poesis in any number of Song Dynasty poem-paintings. By pairing the script version of “Einst dem Grau der Nacht enttaucht” with a hand-lettered and colored text, Klee was intentionally contrasting the legible with the visible.92 It is his visible variant that approximates the idiosyncratic features of calligraphic writing, as well as the structural parallels between verbal and visual imagery that are common to the Chinese poem-painting. Like calligraphic characters, Klee’s printed letters are verbal signs rendered in a personal visual style. The blocky graphic signs are schematized to fit into the units of a grid that defines a textual space occupied by both verbal and visual elements. This doubly coded space is characteristic of Chinese poem-paintings, as is the correspondence between Klee’s structural grid and the linguistic units of his poem. What is unique about Once Emerged from the Gray of Night is the absence of any literally descriptive motifs. To achieve a perceptible degree of poetic distance between verbal and visual signs, Klee eliminated illustrative imagery altogether, substituting colored squares as the principal visual signifiers. In doing so he retained the Chinese

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Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Fig. 12: Paul Klee, Memorial Sheet (of Gersthofen) (1918/196). Pen, pencil, and watercolor on paper mounted on cardboard, 28.5 ⫻ 21 cm. Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, private loan. © 2006 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Photograph courtesy of the Zentrum Paul Klee.

preference for poetic suggestion over literal graphic transcriptions. The result of this experiment is a nontraditional poem-painting that marks a significant step in the process of reconstructing the theoretical premise of the ut pictura poesis paradigm to further the modernist impulse toward abstraction. The short poem written into the structural framework of Memorial Sheet (of Gersthofen) (Gedenkblatt [an Gersthofen], 1918/196) (fig. 12) is altogether different in tone from either the nonsense poem dedicated to “Emilie” or the ethereal word painting of Once Emerged from the Gray of Night: Du still allein, Ihr Ungeheuer mein Herz ist euer, mein Herz ist dein!

Thee, calm and alone, (To your monstrous rout my heart goes out,) my heart’s thine own!93

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As with many of Klee’s terse, trenchant verses, the tone of this rhymed quatrain is acerbically ironic. In this instance irony was the vehicle for a satirical commentary on contemporary visual culture. O. K. Werckmeister has linked Klee’s title to the memorial sheets that assigned names to the grim statistics of wartime Germany.94 Military officials often informed families that loved ones had fallen at the front by sending mass-produced memorial sheets, which paired the aestheticized image of a dead soldier with a line of saccharine verse. Blank space was typically left to individualize the generic image with a name. Klee’s Memorial Sheet (of Gersthofen) is a parody of these commercialized expressions of institutional sympathy. Using both the familiar ‘dein’ and the formal ‘euer,’ Klee composed a greeting-card quatrain in which his satirical intention is slyly masked by a jaunty rhyme. Read together, the first and last lines make a mockery of the pretense of communicating the private pain of grieving survivors in trite rhymes. Inserted between these lines is a parenthetical aside expressing a widespread sentiment that was manifestly at odds with official propaganda. The technique of conflating different voices and divergent points of view was as common to modernist poetry as it was to cubist painting, where exterior and interior surfaces and multiple points of view are spatially integrated, as they are in Memorial Sheet (of Gersthofen).95 Given Klee’s penchant for exposing process, it seems likely that he was drawing attention to a compositional device he had transferred from one medium to another. The syntax of Klee’s poem is intentionally confusing, but its meaning is as transparent as the skeletal structure that contains it. Not coincidentally, the transparency of the architectural structure allows the viewer to observe the artist in his quarters on the military base at Gersthofen, where he was stationed when armistice was officially declared in November 1918. Klee depicted himself tucked in bed with pencil and paper. He could be drafting the verse that is projected up in the rafters, drawing the stereographic image of his room in the barracks, or writing a letter to his spouse. In a letter written to her on 19 November and subsequently transcribed (with minor changes) into the Diaries, he contrasted the chaotic end of the war with the serenity and security of his living space.96 Snugly ensconced in his tidy room, Klee could reflect on the collapse of the German war effort from an ironic distance that corresponds to the physical distance of the viewer in relation to the interior depicted in Memorial Sheet (of Gersthofen). During the war years Klee had continued his practice of writing about his thought processes and working methods, both in the Diaries and in letters. In the aftermath of the war this practice shifted to the semantic spaces of images such as Memorial Sheet (of Gersthofen). Although Klee did not add to the Diaries in the postwar years, he did lavish considerable time on preparing clean copy. If, in the editing process, he recognized parallels between his line endings and Stramm’s poetry, he did not immediately take

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Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book. Fig. 13: Paul Klee, Éhatévauih (1925/124). Pen on paper mounted on cardboard, 8.8 ⫻ 15.7/15.5 cm. Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern. © 2006 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Photograph courtesy of the Zentrum Paul Klee.

the next logical, though admittedly daring, step — that of composing poetry with single words or an even more reductive form of poetic language, the single letter. He did, however, compose visually with that smallest of linguistic units, producing a body of work in which uppercase letters function as both initials and visual abstractions. This occurred even before Schwitters proclaimed that “not the word but the letter is the original material of poetry” (“nicht das Wort ist ursprünglich Material der Dichtung, sondern der Buchstabe”).97 After moving into the sphere of the Bauhaus in the early twenties, Klee continued to experiment with new forms of poetry in visual settings. One example is Éhatévauih, 1925/124 (fig. 13), where letters are suspended in a pictorial space. The title is a phonetic transcription of the sound values of letters distributed in a pattern that diagrams the rise and fall of speech. Although not included in any inventory of Klee’s poetry, this configuration of letters represents his only experiment with the kind of sound poetry that was the featured attraction of every dada soirée. Both Hugo Ball and Raoul Hausmann vied for the recognition of having invented the sound poem, yet there were numerous precedents, including the poetry of Morgenstern and Kandinsky, both of whom are listed on the programs of dada performances.98 Ball’s dada diary and Huelsenbeck’s Dada Almanac describe various kinds of sound poetry, including “simultaneous poems” and “grammalogues.” Klee’s Éhatévauih represents yet another variation on dada sound poetry. Instead of reciting or typesetting his experiment in sound poetry, Klee chose to spatialize it in a visual frame of reference. The pattern of letters is superimposed on loose configurations of calligraphic swirls that evoke the

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Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Fig. 14: Paul Klee, Alphabet AIOEK (1938/227). Colored paste on paper mounted on cardboard, 27.3 ⫻ 21 cm. Achim Moeller Fine Art, New York. © 2006 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Photograph courtesy of the Zentrum Paul Klee.

atmospheric effect of nebulous clouds. As in his earlier Inscription in Clouds (Inschrift in Wolken, 1919/209), the overlay of letters reinforces the illusion of spatial depth. Given the layered relationship of letters to cloud formations, it is possible that Klee was attempting to visualize the layers of association implicit in the sound poem to which Ball gave the title “Labada’s Cloud Chant” (“Labadas Gesang an die Wolken”).99 It is equally possible, however, that Klee’s visual exercise in the modernist concept of simultaneity was not so literally referential. In theory the viewer who enunciates the sound values of the title Éhatévauih and simultaneously registers the relationship between letter forms and cloud formations could experience one of those “magical floating words” with “resonant sounds” that Ball designated “grammalogues,” or word images (“die Verwendung von ‘Sigeln,’ von magisch erfüllten fliegenden Worten und Klangfiguren”).100 Ball himself disdained word images that others had already invented,101 writing what he called “Poems without Words” or “Sound Poems” (“ ‘Verse ohne Worte’

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Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Fig. 15: Kurt Schwitters, “Register [elementar],” 1922. © 2006 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. © 1973 DuMont Literatur und Kunst Verlag.

oder Lautgedichte”), which often took the form of words reduced to sound patterns.102 Klee designed his own exercise in abstract poetry, applying Ball’s reductive process to a pictorial setting as well as a sound poem. In doing so he made a decisive break with lines that represent in conventional ways, either by forming legible words or by describing recognizable objects. Here the poetic text and the underlying visual configuration are reduced to graphic abstractions, one written out, the other drawn. The analogous relationship between verbal and visual signs suggests that writing and imaging had become not simply parallel but virtually interchangeable activities in Klee’s mind. He stated as much in his pedagogical notes on form-production, making the claim that “the word [sic] and the picture, that is, wordmaking [sic] and form-building are one and the same” (“Schrift und Bild, das heisst Schreiben und Bilden, sind wurzelhaft eins”).103 This startling theoretical assertion is validated in Éhatévauih. When Klee returned to letters as compositional units, it was once again with the wistful intention of writing poetry, or at least the Beginning of a Poem (Anfang eines Gedichtes, 1938/189), which is the title he gave to one of five alphabet drawings dating from 1938. The structural settings of the alphabet drawings, including Alphabet WE, 1938/226 and Alphabet AIOEK, 1938/227 (fig. 14), are variations on the linear grid of Klee’s Once Emerged from the Gray of Night, although the letters themselves are different in that they are clearly legible and open-ended in their combinatorial possibilities.104 In these respects the 1938 alphabet drawings acknowledge the legacy of Schwitters’s “Register [elementary]” (“Register [elementar]”) (fig. 15) and “Typographic Visual Poem” (“Gesetztes Bildgedicht”), both dating from 1922. Yet Klee’s drawings pointedly reject the rigidity imposed by Schwitters’s printed letter forms and typesetting grids. The letters are arranged in a compositional grid that resembles a slightly warped word-game

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playing board, distorted so that straight lines are varied with diagonals and curves to resonate with the shapes of the letter forms. The game analogy is an appropriate one, for the combination of letters specified in the title seems to have resulted from a kind of cryptographic word game. There are numerous ways to interpret the letter ciphers “AIOEK” and “WE” and the graphic structures that contain them. Given Klee’s proclivity for self-referential allusions, it is logical to surmise that Alphabet AIOEK and Alphabet WE might bear some relation to Beginning of a Poem, where paired numbers and words make up the phrase “so fang es heimlich an” (“so let it secretly begin”).105 This enigmatic phrase suggests that Beginning of a Poem is a visual version of a “puzzle poem,” so described because the poet invites the reader/viewer to solve a poetic conundrum.106 Assuming that Alphabet AIOEK and Alphabet WE are structurally similar to Beginning of a Poem, the alphabet would again be the external determinant of a poetic construct, within which adjacent letters are isolated as constituent units of puzzle poems. The assumption that the verbal units “AIOEK” and “WE” belong to the language of poetry places Klee’s drawing in a broad cultural context that embraces Jean Cocteau’s irreverent insistence that even the most beautiful poem is “nothing more than a mixed-up alphabet.”107 Accepting the supposition that “AIOEK” and “WE” are the titles of poems composed in this way, questions still remain concerning what they mean and how they function as poetic signifiers. “WE” can be read as the first-person plural pronoun in English, but it is highly unlikely that this was Klee’s intention, especially since “AIOEK” makes no orthographic or phonetic sense as a word in any known language. It is, of course, quite possible that Klee was inventing new words, in which case Alphabet AIOEK and Alphabet WE could be understood as realizations of Velimir Khlebnikov’s prediction that “henceforth a work of art could consist of a single word.”108 In the cases of “AIOEK” and “WE,” those words might be characterized as hypograms, a term used by Ferdinand de Saussure to specify a theme word that lends itself to anagrammatic transpositions. Saussure’s research on anagrams encompassed poetry across global cultures, ranging from sacred Vedic texts to Saturnian verse.109 Although Klee would not have had access to Saussure’s unpublished research, he might well have been familiar with the cabalistic tradition of cryptographically encoded anagrams. He might also have known that medieval poets used anagrammatic theme words, the most famous example being the acrostic from François Villon’s Testament (Le Testament, 1461) in which a vertical sequence of initial letters spells out the poet’s last name.110 There are infinite numbers of variations on the basic principle of composing poetry by arranging the letters of a word or a group of words. A poem based on the anagram “WE” might contain one word in each line that begins with “W” and ends with “E.” Alternatively, the anagram “AIOEK” might determine not the beginning of a poem but the last letters of line endings in a five-line stanza. This use of an anagram would be an extension

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of Klee’s earlier practice of listing the final words of his epigrammatic verses. Read as the ultimate reduction of poetic texts to their anagrammatic theme words, or hypograms, Alphabet AIOEK and Alphabet WE stand as evidence of a self-fulfilled prophecy Klee had voiced in a note to Bloesch as early as 1901: “Possibly or even probably I will end up expressing myself through the word, which I almost believe is the highest form of art” (“Vielleicht oder wahrscheinlich komme auch ich schliesslich dazu mich durch das Wort auszudrücken, ich glaube fast es ist die höchste Kunst”).111 When Klee restricted his poetry to words or sound patterns, it was often derivative, but with his anagrammatic alphabet poems he found his own voice. These exercises in letter poetry have their parallels in drawings where linguistic symbols slip into visual abstractions. Subsequent chapters will examine the strategies that Klee appropriated from modernist aesthetic practices in order to effect a transition from verbal to visual poetry, ultimately forging the new sign language he used to compose his poems in pictorial script.

Notes 1

Tagebücher #895, spring 1911, 312 (Diaries, 256). The handwritten oeuvre catalogue is in the collection of the Zentrum Paul Klee. 2

On the editing and recopying of Klee’s Diaries, see Christian Geelhaar, “Journal intime oder Autobiographie? Über Paul Klees Tagebücher,” in Paul Klee: Das Frühwerk, 1883–1922 (Munich: Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, 1979), 246–60; hereafter cited as Das Frühwerk. See also O. K. Werckmeister, The Making of Paul Klee’s Career, 1914–1920 (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989), 5–8, 41–44; hereafter cited as Klee’s Career. Both authors cite a letter to Lily Stumpf in which Klee mentioned making the first transcription for possible use in drafting an autobiography (Briefe, vol. 1, 16 April 1904, 414).

3

The notebook labeled “Geduchte” is in the archives of the Zentrum Paul Klee. Based on a conversation with Wolfgang Kersten, observations about Klee’s handwriting, and the fact that one poem is dated 1926, Vogel surmises that Klee probably recorded the poems between 1922 and 1926 (Zwischen Wort und Bild, 16, 38 n. 13). 4 The 1946 edition, published by Benteli, was revised and reissued as a new edition in 1965; see Carola Giedion-Welcker, Anthologie der Abseitigen: Poètes à l’écart (Zurich, Arche, 1965), 93–99. 5

Paul Klee, Gedichte, ed. Felix Klee (Zurich: Arche, 1960). The most recent reprint (2001) is the one cited throughout these notes.

6 7

Cf. Gedichte, 135–38, with Vogel, Zwischen Wort und Bild, 15–18.

Gedichte, 105. This poem is published from a manuscript in the collection of Felix Klee. In this translation I attempted to preserve some of the rhythms and rhymes, and acknowledge the assistance of Jim Walker.

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Tagebücher #50, November–April 1897–98, 23 (Diaries, 14).

9

Tagebücher #50, November–April 1897–98, 23 (Diaries, 14); also cited in Vogel, Zwischen Wort und Bild, 84. 10

This poem was published in Gedichte, 22–23, and Tagebücher #111, summer 1911, 50–52 (Diaries, 40–41). For references to Goethe and Hölderlin in Klee’s letters, see the index in Briefe, vol. 2, 1381, 1321. Both Goethe and Hölderlin are well represented in the library of Paul and Lily Klee. See, e.g., Goethe’s sämmtliche Werke in vierzig Bänden (Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta’scher, 1840). 11 I quote one of these poems in my text. Another of Klee’s Heine-inspired poems from this period is included in a letter of 1 March 1899 to Bloesch; a variant is published in Gedichte, 20, and Tagebücher #82, 1899–1900, 41 (Diaries, 33). The version from the letter to Bloesch is translated by Jürgen Glaesemer in “Klee and German Romanticism,” MoMA, Klee, 70. Glaesemer enumerates the characteristic features of these “chansons,” citing their “perfumed eroticism, the romantic surges of emotion and feeling for nature,” and noting that “Heinrich Heine is their godfather.” In the Klee library is a multivolume edition of Heine’s work: Heinrich Heines sämtliche Werke in zwölf Bänden, ed. Gustav Karpeles (Leipzig: Max Hesse, n.d.). Several volumes are inscribed “Lily Stumpf, 24.Dez.05,” suggesting that the set may have been a holiday gift from Klee or one of his family members. 12

Tagebücher #77, summer 1899, 40 (Diaries, 31). The translation and capitalization are variants of those in the English edition.

13

See Heinrich Heine, Sämtliche Werke (Munich: Winkler, 1969), 1:98–99.

14

Werckmeister speculates that Klee’s negative reaction to his bust portrait by the sculptor Alexander Zschokke may have been motivated by his skepticism about the classicizing pretensions of the George circle. See his essay “Klees Zeichnung ‘Vor dem Tempel. 1932/155,’ ” in Paul Klee im Rheinland, ed. Uta Gerlach-Laxner and Frank Günter Zehnder (Cologne: DuMont / Bonn: Rheinisches Landesmuseum, 2003), 243–44. 15

Tagebücher #868, December 1909, 297 (Diaries, 242).

16

Christian Morgenstern, Palma Kunkel (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1921), 17. The copy with Klee’s marginal notations cited here is in the Zentrum Paul Klee. I wish to thank Stefan Frey, curator of the Klee estate, for confirming that this notation is in Klee’s own handwriting.

17

Gedichte, 8. In this translation I use Long Ears as a synecdoche, thus the upper-case letters and singular verb. My transcription restores the layout on page 3 of the notebook of “Geduchte,” which is the first page on which Klee wrote. Throughout the notebook he wrote only on odd-numbered pages, leaving the verso of each page blank.

18

See Christian Morgenstern, Galgenlieder: A Selection, trans. Max Knight (Berkeley: U of California P, 1963), 82–83; hereafter cited as Galgenlieder.

19 20

Gedichte, 9, reproduced as it is recorded on page 9 of the notebook of “Geduchte.”

Christian Morgenstern, Songs from the Gallows, trans. Walter Arndt (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1993), 132; the poem cited is elsewhere entitled “Scholastikerproblem.” For reproductions of the two works by Klee, see Catalogue raisonné, 2:227 for 1915/29 (there translated as “genius,” elsewhere as “angel”) and 8:398 for 1939/859.

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21

Gedichte, 16, printed from the autograph version handwritten in Klee’s personal copy of Georg Büchners Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Paul Landau, vol. 1 (Berlin: Paul Cassirer, 1909). Compare this with Morgenstern’s “Nein!” in Galgenlieder (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1922), 5. This is likely a replacement for the earlier edition Klee mentioned in the Diaries; see note 15. Like the other volumes of Morgenstern in the Klee library, this one is marked with a system of Xs and slashes that must have had meaning for Klee.

22

Vogel characterizes this poem as a latter-day example of Sturm und Drang in “Eine semiotisch-strukturalistische Interpretation,” 73.

23

Georg Büchner, Dantons Tod and Woyzeck, ed. Margaret Jacobs, 4th ed., Manchester German Texts (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1996), 33. Translation by Fritz Janschka.

24

See, e.g., John Simon, “The Original Miller’s Daughter,” Opera News 66 (March 2002): 35.

25

Vogel has established these dates based on the script used and recollections of Felix Klee concerning when his father acquired the edition of Büchner’s work in which “Motto” is inscribed. See Zwischen Wort und Bild, 16, 38 n. 12.

26

Klee’s ambivalence toward Walden when the two were first introduced by Franz Marc indicates that the beginning of their relationship may well have been strained, if not stormy. See Tagebücher #914, summer–fall 1912, 329–30 (Diaries, 274). 27

Gedichte, 15, reproduced as it is recorded on the undated manuscript interleaved in the notebook of “Geduchte.” Although “Rach [sic] und Degen” can be translated as “Revenge and sword,” I have sacrificed meaning to Klee’s system of transposing letters.

28

Galgenlieder, 28–29.

29

Vogel, “Eine semiotisch-strukturalistische Interpretation,” 62.

30

Gedichte, 8, reproduced as it is recorded on page 5 of the notebook of “Geduchte.” 31

Gedichte, 16, reproduced from the autograph copy in a 1928 pocket diary. Translation by Fritz Janschka. 32

Morgenstern, Galgenlieder, 22–23. Vogel also cites Morgenstern as a source of the style of Klee’s “1/1000” in “Eine semiotisch-strukturalistische Interpretation,” 46. 33

Kurt Schwitters, Lyrik, vol. 1 of Das literarische Werk, ed. Friedhelm Lach (Cologne: Verlag M. DuMont Schauberg, 1973), 199; hereafter cited as Lyrik. The poem was originally published in Elementar. Die Blume Anna: Die neue Anna Blume, eine Gedichtsammlung aus den Jahren 1918–1922 (Berlin: Der Sturm, 1922), 7–8; hereafter cited as Elementar. Die Blume Anna.

34

Morgenstern, Galgenlieder, 150–51.

35

Hans Arp, “Sekundenzeiger,” in German Poetry, 1910–1975, ed. and trans. Michael Hamburger (New York: Urizen Books, 1976), 104–5. 36

For the entire text see Gedichte, 120, and Briefe, vol. 2, 1245, reproduced from the autograph copy in a 1933 pocket diary. A literal translation of the title (“Mr. Abel and Relatives”) would sacrifice the biblical allusion.

37

Tagebücher #306, November 1901, 89 (Diaries, 72). Translation by Fred Chappell.

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38

For this information about examination techniques in classical studies, I am indebted to poet and classical scholar Fred Chappell.

39 For a brief history of bouts-rimés, see Tony Augarde, The Oxford Guide to Word Games (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1984), 135–38. 40

Tagebücher #306, November 1901, 89 (Diaries, 72). Translation with help from Fred Chappell.

41

Tagebücher #184, summer 1901, 73 (Diaries, 60).

42

“Der Abend” appears in several editions of the author’s work in the Klee library, e.g., Gedichte von Joseph Freiherrn von Eichendorff, ed. Franz Brümmer (Leipzig: Philipp Reclam, n.d.), 58. 43

Tagebücher #325, December 1901, 98 (Diaries, 78).

44

Gedichte, 12. I have preserved the layout and parentheses in the title as they appear on page 19 of the notebook of “Geduchte.” 45

Tagebücher #1081 A, 442 (Diaries, 375). Translation from the English edition.

46

Gedichte, 8, reproduced as it is recorded on page 5 of the notebook of “Geduchte.” A more literal, unrhymed translation would read: “What thrives lonely and alone? / It is the plant called ivory.”

47

Gedichte, 28. I have reproduced it as it is recorded on page 5 of the notebook of “Geduchte,” only without the notations for stressed syllables, which Klee added to the autograph copy. For a reproduction of Persian Nightingales, see Catalogue raisonné, 2:411. Kersten and Okuda link this painting and the poem recorded in Tagebücher #1081 A to a Persian-Turkish literary tradition, interpreting the nightingale as an “ornament” of the “artist-ego” (Im Zeichen der Teilung, 66). Similarly, the “silenced nightingale” in the couplet could signify Klee the poet who subsequently regained his voice as a painter. 48 Gedichte, 9, reproduced as it is recorded on page 7 of the notebook of “Geduchte.” A more literal, unrhymed translation would read: “All, I loved all of them / Now a cooler star I am.” 49 For the original text and the translation, see Your Diamond Dreams Cut Open My Arteries: Poems by Else Lasker-Schüler, trans. Robert P. Newton (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1982), 186–87; hereafter cited as Your Diamond Dreams. 50 See, e.g., “Franz Marc,” Your Diamond Dreams, 234–37. Cf. Klee, Tagebücher #1008, July-August 1916, 400–402 (Diaries, 343–45). 51

“Georg [sic] Grosz,” Your Diamond Dreams, 222–23.

52

George Grosz, “Aus den Gesängen,” in “Ach knallige Welt, du Lunapark,”: Gesammelte Gedichte, ed. Klaus Peter Dencker (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1986), 21; hereafter cited as “Ach knallige Welt.” This poem was first published in Neue Jugend, nos. 11–12 (1917): 243. 53

Gedichte, 9. My transcription restores the layout of page 7 of the notebook of “Geduchte.” Klee’s wordplays and inventions defy a literal translation.

54

Gedichte, 9, reproduced as it is recorded on page 9 of the notebook of “Geduchte.”

55

Tagebücher #1081 A, 442–43 (Diaries, 375); see also fig. 7.

56

See August Stramm, Das Werk, ed. René Radrizzani (Wiesbaden: Limes, 1963), 21.

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57

At the International Association of Word & Image Studies (IAWIS) conference held in Ottawa in August 1993, Paul Bauschatz presented a paper entitled “Language, Rhyme, and Space,” in which he grouped Klee with Stramm and Louis Zukofsky and analyzed texts by all three, including three sets of Klee’s line endings.

58

Gedichte, 12. In the manuscript version on page 17 of the notebook of “Geduchte” Klee added standard metric markings to indicate rhythmic stresses beginning with the line “Sag mir wo ist dann.”

59

Friedrich Nietzsche, Also Sprach Zarathustra: Ein Buch für alle und keinen (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam, 1975), 5; and Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Clancy Martin (New York: Barnes & Noble, 2005), 9. Vogel likewise cites this passage from Nietzsche in “Eine semiotisch-strukturalistische Interpretation,” 43. 60

Gottfried Benn, Gedichte, vol. 3 of Gesammelte Werke, ed. Dieter Wellershof (Wiesbaden: Limes, 1960), 8.

61

“Creative Credo,” sec. 4, 184 (Schriften, 119).

62

Lessing, Laocöon, 78 (Laokoon, 875).

63

On Klee’s ambition in this regard, see Tagebücher #429, 488.

64

For illustrations documenting Klee’s process of composing by cutting and combining, see Kersten and Okuda, Im Zeichen der Teilung, 322–68. 65

Kersten and Okuda, Im Zeichen der Teilung, 39–44, 94–101, 322–23.

66

The text of this poem is transcribed from the drawing and published in Gedichte, 109. My transcription retains the line breaks in Klee’s original text.

67

Glaesemer establishes the link between Klee’s poem and German Romanticism in “Klee and German Romanticism,” 80. Vogel links the text to Tagebücher #920, 1913, 333: “Weh mir unter dem Druck der wiederkehrenden Stunde, in der Mitte allein, in der Tiefe der schleichende Wurm” (Zwischen Wort und Bild, 145–46). The first line of Klee’s “Motto” combines the words “Sturm” and “Wurm” excerpted from the two texts.

68

Jürgen Glaesemer (Paul Klee — Handzeichnungen: Kindheit bis 1920 [Bern: Kunstmuseum, 1973], 1:209) reproduces the two drawings, catalogued as 1912/130 and 1912/131 separately, with the notation that they are mounted on the same support. Kersten and Okuda (Im Zeichen der Teilung, 99) reproduce the two together.

69

See the text and illustration to Kandinsky’s “Open” (“Offen”) in Sounds, 31, 122.

70

As an example of the critical reception of Apollinaire’s calligrammes, see Gabriel Arbouin, “Devant l’Idéogramme d’Apollinaire,” Les Soirées de Paris 2 (1914): 383–85. 71

See my book Paul Klee’s Pictorial Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002), 122–25, where Klee’s watercolor is reproduced next to Apollinaire’s poem; hereafter cited as Klee’s Pictorial Writing.

72 Gedichte, 13. The layout used in the Gedichte does not conform to Klee’s manuscript version, which is written out on a scrap of discolored paper and inserted at the back of the notebook of “Geduchte.” The manuscript layout is reproduced in Vogel (Zwischen Wort und Bild, 17) and also here. The layout in the Gedichte approximates the verticality of Apollinaire’s calligramme and the visual effect of Schwitters’s “Regen” (1944). For Apollinaire’s “Il Pleut,” see his Oeuvres complètes, 3:192; for Schwitters’s “Regen,” see Lyrik, 142.

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73

On the invention of the cubist collage, see Christine Poggi, In Defiance of Painting: Cubism, Futurism, and the Invention of Collage (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1992), 1–29.

74 On the etymology of the word “script,” see J. Hillis Miller, Ariadne’s Thread: Story Lines (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1992), 6. 75 Although Felix Klee does not include “Einst dem Grau der Nacht enttaucht” in the collected Gedichte, he does quote the text in a note in which he observes that it is probably a poem by Klee (Gedichte, 128). For an extensive bibliography of this work, see Catalogue raisonné, 2:440. In-depth analyses are found in: Jürgen Glaesemer, Paul Klee: The Colored Works in the Kunstmuseum Bern, trans. Renate Franciscono (Bern: Kunstmuseum and Kornfeld, 1979), 45–47 (hereafter cited as Colored Works); 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 UP, 1991), 56–64; Katja Schenker, “Titel-Bild-Gedicht. Paul Klee, ‘Einst dem Grau der Nacht enttaucht, 1918.17,’ in Georges-Bloch-Jahrbuch des Kunsthistorischen Instituts der Universität Zürich 5 (1998): 137–55 (hereafter cited as “Titel-Bild-Gedicht); and Claude Frontisi, Paul Klee, La Création et sa parabole poétique: Théorie et pratique en peinture (Annecy, France: La Petite École, 1999). For aspects of Once Emerged from the Gray of Night, not discussed here, see Klee’s Pictorial Writing, 73–78. 76

Briefe, vol. 2, 14 October 1917, 882.

77

This translation is a variant of the one published in Klee’s Pictorial Writing, 75.

78

Christian Morgenstern, Alle Galgenlieder: Galgenlieder, Palmström, Palma Kunkel, Gingganz (Wiesbaden: Insel, 1950), 19; hereafter cited as Alle Galgenlieder. Translation by Fritz Janschka.

79

German and English texts are quoted from Georg Trakl, Poems, trans. Lucia Getsi (Athens, OH: Mundus Artium Press, 1973), 20–23. Werckmeister discusses the juxtaposition of Klee’s lithograph Death for the Idea (Der Tod für die Idee, 1915/1) and Trakl’s poem “Nacht” in the December 1914 issue of Zeit-Echo (Klee’s Career, 30–32).

80

Hermann von Helmholtz, Handbuch der physiologischen Optik (Hamburg and Leipzig: Leopold Voss, 1896), 317.

81 82

Handbuch der physiologischen Optik, 311.

See The Thinking Eye, vol. 1 of Paul Klee Notebooks, ed. Jürg Spiller, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Wittenborn, 1961), 479–80 (hereafter cited as Spiller, ed., The Thinking Eye); Paul Klee: Das bildnerische Denken: Schriften zur Form- und Gestaltungslehre, ed. Jürg Spiller (Basel: Schwabe, 1956), 479–80 (hereafter cited as Spiller, ed., Paul Klee: Das bildnerische Denken); and Paul Klee, Beiträge zur bildnerischen Formlehre: faksimilierte Ausgabe des Originalmanuskripts von Paul Klees erstem Vortragszyklus am Staatlichen Bauhaus Weimar 1921/22, ed. Jürgen Glaesemer (Basel: Schwabe, 1979), 165–66 (hereafter cited as Klee, Beiträge zur bildnerischen Formlehre). Klee’s 190-page manuscript of the Beiträge zur bildnerischen Formlehre is incorporated in its entirety in the second part of The Thinking Eye, where it is supplemented by selections from Klee’s lecture notes from later years of teaching. I use double citations, as here, to distinguish between material in the Beiträge zur bildnerischen Formlehre and material interpolated by the editor from other manuscripts.

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83 Spiller, ed., The Thinking Eye, 499 (Spiller, ed., Paul Klee: Das bildnerische Denken, 499), and Klee, Beiträge zur bildnerischen Formlehre, 184–85. 84

For a detailed analysis of Klee’s working process and materials, see Schenker, “Titel-Bild-Gedicht,” 142–45, 151.

85

See Joseph Viscomi, Blake and the Idea of the Book (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1993), 30. 86

Among the many studies of Blake’s illuminated books, see, e.g., Michael Phillips, William Blake: The Creation of the Songs, From Manuscript to Illuminated Printing (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2000). 87

The location of a copy of Songs of Innocence in Munich is documented in Blake, Songs of Innocence and of Experience, vol. 2 of Blake’s Illuminated Books, ed. Andrew Lincoln (Princeton, NJ: William Blake Trust and Princeton UP, 1991), 9.

88

Tagebücher #578, September 1904, 194 (Diaries, 158). Klee may have been referring to Richard Garnett’s William Blake, Painter and Poet (London and New York: Seeley / Macmillan, 1895). 89

This information is supplied by Glaesemer, Colored Works, 38. At some point Klee must have lost Heilmann’s anthology, for it is no longer listed in the checklist of the Klee library. For a discussion of this anthology as it relates to Klee’s work, see also Constance Naubert-Riser, “Paul Klee et la Chine,” Revue de l’art 63 (1984): 47–56. 90 Hans Heilmann, Chinesische Lyrik vom 12. Jahrhundert v. Chr. bis zur Gegenwart (Munich: R. Piper, 1905), xxx. 91

Jonathan Chaves traces the history of the Chinese poem-painting in the exhibition catalogue The Chinese Painter as Poet (New York: China Institute Gallery and Art Media Resources, 2000), 19–131.

92

Frontisi notes that Klee would have been aware of the Chinese tradition of painting and writing coexisting on the same surface. (La Création et sa parabole poétique, 25). 93

This is the only example of Klee’s poems in a pictorial setting that he also transcribed in the notebook of “Geduchte” (p. 13). The translation is by Fred Chappell; a more literal translation would preserve neither the rhyme nor the implications of the syntax. 94

For a discussion and a reproduction of memorial sheets as they relate to this work, see Werckmeister, Klee’s Career, 139–42.

95

Jim Jordan notes that Klee flattened the perspective “by his usual Cubist means” in Paul Klee and Cubism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1984), 181. Alain Bonfand notes that Klee’s perspective reads like the “anatomy of a space” in Paul Klee, l’oeil en trop (Paris: Editions de la différence, 1988), 69. 96 Briefe, vol. 2, 19 November 1918, 944; and Tagebücher #1132, November 1918, 470 (Diaries, 408). 97 98

Schwitters, “Konsequente Dichtung” (1924), in Manifeste und Kritische Prosa, 190.

For a group that advocated the destabilization of tradition and purported to celebrate nonsense, dada artists were obsessed with staking claims to history in the making. On conflicting claims about sound poems, see Hans Kleinschmidt’s

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introduction to Huelsenbeck’s edited volume Memoirs of a Dada Drummer, xxvii–xxviii. 99

On Ball’s title, which honors the Hungarian choreographer Rudolf von Laban, see Erdmute Wenzel White, The Magic Bishop: Hugo Ball, Dada Poet (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1998), 104–5, 131. The translation of the title is taken from this study. For a reproduction of Klee’s Inscription in Clouds, see Catalogue raisonné, 3:129. 100

Hugo Ball, Flight Out of Time: A Dada Diary, trans. Ann Raimes, ed. John Elderfield, Documents of 20th-Century Art (New York: Viking, 1974), 67 (hereafter cited as Flight Out of Time); idem, Die Flucht aus der Zeit (Lucerne: J. Stocker, 1946), 94. 101

He expressed this view in the “First Dada Manifesto” (1916), reproduced in the appendix of Flight Out of Time, 221. 102

Flight Out of Time, 70 (Die Flucht aus der Zeit, 98).

103

Spiller, ed., The Thinking Eye, 17 (Spiller, ed., Paul Klee: Das bildnerische Denken, 17). The calendrical notation “25612” penciled in the lower right of Klee’s drawing coincidentally adds a numerical dimension to the parallel between writing and image-making.

104 For reproductions of the alphabet poems named but not illustrated here, see Jürgen Glaesemer, Paul Klee, Handzeichnungen: 1937–1940 (Bern: Kunstmuseum, 1979), 3:69 (Beginning of a Poem, #53), 71 (Alphabet WE, #59). 105

Dutch scholar Karel Citroen has identified the source of this line in correspondence with me; documentation of his discovery is forthcoming in Word & Image.

106 Dick Higgins identifies puzzle poems as analogues of pattern poems in Pattern Poetry: Guide to an Unknown Literature (Albany: State U of New York P, 1987), 184. 107

Cocteau’s remark was made to Charles Peignot. See William Gardner, Alphabet at Work (New York: St. Martin’s, 1982), viii. 108

Velimir Khlebnikov, “The Word as Such,” in Letters and Theoretical Writings, vol. 1 of Collected Works, trans. Paul Schmidt, ed. Charlotte Douglas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1987), 255. 109

See Jean Starobinski, Words upon Words: The Anagrams of Ferdinand de Saussure, trans. Olivia Emmet (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1979), 15–24; originally published as Les Mots sous les mots: Les Anagrammes de Ferdinand de Saussure (Paris: Gallimard, 1971).

110

The acrostic cited here is found in the “Ballade pour Prier Notre Dame,” inserted between stanzas 89 and 90 of Le Testament. See François Villon, Poésies, ed. Jean Dufournet (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), 98. 111

Unpublished postcard to Bloesch dated 28 April 1901; quoted in Vogel, Zwischen Wort und Bild, 81, 113 n. 3.

2: The Poetic and the Pictorial

B

Y THE END OF 1901 KLEE SEEMS to have given up any hope of making a name for himself as a poet, but he was still looking to poetry as inspiration for his visual work. Early in 1902 he admitted to painting “with venomous pleasure on themes from a German sentimental poet” (“mal ich mit giftiger Lust an einem deutsch sentimentalen Poeten”).1 Later that same year Klee wrote a letter to Lily Stumpf in which he reflected on what he had accomplished since his student years. He acknowledged that his early efforts in the visual arts were poetic (“rein poëtisch”) rather than pictorial (“malerisch”).2 At about the same time he vowed in a diary entry to relinquish his poetic proclivities and focus his attention on the formal elements of visual art.3 When asked in 1919 and again in 1920 to supply autobiographical notes for Wilhelm Hausenstein and Leopold Zahn, both of whom were preparing publications on his work, he revised diary entry #429, in each case labeling the passage a retrospective assessment. Summarizing what he judged in hindsight to be an objective that had shaped his artistic identity, Klee pointed out to Hausenstein that even in the early years of his artistic practice he had sought a “union of the poetic and the pictorial” (“Versuch der ‘Verbindung von Dichterischem’ [sic] und Bildnerischem”).4 In the set of notes assembled for Zahn, he added that his academic training had instilled a propensity for themes that “were not pictorial, perhaps rather poetic” (“nicht bildnerisch, vielleicht wohl dichterisch”).5 What Klee meant by the designation “poetic” in 1902 is not entirely clear since he offered no explanation. His intended meaning can only be inferred from what he did say and by comparing his words to his visual images, as he himself did. In the letter to Lily Stumpf he remarked that the poetic was not confined to subject matter alone,6 and in the Diaries he noted with regret that his poetic tendencies had shifted from the lyrical to the satirical.7 Klee’s choice of the terms “lyrical” and “satirical” implies that he equated the poetic with certain literary genres and their pictorial counterparts. His early works support this supposition. His atmospheric landscapes dating from 1899 can be described as lyrical, while some of his drawings from 1902 foreshadow the satirical Inventions on which he began work in 1903.8 Despite variations in phrasing, the letter to Lily Stumpf and the three versions of diary entry #429 imply that in 1902 Klee viewed poetic painting as similar to poetry in its subject matter and also in the way it communicates meaning.

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By 1919 and 1920 — when Klee used the 1902 letter to draft the autobiographical statements for Hausenstein and Zahn — he would have been familiar with modernist variants on the term “poetic,” but he retained the contrast between the poetic and the pictorial in his notes. Presumably he did so not only in the interest of preserving chronological consistency but also out of a desire to establish a historical record of his dual allegiances to the poetic and the pictorial. However, looking at his visual production from the second decade of the twentieth century, it is clear that Klee had processed the vocabulary of early modernist theory and criticism. His own experiments with pictorial abstraction leave no doubt that he understood the shift in critical thinking that reframed the poeticpictorial opposition as a contrast between visual representation that was literary, or literally descriptive, and painting that Apollinaire deemed poetic because it did not attempt to imitate observable reality. Even after Klee had embraced Apollinaire’s concept of poetic painting, he never renounced his affinity for images and themes that were common to poetry. There is evidence throughout his creative practice that he referred to poetic texts — contemporary as well as canonical — not only for subject matter but also for devices that he adapted to the process of transferring poetic figures from textual to pictorial settings. As Klee negotiated the transfer, he submitted his figurative vocabulary to the reductive process of abstraction, making his images poetic in the way that modernists used the term. Representative examples of Klee’s war images from 1913 to 1916 support the speculation that he began the process of imposing his own visual signature on Apollinaire’s concept of poetic painting by experimenting with visual images and compositional structures that parallel the full spectrum of poetry dating from the First World War. Klee was not drafted until March 1916. Knowing that conscription was only a matter of time, he took full advantage of the reprieve to pursue his studio work. With few exceptions, Klee’s images of war date from this time. Since he had seen no military action at first hand, his war imagery must have been derived from sources that substituted for lived experience. As he waited for the inevitable, he kept informed of developments on the front lines by absorbing accounts that were as ostensibly objective as newspaper reports illustrated with military maps and as personal as conversations with soldiers on leave from active duty, including his friend Marc. He would also have had access to the war poetry published in periodicals such as Der Sturm and Die Aktion. Not all of Germany’s poets were obsessed with the war, but few ignored it altogether. There were those who wrote about war from the relative comfort of their ivory towers, while others were drafted and sent into battle. Their perspectives on the war therefore ranged from that of remote spectator to shell-shocked combatant. Klee’s visual images of war span the same emotional range, in part because he so successfully internalized the imagery and technical devices of contemporary war poetry.9

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Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Fig. 16: Paul Klee, The War Strides over a Village (1914/179). Watercolor on paper mounted on cardboard, 17.4 ⫻ 10.5 cm. Private collection, Germany. © 2006 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Photograph courtesy of the Zentrum Paul Klee.

As Patrick Bridgwater observes in an important study of German poetry of the First World War, one of the most memorable poems about war from this period is Georg Heym’s “The War” (“Der Krieg”).10 Written early in 1911, long before the declaration of war but just a year before Heym’s accidental death by drowning, this poem evokes a prophetic vision of horrors the poet himself would never witness. Although personified as a menacing presence with a black hand and head, Heym’s vision of war is also a conceptual abstraction characterized by analogies, one of which is a tower (“einem Turm gleich tritt er”). Not only did Klee insert a visual form of the same analogy in The War Strides over a Village (D. Krieg schreitet üb. e. Ortschaft, 1914/179) (fig. 16) but he activated his image by replicating one of Heym’s most effective poetic strategies. Beginning with the fifth stanza, Heym structured his verbal images so that they seem to detonate and implode, evoking the craters of destruction left in the wake of war: Eine grosse Stadt versank in gelbem A great city sank in yellow Rauch, smoke, Warf sich lautlos in des Abgrunds Threw itself soundlessly Bauch. into the belly of the abyss.11 Klee spatialized this device in The War Strides over a Village. Using the visual vocabulary stockpiled for a series of watercolors begun during a trip

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Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Fig. 17: Paul Klee, View of the Severely Threatened City of Pinz (1915/187). China ink and watercolor on paper mounted on cardboard, 14 ⫻ 21.7 cm. Foundation Dieter Scharf Collection in memory of Otto Gerstenberg (Kat. 126), Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Germany. © 2006 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Photograph by Joerg P. Anders; Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz / Art Resource, New York.

to Tunisia in 1914, he defined multiple points of convergence and constructed clusters of visual abstractions that verge on collapse like the biblical Gomorrah that is the last word in Heym’s poem (“Pech und Feuer träufet unten auf Gomorrh”). In his visual practice, as in his writing, Klee selectively appropriated the formal strategies of German expressionist poets. His View of the Severely Threatened City of Pinz (Ansicht der schwer bedrohten Stadt Pinz, 1915/187) (fig. 17) parallels Wilhelm Klemm’s “Rethel” in terms of its spatial structure and light effects. Published in Die Aktion on 21 November 1914, Klemm’s “Rethel” is the word picture of a town in the Ardennes he had marched through and described in a prose sketch, which he subsequently reworked into a three-stanza poem.12 Klemm’s poetic cityscape is at once vividly evocative and eerily unreal. To give his short poem the sensory impact of visual representation, he skillfully manipulated figurative

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language, color references, and perspective. Klee’s drawing with watercolor makes reference to Klemm’s visual cues, the most obvious being his shifting point of view. Utilizing a few well-chosen words, Klemm began by sketching the contours of distant ruins (“Feierlich ragen die riesigen, nächtlichen Schlote”), abruptly zoomed in to focus on a dark street (“Eine pechschwarze Gasse verschlingt die Kolonne”), then pulled back again to a panoramic perspective (“Und nun blankt totenweiss die Trümmerstadt”). Klee recreated these shifts with a composite view that combines bird’s-eye perspective with legible street signage and multiple points of convergence, which he would subsequently describe in his notes on perspective as deviations from central perspective using variable viewpoints.13 Like Klemm, Klee cast the visual evidence of warfare in a paradoxically seductive light. His image of the city of Pinz is bathed in a pallid watercolor wash that is as strangely beautiful as Klemm’s image of moonlight strutting “pinkly” over piles of debris (“Prahlt rosa auf Backsteinbergen”). Despite similarities of perspective and lighting, Klee’s View of the Severely Threatened City of Pinz does not literally illustrate Klemm’s “Rethel,” which was not Klee’s intention. On the contrary, by 1915 he was experimenting with ways in which the metaphorical language of poetry could be adapted to pictorial images that are poetic in the sense that Apollinaire used the term, namely, as a synonym for visual vocabulary that challenges the mimetic tradition. To transform Klemm’s Rethel into his own fictional city of Pinz, Klee freely interpreted the catalogue of verbal imagery in the first stanza of the poem. Retaining only visual allusions to the “nocturnal chimneys” (“nächtliche Schlote”) in the first line, he reduced Klemm’s “pyramids of rubble” (“Pyramiden von Schutt”) and “mountains of bricks” (“Backsteinberge”) to a staggered succession of overlapping triangles, stripping down the “burned-out factories” (“verbrannte Fabriken”) of Rethel to outlined forms that resemble negative transparencies. The dark center of the painting is defined by a concentration of scribbled and crosshatched linear patterns that substitute one of Klee’s own metaphors for Klemm’s poetic imagery. At the beginning of 1915 Klee invoked the horrors of war in a passage from the Diaries that articulates his concept of pictorial abstraction. Reflecting philosophically on the correlation between disorder in the world and abstraction in art, he envisioned the vocabulary of abstraction as a cavernous pit of fragmented forms (“In der grossen Formgrube liegen Trümmer”).14 It is this metaphor that is given visual form in View of the Severely Threatened City of Pinz. The controlled geometric abstraction that characterizes works such as View of the Severely Threatened City of Pinz was occasionally enlivened by the satirical humor Klee never entirely suppressed in either his poetry or his visual images. This facet of his sensibility would have resonated with the acerbic predictions spewed out in staccato rhythms by Alfred Lichtenstein in the summer of 1914. Like Lichtenstein, Klee harbored no

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Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Fig. 18: Paul Klee, When I Was a Recruit (1916/81). Pen on paper mounted on cardboard, 17.3 ⫻11 cm. Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, Livia Klee donation. © 2006 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Photograph courtesy of the Zentrum Paul Klee.

illusions about the heroism of combat. Shortly before being sent to the front lines, Lichtenstein penned “Leaving for the Front” (“Abschied”), a pessimistic but prescient testament to the probability that he would not return: Wir ziehn zum Krieg. Der Tod is We are going off to war. Death is unser Kitt. our bond. O, heulte mir doch die Geliebte nit. Oh, if only my girlfriend would stop howling.15 Lichtenstein’s colloquial language, short sentences, and end rhymes inject his parting poetic gesture with wry humor. Klee used similar means to achieve much the same effect in When I Was a Recruit (Als ich Rekrut war, 1916/81) (fig. 18), one of only a few drawings that document his actual military experience. Compared to the complexity and technical virtuosity of View of the Severely Threatened City of Pinz, When I Was a Recruit is selfconsciously awkward in its spatial relationships, obsessive cross-hatching, and visual rhyming. Although the soldiers depicted in Klee’s drawing are decked out in uniform and stand at attention, they hardly seem prepared for warfare, let alone eager to take up arms. Their caricatured facial features and dazed expressions subversively belie any patriotic promise of glory in battle.

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Fig. 19: Paul Klee, ab ovo (1917/130). Watercolor on primed gauze on paper mounted on cardboard, 14.9 ⫻ 26.6 cm. Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern. © 2006 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Photograph courtesy of the Zentrum Paul Klee.

Because Klee was not assigned to front-line duty, there were stretches of time during the war years when he could focus his attention on the profession he hoped to resume. In his Diaries he crafted some of the quotable aphorisms about the creative process that he would reiterate and reformulate over the next decade. The creative process was also a recurring theme in his visual production, an example being ab ovo, 1917/130 (fig. 19). The title of Klee’s painting is a phrase quoted from Horace, who used it in his Satires and in the Ars Poetica, a treatise on the art of poetry written in poetic form.16 One section of the Ars Poetica is devoted to an argument in defense of balancing historical facts with poetic invention. To illustrate the effectiveness of this kind of balance, Horace cited the Iliad, noting that Homer refrained from indulging in wordy descriptions of all the events leading up to the Trojan War, beginning with the complications surrounding the birth of Helen of Troy. Horace himself followed the example set by Homer, substituting the words “ab ovo” for a lengthy exposé of Leda’s double egg and Helen’s twin birth (“nec gemino bellum Troianum orditur ab ovo”).17 With its two ovoid shapes, one in the center of a horizontal composition, the other to the right of center, Klee’s ab ovo visually configures Horace’s mythological allusion. If this were the only level of meaning implicit in Klee’s title and its analogous visual image, the subject of the

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painting would conform to the expectations of the ut pictura poesis tradition as it had been practiced for centuries. The fact that Klee’s formal vocabulary falls outside the parameters of that tradition indicates his intention to reinterpret the oft-quoted phrase from Horace’s Ars Poetica. The phrase ut pictura poesis occurs in the section of Horace’s treatise devoted to the calling and training of a poet. It introduces a passage commenting on the circumstances of perception as a determining factor in judging the relative merits of both painting and poetry.18 From a contemporary perspective, it is not difficult to imagine how Horace’s observations could be applied to a reception theory. Historically, however, the term ut pictura poesis was excerpted from its original context and applied to a theory of painting that posits parallels between painting and poetry. In returning to the source of the term ut pictura poesis, Klee would have discovered that even though Horace mentioned painting only briefly, he did offer advice and axioms that are as applicable to painting as they are to poetry. For example, Horace could state with authority that familiar subjects pose the most formidable challenge to a poet’s capacity for invention (“difficile est proprie communia dicere”)19 because he himself had taken on just such a subject in his Ars Poetica. Klee rose to the same challenge in ab ovo, using Horace’s poem on the art of poetry as his model for a picture about the art of painting and the poetic figure “ab ovo” as his prototype for a visual metaphor of the creative process. By quoting Horace’s “ab ovo” as his title, Klee provided a verbal aid to reading his visual image and pointed to a poetic context for constructing meaning. The title identifies the two ovoid shapes as eggs, here lodged in nests of watercolor, gauze, and chalk.20 Given the source of the title, the eggs no doubt allude to Leda’s biological anomaly, but they are no more literally descriptive than Horace’s verbal image. Just as Horace conceived the phrase “ab ovo” to condense a complex set of narrative circumstances into a concise figure of speech, so Klee reduced what could have been an illustrative image to a richly suggestive pictorial metaphor. In applying Horace’s ideas and example to visual imagery, he began to revise the ut pictura poesis paradigm from a modernist perspective. Even without benefit of the title, it is readily apparent that the smaller ovals within the two eggs — one pale violet, the other blue — represent points of formal genesis. Emerging from these germinating points is a heart, and farther to the left is an arrowhead. Not coincidentally, the heart and the arrow are both symbols Klee subsequently used to illustrate his theories of pictorial construction.21 Alternatively, the oval forms could be interpreted as abstractions of human ovaries, in which case the adjacent arrowhead would logically be understood as a phallic symbol. These disembodied anatomical parts assume symbolic coherence in the context of an entry in Klee’s Diaries that refers to the “primitive female and male” (“urweiblich [und] urmännlich”) components of a visual image.22 Whatever figurative analogies and

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Fig. 20: Paul Klee, Flower Myth (1918/82). Watercolor on primed gauze on paper mounted on cardboard, 29 ⫻ 15.8 cm. Sprengel Museum, Hannover, Sprengel Collection. © 2006 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Photograph courtesy of the Sprengel Museum.

metaphorical connotations are encoded in Klee’s painting, its constituent parts can also be read as dynamically calibrated pairs of formal opposites: curves and angles, light and dark tones, warm and cool colors.23 Given that these formal elements are visual metaphors that independently communicate and reinforce the symbolic connotations of the title and imagery, ab ovo is a poetic painting in the modernist sense. Klee pursued his experiments with a modernist concept of poetic painting in Flower Myth (Blumenmythos, 1918/82) (fig. 20). In this work he manipulated figure/ground relationships to generate an image that is intended to be perceived simultaneously as a rainbow-hued landscape and a dismembered female torso anchored in place by a crescent-shaped flower.24 Strategically placed above a graphically rendered female pudendum, the bulb of the flower corresponds anatomically to a womb, while the stem, blossom, and stamen double as a substitute phallus, a role that is reinforced by the single-minded bird. Flower Myth perpetuates the historically

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gendered stereotypes that figure in literary and visual metaphors of the creative process. The literary history of these figures is played out in a range of genres, from Ovid’s lyric poetry to Renaissance treatises on aesthetics, as well as in Jules Michelet’s oddly rhapsodic social studies of gendered identity.25 In Flower Myth Klee transformed an eclectic mix of literary figures into pictorial metaphors of the opposing generative forces that exist in nature and art. The central motif is a blue flower, which visually configures the elusive symbol envisioned by Friedrich von Hardenberg, better known as Novalis. Recontextualized in Klee’s painting, the flower from Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen gives concrete form to Goethe’s “Urpflanze,” a term describing a conceptual image that symbolizes the cyclical process of organic growth.26 Just as Goethe’s “Urpflanze” is an archetypal symbol rather than the verbal image of any particular flower, so Klee’s painting is not simply a pictorial reflection on the germination and growth of a single flower or a single picture but rather visual affirmation of the theory that art imitates nature. In linking the process of artistic creation to human sexuality and to the larger scheme of nature’s reproductive systems, Klee gave multiple levels of meaning to his assertion that “art is a metaphor for creation” (“Kunst verhält sich zur Schöpfung gleichnisartig”).27 Flower Myth is a pictorial amplification of an idea formulated in Klee’s Diaries: A picture representing a “naked person” must not be created by the laws of anatomy, but only by those of compositional anatomy. First one builds an armature on which the picture is to be constructed. How far one goes beyond this armature is a matter of choice. [Ein Bild mit dem Gegenstand: “nackter Mensch” ist nicht menschenanatomisch, sondern bild-anatomisch zu gestalten. Man konstruiert fürs erste ein Gerüst der zu bauenden Malerei. Wie weit man über dieses Gerüst hinausgeht ist frei.]28

The armature on which Klee constructed Flower Myth is a female torso, abstracted and fragmented almost beyond recognition. With the addition of a flat field of warm pink, sprinkled with elegantly refined botanical and celestial imagery, he transformed the female anatomy into the compositional anatomy of an imaginary landscape. Although the additions reconfigure and add symbolic value to a partial figure that would otherwise resemble an ancient sculptural fragment, they do not disguise the fact that the female body is dismembered. Cut off at the shoulders, biceps, and upper thighs, the torso all but fills a rectangular frame. The bulging curves of the torso and the angular inserts that wedge it into a shallow pictorial space generate the same dynamic interplay of formal contrasts that informs ab ovo. A similar play of binary oppositions is found in Grosz’s John, the Woman Killer (John, Der Frauenmörder). Like Flower Myth, Grosz’s painting dates from 1918. Both works exemplify what Maria Tatar has characterized

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as murderous sexuality in the guise of modernist aesthetic practice, which developed in a culture that had a morbid fascination with sexual violence.29 Sexual allusion had become more explicit in the half century that separates Klee’s painting from Nietzsche’s image of nature as a feminine presence that must “sigh over her dismemberment into individuals” (“über ihre Zerstückelung in Individuen zu seufzen habe”).30 Like Nietzsche’s trope, Klee’s partial female figure is a symbol of fertility, and like the female figure in Grosz’s painting, she is a victim of dismemberment. In his depiction of John, the Woman Killer, Grosz took on the role of “Jackt the Ripper,” [sic] one of the shady characters who stalk and strut through the poem he entitled “Berlin 1917.”31 Klee, too, activated the same destructive instincts in Flower Myth, directing his experience with composing by editing and cutting into a form of vicarious violence. Placed in the context of the cultural discourse that dominated the early Weimar Republic, the disfiguring process of fragmentation evident in both Klee’s and Grosz’s images can be seen as a covert form of violence against women, whose erotic energy posed as much of a threat in the domestic arena as the victorious enemy had posed on the battlefronts of the war.32 On the surface Klee’s wartime experience and personal relationships would not seem to constitute a convincing rationale for such passive, selfconsciously disguised aggression. Although Klee served in the German military until the end of the war, his assignments as repairman, transport courier, and office clerk would have been considered cushy by Grosz and other artists more directly exposed to frontline combat. Moreover, any delays Klee experienced in establishing his professional reputation were decidedly insignificant compared to the tragic deaths of his friends and fellow soldiers August Macke and Franz Marc. As for any suppressed anger toward women, only circumstantial evidence hints at a personal dimension to the contemporary complexes about female sexuality.33 One explanation for Klee’s participation in the widespread sanctioning of vicarious violence is to postulate an inchoate desire to avenge the creative potential lost in the war and, more particularly, to memorialize Marc. In support of this conjecture, Flower Myth can be seen as a pictorial text that parallels the ideas articulated in a diary entry in which Klee retrospectively analyzed his relationship to Marc. Klee set the mood for his musing on the differences between Marc and himself with a descriptive passage similar in its imagery to the landscape in Flower Myth: During the day magnificent midsummer flora made things unusually colorful, and late at night and before dawn, a firmament unfolded before me that lured my soul into vast expanses. [Tags stimmte eine fabelhafte Hoch-sommerflora [sic] ausserdem noch besonders farbig und nachts und vor Sonnenaufgang spannte sich über mir und vor mir ein Firmament das die Seele in grosse Räume dahinzog.]34

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This passage reads like a prose sketch not only for Flower Myth but also for some of Klee’s poems, including the one from 1917 beginning “Because I came, blossoms opened.”35 As such, it references the two spheres of Klee’s creative activity. Given this double allusion to the creative process, it comes as no surprise that Klee concluded his diary entry with the observation that “art is like creation” (“Kunst ist wie Schöpfung”), a theoretical summation that is rephrased and expanded upon in the “Creative Credo” and other writings.36 Klee’s descriptive prose and pithy aphorism frame a carefully worded memorial to Marc that both contextualizes the gendered imagery of Flower Myth and lends credence to a second conjecture about the use of vicarious violence. In the context of this memorial tribute, the female torso doubling as a fertile landscape setting could represent what Klee perceived as Marc’s feminine urge to give and to bond with the earth, while the doubly gendered flower symbolizes Klee’s aspiration to be in harmony with the divine and, by implication, to achieve the status of independent, self-sufficient creator.37 Klee’s reductive figuration would be consistent with the speculative assumption that pictorial violence against women and abstraction of their images were successive steps in their eventual elimination, thus allowing for the appropriation of their biological role in the creative process.38 It is surely no coincidence that Klee’s strategy of formal reduction resulted in a constellation of imagery in which the dominant image and only active agent is the central flower, which becomes a symbol of his own artistic autogamy. In Flower Myth, as in ab ovo, Klee distilled a creation myth into a multilayered symbolic abstraction. Using a different formal vocabulary, he continued to probe the potential of symbolic language during the twenties in works such as Cathedral (Kathedrale, 1924/138) (fig. 21). This painting contains a poetic figure of flight, although that realization becomes apparent only in the temporal process of analysis. Klee’s title is descriptive yet nonspecific. The cathedrals of medieval Europe survived in the culture of modernism as useful symbols invoked across artistic media. In the first of three “cathedral poems” published in the 1907 edition of New Poetry (Neue Gedichte), Rainer Maria Rilke anthropomorphized the cathedral as a towering presence “in dem alten / Faltenmantel ihrer Contreforts / dasteht” (“wearing the folds of its grey buttresses / like some old coat”).39 In the second poem he compared a cathedral portal to a natural rock formation left behind by a retreating tide.40 Rilke’s water imagery was transferred to another medium in Claude Debussy’s musical composition La Cathédrale engloutie, a 1910 piano prelude that plumbs the murky depths of Breton legend. The curious title alludes to the cathedral of Ys, which was purportedly engulfed by the sea in the fourth or fifth century and periodically reappears at sunrise. Using a melodic line supported by chordal structures with chromatic value, Debussy attempted to evoke a visual mirage through sound.41 This impressionistic exercise in

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Fig. 21: Paul Klee, Cathedral (1924/138). Watercolor and oil on paper mounted on cardboard, mounted on wood panel, 29.845 ⫻ 35.2425 cm. The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, acquired 1942. © 2006 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Photograph courtesy of The Phillips Collection.

musical imagism is altogether different in spirit from Lyonel Feininger’s 1919 woodcut, originally entitled Cathedral (fig. 22). Designed as the title page for the program announcement of the Weimar Bauhaus, Feininger’s cubistic gloss on architectural historicism gives visual form to director Walter Gropius’s “crystalline symbol of a new faith” (“als kristallenes Sinnbild eines neuen kommenden Glaubens”).42 In predictably provocative fashion, Schwitters appropriated Feininger’s title for his 1920 portfolio of lithographs, which suggest an alternative approach to Gropius’s call for a new social and aesthetic order.43 Variants of the word “Kathedrale” and its corresponding image are also found in two poems by Schwitters that provide useful points of comparison in analyzing Klee’s visual image. Gropius recruited Klee to join the Bauhaus, where he taught from 1921 to 1931, first in Weimar and then in Dessau following the 1925 move. Like many of the experimental works that date from Klee’s Bauhaus

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Fig. 22: Lyonel Feininger, Cathedral, 1919. Woodcut, II proof, work number 1923, 305 x 189 mm. The Cleveland Museum of Art, gift of The Print Club of Cleveland (1952.24). © 2006 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Photograph courtesy of The Cleveland Museum of Art.

years, Cathedral combines the graphic precision of drawing with the color and texture of painting. This technical hybrid is also a doubly coded image that requires two modes of perception and comprehension. The cathedral is visually perceived, yet the individual signs that configure the image are arranged like the signs of a verbal text. Individually the signs function either descriptively (the arched windows) or symbolically (the “X” that signifies structural support). Collectively they represent the form of a cathedral, which is set off against a field of mottled color. The structural relationship between line and color in Klee’s Cathedral had a precedent in Schwitters’s “Simultaneous Poem” (“Simultangedicht / kaa gee dee”), a 1919 experiment in dada sound poetry written for three voices. The principal voice articulates combinations of phonetic fragments from the nouns “Kathedrale” and “Gedicht,” intoning a text that is projected against a background chorus of alliterative, plosive sounds: kaa gee dee katedraale draale kaa tee dee kateedraale draale

takepak take takepak takepak take takepak

tapekek tape kek kek tapekek tape kek kek44

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Fig. 23: Kurt Schwitters, “Doof,” 1922. © 2006 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. © 1973 DuMont Literatur und Kunst Verlag.

Enunciated simultaneously as related refrains, the sounds of the second and third voices establish a contrapuntal relationship with the principal voice. Like Schwitters’s poem, Klee’s Cathedral layers the clearly articulated image of a cathedral over a nonrepresentational yet subtly differentiated background. Another poem by Schwitters anticipated Klee’s delineation of figurative imagery with signs arranged in such a manner that they obviate the traditional distinctions between poetic and pictorial syntax. In “Doof,” dating from 1922 (fig. 23) words and syllabic fragments are stacked into a shape that resembles a cathedral tower. Were it not for his title, Schwitters’s poem might reasonably be interpreted as an homage to Apollinaire’s calligrammes, which were highly regarded in critical circles sympathetic to modernism.45 Although Apollinaire’s name is never mentioned in Schwitters’s voluminous critical writing, a title that translates as “Dumb” would hardly suggest an intention to emulate. Regardless of Schwitters’s opinion of Apollinaire’s calligrammes, his own “Doof” is a neatly turned exercise in spatializing linguistic signs so that they represent visually as well as verbally. Like the linguistic units in Schwitters’s classic example of shaped poetry, the individual signs in Klee’s Cathedral are horizontally aligned; they also accumulate vertically into a visual image occupying a space that is indeterminate because it is both textual and pictorial. Even though Klee’s signs are visual rather than verbal, he did introduce a verbal substitute for a visual image, thereby inverting Schwitters’s process of making a visual form with verbal signs.

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At first glance the verbal sign incorporated into the spatial structure of Cathedral appears to be accidental. Closer scrutiny reveals that Klee isolated and subtly reinforced the partial watermark of the French paper manufacturer Canson et Montgolfier. The embossed names, an imprimatur of high quality, are visible in a number of Klee’s works on paper. Cut off either by chance or design, in Cathedral they are in the upper left corner and read as ON & MONTGOLFIER. At some point in the application of ground and paint layers, Klee appropriated the cropped embossment, evidently with the intention of incorporating it into his visual image. As a syllabic fragment, ON assumes a much broader range of referential possibilities than the full name CANSON. It is nevertheless linked by the ampersand to the name MONTGOLFIER, which establishes a primary frame of reference.46 Jacques-Étienne and Joseph-Michel Montgolfier were eighteenth-century French inventors who financed their scientific experiments with income from the family’s successful paper manufacturing firm.47 The Montgolfier brothers engineered the first untethered, manned flight in a hot-air balloon, which wafted over Paris for a scant twenty-five minutes on 21 November 1783, capturing the attention of the scientific community and the popular imagination alike. In celebration of their feat, the press dubbed their heat-powered balloon the “montgolfière,” an etymological derivation that would still have had common currency in the early twentieth century. Read as another fragment, like ON, the name MONTGOLFIER becomes the linguistic substitute for the displaced image of a “montgolfière.” Assuming this to be the case, the substitution raises the question of why Klee would have used a word fragment instead of the image of a hot-air balloon. Historical circumstance provides one possible explanation. The most literal-minded viewers in the twenties might have linked the image of a balloon to the scientific experiments of the physicist and balloon pilot Auguste Piccard, their contemporary and a Montgolfier successor. Such an association would have doomed Klee’s landscape to the illustrative status of the popular prints produced to document the “montgolfière’s” inaugural flight over the Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris.48 In choosing to use the image of an unidentified cathedral as the visual foil for a verbal symbol, Klee set himself the challenge of turning a merely picturesque image into a poetic one. In what appears to have been a deliberate act of poetic intervention, Klee capitalized on the fragmented indeterminacy of a partial watermark to experiment with poetic devices in a pictorial setting. Placed in a linguistic context, the German word “Ballon” has a rhymed as well as an orthographic relationship to the syllabic fragment ON. By substituting the word MONTGOLFIER for the image of a “Ballon,” Klee in effect replaced end rhyme with internal assonance. The substitution also gave him license to introduce verbal figures of speech into his vocabulary of visual symbols.

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Read as a synonym for the image of a balloon, the word MONTGOLFIER functions metonymically. As a metonymic substitute with biographical, historical, and commercial associations, it exemplifies Klee’s use of verbal abstractions as a means of expanding the frame of reference for his visual abstractions. As a symbol of flight, it adds an experimental dimension to an idea that recurs throughout Klee’s visual production as well as in his writing. Like Odilon Redon, who preceded him with The Eye, Like a Strange Balloon, Moves Toward Infinity (L’Oeil comme un ballon bizarre se dirige vers l’infini, 1882), and Albert Lamorisse, who followed suit with The Red Balloon (Le Ballon rouge, 1956), Klee often invoked the balloon as a multidimensional symbol of flight. Klee’s balloon image proliferates in postwar landscapes such as B.(Delicate Landscape) (B.[zarte Landschaft], 1918/69) and With the Balloon (Mit d. Luft Ballon, 1918/112), then recurs with some frequency between 1922 and 1929, notably in Red Balloon (Roter Ballon, 1922/179) and The Balloon (Der Luftballon, 1926/153).49 As Sara Lynn Henry has shown, the hot-air balloon illustrating Klee’s Gymnasium physics book would have provided a handy visual reference for the shape and trappings of a vintage gas balloon.50 The fact that Klee usually eliminated the quaint historical details in his pictorial images suggests that he was less interested in the cultural history of ballooning than in the potential value of the balloon motif in visualizing the symbolic implications of flight. Klee occasionally cited the mechanics of flight, as in a lecture given at the Bauhaus on 29 February 1924, in which he related the physics of flight to the principles of movement in a work of art.51 More typically his references to flight figure in descriptions of dream imagery, where they take on metaphysical connotations. An oft-quoted entry from the Diaries begins: “Dream. I flew home, where the beginning lies” (“Traum / Ich flog nach Haus, wo der Anfang ist”).52 During the early years of the war Klee invoked flight as a metaphor for the strategies he devised to distance himself and his pictorial vocabulary from the realities of the external world, as in the following: “And to work my way out of my ruins, I had to fly. And I flew” (“Um mich aus meinen Trümmern herauszuarbeiten musste ich fliegen. Und ich flog”).53 The romantic sensibility that engendered these escapist fantasies shifts from the domain of the personal to the theoretical in a passage from the lecture Klee delivered at the Jena Kunstverein on 26 January 1924. Reflecting on the frustrations inherent in what he deemed to be “Romanticism . . . in its crassly pathetic phase” (“die Romantik in ihre besonders krasse pathetische Phase”), Klee observed that this form of expression “tries convulsively to fly from the earth” (“diese Gebärde will in Stössen von der Erde weg”).54 Not surprisingly, Klee couched his assessment of the historical phase of Romanticism in a trope that was common to the tradition itself. In Romantic poetry from the nineteenth to the early

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twentieth century, there are literally hundreds of figurative images of flight, among them Klee’s own Woe Is Me in the Gale Wind (fig. 8). As he constructed the image he entitled Cathedral, Klee discovered another such poetic figure in the name MONTGOLFIER. Whether Klee’s verbal images of flight are couched in confessional or theoretical terms, they are always charged with personal meaning. The same is true of his verbal substitute for a pictorial image of flight. As if to underscore his intention, he signed Cathedral in the upper left corner, just above the fragmented watermark, thus associating his own name with the multiple connotations of the name MONTGOLFIER. Throughout the twenties and into the early thirties Klee continued to experiment with a range of graphic media and techniques as vehicles for visualizing poetic ideas. Not long after he left Germany in 1933 and resettled in Bern, he began to feel the physical effects of scleroderma, the debilitating condition that would claim his life in the summer of 1940. During the last two years of Klee’s artistic practice, drawing was a principal means of expression. In line drawings that are as expressive as they are economical he composed visual codas to some of the poetic texts that had stimulated his imagination for almost forty years. Foremost among these are the sixteen drawings that envision Dante’s Inferno as The Infernal Park (Der Inferner Park). Klee’s fourteen Urchs drawings dating from 1939–40 likewise allude to poetry, albeit poetry that is entirely different in spirit.55 In this series of drawings Klee transformed the traditional bestiary into a multi-referential commentary on the language of poetry — visual as well as verbal. For any modernist intent on contemporizing the meaning of “poetic” as it applied to painting and drawing, the bestiary posed a particularly tenacious challenge to entrenched tradition. From its classical origins the bestiary evolved into a collection of moralizing tales featuring both real and imaginary animals. Illustrated versions proliferated in medieval manuscripts and early printed books, managed to survive in the literary and visual culture of early modern Europe, finally experiencing a resurgence in popularity during the twentieth century. The genre was revived in poetic form by Apollinaire, a voracious reader whose eclectic tastes included medieval bestiaries. His Bestiary or Parade of Orpheus (Le Bestiaire ou, Cortège d’Orphée) comprises thirty poems. Eighteen were published in the journal La Phalange in 1908 and the entire collection appeared three years later in a limited edition of 120 copies.56 The rhymed verses, four to six lines in length, are traditional in form but not in content. Leavening a conventional mix of classical lore and biblical allusion with ironic inversion and a good measure of bawdy wit, Apollinaire concocted a sequence of pithy verbal portraits. Given that there are four poems dedicated to the mythical poet Orpheus interspersed throughout Apollinaire’s bestiary, it should come as no surprise that virtually all the poems are in some way autobiographical.

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A typical example is “The Octopus” (“Le Poulpe”), which substitutes modern metaphor for anachronistic allegory and self-reflexive commentary on the art of writing poetry for medieval morality: Jetant son encre vers les cieux, Suçant le sang de ce qu’il aime Et le trouvant délicieux, Ce monstre inhumain, c’est moi-même.

Flinging his ink toward the heavens, Sucking the blood from all he loves And finding it delicious, This inhuman monster is myself.57

Evidently Apollinaire had an illustrated bestiary in mind from the inception of the project. He may well have hoped for illustrations from Pablo Picasso, but in the end he engaged Raoul Dufy, then a struggling artist who had no experience with illustration. Won over by Apollinaire’s confident predictions of fame and fortune, Dufy rose to the occasion by imposing a modern design sensibility on traditional techniques of woodblock printing.58 He and Apollinaire were surely disappointed by their skimpy financial returns, but they must have been pleased with the book. The poems and illustrations complement each other in their visual properties as well as their finesse with figurative imagery. The layout follows a format typical of early printed bestiaries. Each page is headed by the title of the poem, with Dufy’s framed image occupying the center, followed by Apollinaire’s printed text. The distribution of text and image establishes a pattern of inversions in the relationship between positive and negative spaces, whereby the contrast between light and dark in the woodblock prints is in inverse proportion to the contrast between the typeset lettering and the expanse of the white page. This pattern of inversions is the unifying visual principle of an exceptionally handsome livre d’artiste. With very few exceptions, artists’ books from the early twentieth century pair texts with visual images that are unapologetically — even conventionally — illustrative, which accurately describes Dufy’s woodcuts. As a poet Apollinaire had taken considerable liberties with the traditional bestiary, but when it came to selecting visual parallels to his poetry, he apparently preferred imagery that was not poetic in the way he himself would define the term in his article “Die moderne Malerei.” By the time Klee took on the bestiary theme in the late thirties, his own experience with book illustration was two decades behind him.59 In the intervening years he had come to understand how poetry could spawn visual images that are poetic as opposed to illustrative. He was also using the term “poetic” to specify metaphorical language rather than subject matter that was either borrowed directly from a literary text or was literally representational. This was what he meant when he urged his students to consider “the poetic, not the literary.”60 He demonstrated this distinction in his Urchs drawings. The titles describe a range of actions (URCHS horchend [eavesdropping], 1939/1031, fliehender URCHS [fleeing],

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Fig. 24: Paul Klee, ORCHS, as Relative (1940/61). Chalk on paper mounted on cardboard, 20.5 ⫻ 29.6 cm. Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern. © 2006 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Photograph courtesy of the Zentrum Paul Klee.

1939/1080), attitudes (URCHS, unschlüssig [indecisive], 1939/1030, URCHS ärgerlich [annoyed], 1939/1052), and identities (URCHSenPaar [partners], 1939/1082, URCHS und Nachwuchs [parents], 1939/1056). Another title, which incorporates a verbal hybrid of Urchs and the noun “Ochse,” suggests a relationship between an Urchs and the familiar ox: ORCHS, as Relative (ORCHS, als Anverwandter, 1940/61) (fig. 24).61 Given that verbal suggestion is supported by visual evidence, most Klee scholars concur that the beast depicted in the Urchs drawings is a derivative of the long extinct but once terrifying aurochs, the primal ancestor of the domesticated ox.62 Visual sources cited as inspiration for Klee’s drawings are more varied, chronologically spanning the five centuries that separate the Renaissance tradition of the Madonna and child from Picasso’s minotaurs.63 A number of poetic sources can be added to the long list of possibilities.

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One readily available poetic model is an untitled poem by Klee recorded in a 1933 pocket diary. The poem is a self-contained bestiary of verbal inventions: Elephantastisch Mammutig Marabulistisch Giganthologie Kentauerochs Herculinarisch

Elephantastic Mammouthy Marabullish Giantology Centaurox Herculinear64

Klee appears to have rewritten Apollinaire’s Bestiary in the spirit of dada and the language of Morgenstern. He retained variants of Apollinaire’s end rhymes and short verses but reduced the poet’s six-line stanza form to a list of compound modifiers and nouns that add to the list of twenty hybrids grafted by Morgenstern in his “New Creations Proposed to Mother Nature” (“Neue Bildungen, der Natur vorgeschlagen”). Among these new creations are an oxsparrow and a peafowlox (“Der Ochsenspatz . . . Der Pfauenochs”).65 Yet another fantastical ox makes a solo appearance in the Gallows Songs, where the beast named in the title “Der Steinochs” taunts the reader with its legendary invincibility.66 Drawing on his seemingly inexhaustible capacity for wordplay, Morgenstern substituted a physical property (stone) for an attribute (strength), thereby transforming the cliché “strong as an ox” into an imaginary beast with implicit genealogical origins in the paleolithic past. The “Kentauerochs” in the fifth line of Klee’s poem extends the pedigree of Morgenstern’s poetic invention to include Greek mythology. Like all Klee’s word combinations, this one could be rearranged within its original setting or even removed and placed in another context without losing its poetic value. In fact, Klee knew that another context would only multiply its potential for generating new forms and new meanings. This was a lesson he had learned from Ovid. In the opening line of the Metamorphoses Ovid stated that his intention was “to tell of forms changed to other bodies.”67 The last work Ovid completed before being exiled from Rome by Emperor Augustus in 8 C.E., the Metamorphoses is a vast historical saga that recounts episodes from Greek mythology, Roman legend, and current events in the thematic context of transformation. As Ovid’s annotators have long recognized, metamorphosis was not only the subject of Ovid’s epic but also the creative principle that shaped both the language and the narrative structure of the poem. As the twelve thousand-line poem unfolds, it becomes increasingly obvious that the omniscient poet is the agent of transformation. Ovid’s dominant presence, whether as third-person narrator or in symbolic guise as the poet Orpheus, introduces the probability that the Metamorphoses is on one level a self-reflexive narrative about how stories are created from other stories and how poems are constructed by transforming existing

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poems.68 Klee owned a bilingual edition of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and cited it as a rich source of information about the subject of his etching Aged Phoenix (Greiser Phönix, 1905/36).69 Although he expressed reservations about the aptness of Ovid’s style for interpreting the unique life span of the phoenix, he must have responded more positively to the theme of metamorphosis, which he appropriated as a unifying subtext of the etched Inventions from 1903–5 that constitute his Opus One. Transformation also proved to be a useful principle in Klee’s pedagogical practice during the twenties and remained a constant source of creative ideas as well. The short poem dating from 1933 quoted above is a case in point. It combines allusions to classical mythology with the vocabulary of evolutionary natural history, whose proponents — including Charles Darwin — were initially known as transformationists.70 Klee applied poetic license to transformationist theory in constructing the verbal derivatives that make up his poem. Leaving aside the question of his other possible models, the six-line poem represents an exercise in transforming literary texts as well as etymological units and in this respect can be characterized as a very condensed version of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Klee’s Urchs drawings represent yet another stage in the ongoing process of transformation. Klee continued a double-centered process of reduction and metamorphosis in naming the subject of the Urchs drawings, the name being a contraction of the “Kentauerochs” in his poem. He had applied the same strategy when he excerpted fragments from five lines of what was presumably a longer poem and used different combinations as both the title and a mirror-written text in the drawing Eternity for Little People (Ewigkeit für kleine Leute, 1939/30).71 Like the title Eternity for Little People, the word Urchs has an element of poetic indeterminacy because it is a fragment. In keeping with the principle of change, the Urchs drawings reverse the reductive process in that they represent an elaboration of one poetic figure embedded in the text of Klee’s 1933 poem. The drawings are clearly not literal depictions of a “Kentauerochs,” any more than the drawing entitled Ovidian (Ovidisch, 1939/26) is an illustration of a specific passage from Ovid’s Metamorphoses.72 Nor was Klee’s poetic bestiary conceived as a verbal sketch for visual images, although any line could have served this purpose after the fact, which seems to have been the case with “Kentauerochs.” In transforming his own verbal invention into visual images that correspond to the transformations indicated in the titles of his Urchs drawings, Klee created a new, doubly coded text. The fourteen Urchs drawings constitute a bestiary that features a single beast and reverses the customary relationship between word and image in other illustrated bestiaries, including the Apollinaire/ Dufy collaboration. In contrast to the pairing of Apollinaire’s poetic text and Dufy’s illustrative visual images, Klee’s Urchs drawings are extended visual metaphors with titles that serve as short, descriptive legends. The legends function

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singly and collectively as verbal signifiers of transformation. The principle of transformation operates on several levels in ORCHS, as Relative. Klee’s Urchs in a state of transition has a bulky body and a large head shown from two points of view to delineate the aurochs’s distinctive horns and curled snout. Layered into this composite view of an aurochs’s head are shapes that resemble an ox’s long snout and nostrils. By using the cubists’ representational device of superimposed, integrated views, Klee implied an evolutionary link between the aurochs and the ox. In doing so he was no doubt conscious of transforming the double-headed Janus from Roman mythology and Ovid’s Metamorphoses into a visual symbol of biological evolution. Klee used line in much the same way Ovid used his story line, namely, as both a vehicle of metamorphosis and a context for self-reflection. As Klee’s line becomes a metaphor of phylogenetic lineage, it also delineates a context for reflecting on the poetic nature of pictorial language. Like so many of Klee’s late drawings, ORCHS, as Relative ruminates on the capacity of line to transform rather than represent. Like his “Kentauerochs,” Klee’s Urchs and the Urchs becoming an Orchs do not represent a beast in any known animal kingdom. The Urchs is a visual invention that is differently configured from one drawing to the next, each rendered in language that is as poetic in its own way as the verbal invention in Klee’s poem, the figures of speech in Apollinaire’s Bestiary, or the epic voice of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

Notes 1

Tagebücher #371, January–February 1902, 112 (Diaries, 89).

2

Briefe, vol. 1, 11 July 1902, 254. Marcel Franciscono observes that Heinrich Knirr, with whom Klee studied drawing in Munich, may have convinced him that the poetic was not incompatible with the painterly, and that his poetic proclivities could be developed by studying with Franz von Stuck, a well-known “Künstlerpoet” who taught at the Munich Academy. Franciscono also notes von Stuck’s influence on Klee’s work dating from the early 1900s. See Franciscono’s Paul Klee: His Work and Thought (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991), 31; hereafter cited as Klee. 3 Tagebücher #429, July 1902, 155. In the English edition of the Diaries this entry is edited to include sections from the notes written for Hausenstein and Zahn, cited in notes 4 and 5 (see Diaries, 125). 4

Tagebücher #429, July 1902, 488.

5

Tagebücher #429, July 1902, 521.

6

Briefe, vol. 1, 11 July 1902, 254.

7

See Tagebücher #429, July 1902, 155, 488, 521 (Diaries, 125). In my paraphrase of Klee’s words I use adjectives instead of the nouns “Lyrik” and “Satire.”

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8 There is a reference to a group of experimental drawings characterized as “poetic (satirical) conceits” in the notes composed for Zahn and interpolated into the English-language edition of the Diaries. These drawings may have been studies for the etched Inventions; see Tagebücher # 507, 522 (Diaries, 141). For reproductions of the “lyrical” landscapes dating from 1899, see Catalogue raisonné, 1:157. For the etchings grouped under Inventions and Opus One, see Eberhard W. Kornfeld, Verzeichnis des graphischen Werkes von Paul Klee (Bern: Kornfeld und Klipstein, 1963), nos. 3–18. 9

For comprehensive surveys of Klee’s war imagery, see: Michele Vishny, “Paul Klee and War: A Stance of Aloofness,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 120 (December 1978): 233–43; Werckmeister, Klee’s Career, 15–34, 51–56, 65–66; Franciscono, Klee, 205–11; and Regine Prange, “Hinüberbauen in eine jenseitige Gegend: Paul Klees Lithographie ‘Der Tod für die Idee’ und die Genese der Abstraktion,” Wallraf-Richartz-Jahrbuch 54 (1993): 281–314. A number of exhibitions and accompanying catalogues also document Klee’s war experiences, including Paul Klee in Gersthofen (Gersthofen: Paul-Klee-Gymnasium, 1992) and Paul Klee in Schleissheim (Munich: Deutsches Museum and Bruckmann, 1997). 10 Patrick Bridgwater, The German Poets of the First World War (New York: St. Martin’s, 1985), 21; hereafter cited as German Poets. Bridgwater quotes German texts in full and includes English translations in an appendix. For Heym’s poem “Der Krieg,” see 21–22, 37, and 168–69 — the source of all my quotations from the poem. Bridgwater discusses “Der Krieg” at greater length in a later study of Heym’s life and works, citing the graphic work of Alfred Kubin and Francisco de Goya as visual sources of the poem. See his Poet of Expressionist Berlin: The Life and Work of Georg Heym (London: Libris, 1991), 188–90. 11 As an example, I quote the first two lines of the ninth stanza as published in Bridgwater, German Poets, 22, 168. 12 Wilhelm Klemm, “Rethel,” translated in Bridgwater, German Poets, 179–80; originally published in Die Aktion, 21 November 1914 872–73, which is the source of the German quotations. 13 Spiller, ed., The Thinking Eye, 155–57 (Spiller, ed., Paul Klee: Das bildnerische Denken, 155–57). 14

Tagebücher #951, 1915, 365 (Diaries, 313).

15

Lichtenstein’s “Abschied,” in Bridgwater, German Poets, 65, 173–74; originally published in Der Krieg: Ein Flugblatt (Berlin-Wilmersdorf: A. R. Meyer, 1914). 16

At the conclusion of one of the most extensive analyses of ab ovo in the Klee literature, Richard Verdi proposes that Klee’s title originated in Horace’s Satires (“ab ovo usque ad mala”/ “from the egg to the fruit”); see his book Klee and Nature (New York: Rizzoli, 1985), 210; hereafter cited as Klee and Nature. 17

Horace, The Art of Poetry, line 147, 35.

18

Horace, The Art of Poetry, line 361, 39.

19

Horace, The Art of Poetry, line 128, 34.

20

For an in-depth analysis of the material structure of ab ovo, see Nathalie Bäschlin, Béatrice Ilg, and Patrizia Zeppetella, “Beiträge zur Maltechnik von Paul

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Klee,” in Paul Klee: Kunst und Karriere, Beiträge des internationalen Symposiums in Bern, ed. Oskar Bätschmann and Josef Helfenstein (Bern: Stämpfli, 2000), 185–88; hereafter cited as Paul Klee: Kunst und Karriere. 21 See Spiller, ed., The Thinking Eye, 355, 403–23 (Spiller, ed., Paul Klee: Das bildnerische Denken, 355, 403–23), and Klee, Beiträge zur bildnerischen Formlehre, 93–94, 123–39. 22 Tagebücher #943, 1914, 363 (Diaries, 310). Klee reiterated this idea in other writings. See: “Creative Credo,” sec. 5, 185 (Schriften, 121); Spiller, ed., The Thinking Eye, 351–52 (Spiller, ed., Paul Klee: Das bildnerische Denken, 351–52); and Beiträge zur bildnerischen Formlehre, 92. Numerous scholars link ab ovo to diary entry #943; see, e.g., Marianne L. Teuber, “Zwei frühe Quellen zu Paul Klees Theorie der Form: Eine Dokumentation,” in Das Frühwerk, 278. The sexual/reproductive implications of Klee’s imagery have been noted by many scholars; see, in addition to Verdi, Susanna Partsch, Paul Klee, 1879–1940 (Cologne: Benedikt Taschen, 1990), 42; and Glaesemer, Colored Works, 41, who places the work in the broader context of Klee’s pedagogical writings. 23 For a more extensive formal analysis, see, in addition to Verdi, Constance Naubert-Riser, Klee, trans. John Greaves (New York: Portland House, 1988), 56. 24

In contrast to my interpretation of the metaphorical implications of Klee’s Flower Myth, Félix Thürlemann submits Klee’s imagery and figure/ground relationships to a semiotic analysis in Paul Klee: Analyse sémiotique de trois peintures (Lausanne: Editions l’Âge d’homme, 1982), 17–40, 122–23. 25 Jules Michelet’s La Femme was published in multiple editions from the midnineteenth through the early twentieth century, the fifteenth edition being issued in 1885 by the Paris-based publisher Calmann-Lévy. For modern publications that address the specific aspects of gendered types cited in my text, see: Sharon L. James, Learned Girls and Male Persuasion: Gender and Reading in Roman Love Elegy (Berkeley: U of California P, 2003); and Elizabeth Cropper, “On Beautiful Women, Parmigianino, Petrarchismo, and the Vernacular Style,” Art Bulletin 58 (September 1976): 374–94. 26 I address these and other sources of Klee’s imagery in a previously published article: “Paul Klee’s Flower Myth: Themes from German Romanticism Reinterpreted,” Source 8 (spring 1989): 16–21. For the Novalis reference, see Friedrich von Hardenberg, Henry von Ofterdingen, trans. Palmer Hilty (New York: F. Ungar, 1964), 17. The copy of this work in the Klee library is in vol. 2 of Novalis’ Werke in vier Teilen, ed. Hermann Friedmann (Berlin: Deutsches Verlaghaus Bong, n.d.). Goethe wrote about the archetypal plant in letters from Italy in 1787 and used the term “Urpflanze” in his Italienische Reise, which Klee mentioned having taken with him to Italy in 1901–2; see Briefe, 1:169, 175. See also J. W. von Goethe, Italian Journey, 1786–1788, trans. W. H. Auden and Elizabeth Mayer (San Francisco: North Point, 1982), 251. 27 This quotation is taken from Klee’s “Graphic Art”; see Schriften, plate 57, and “Thoughts on Graphic Art,” 10. See Werckmeister’s analysis of the first draft in Klee’s Career, 131–36. Verdi traces Klee’s analogy to Aristotle’s De generatione animalium, I, 20–21, in Klee and Nature, 197, 249 n. 12.

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28 Tagebücher #840, October 1908, 280 (Diaries, 231). The idea is paraphrased and expanded in a 1922 summer-course lecture at the Bauhaus (Spiller, ed., The Thinking Eye; Spiller, ed., Paul Klee: Das bildnerische Denken, 449; Klee, Beiträge zur bildnerischen Formlehre, 149). A more narrowly focused study of this idea as it relates to Klee’s depiction of the female anatomy is that of Claude Frontisi, Klee: Anatomie d’Aphrodite, le polyptyque démembré (Paris: Adam Biro, 1990). 29

Maria Tatar, Lustmord: Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1995), 6, 126; hereafter cited as Lustmord. Werckmeister pairs Grosz’s John, the Woman Killer with one of Klee’s illustrations to Curt Corinth’s Potsdamer Platz; see Klee’s Career, 153–56.

30 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. William A. Haussmann (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1923), 31; Die Geburt der Tragödie, vol. 1. of Werke, ed. Karl Schlechta (Frankfurt: Ullstein, 1984), 28. Nietzsche invoked this figure of speech in his discussion of the evolution of Dionysian rituals. 31

George Grosz, “Berlin 1917,” in “Ach knallige Welt,” 32.

32

Tatar, Lustmord, 68, 128. See also Carol Duncan, “Virility and Domination in Early Twentieth-Century Vanguard Painting,” in Feminism and Art History: Questioning the Litany, ed. Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), 290–313.

33

Vishny explores this aspect of Klee’s life and work in “Klee’s Self-Images,” 53–54.

34

Tagebücher #1008, July-August 1916, 400 (Diaries, 343). For an in-depth analysis of this passage and Klee’s relationship to Marc, see Werckmeister, Klee’s Career, 56–62, 76–80. 35

This poem, which is discussed at length in chapter 1 and illustrated in figure 7, was recorded in Tagebücher #1081 A, August 1917, 442 (Diaries, 375). 36

Tagebücher #1008, July-August 1916, 402 (Diaries, 344). See also “Creative Credo,” sec. 7, 186 (Schriften, 122). 37

Tagebücher #1008, 402 (Diaries, 344).

38

See Tatar, Lustmord, 178–80, for an interpretation and reproduction of another work by Klee entitled Dogmatic Composition (Dogmatische Komposition, 1918/74). 39

Rainer Maria Rilke, “The Cathedral” (“Die Kathedrale”), in Neue Gedichte / New Poems, trans. Stephen Cohn (Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1998), 48–49. 40

Rilke, “The Cathedral Porch” (“Das Portal”), in Neue Gedichte, 50–51.

41

On Debussy’s Cathédrale engloutie, see Siglind Bruhn, Images and Ideas in Modern French Piano Music: The Extra-Musical Subtext in Piano Works by Ravel, Debussy, and Messiaen, Aesthetics in Music, no. 6 (Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon, 1997), 41–44. 42

Walter Gropius, “Program of the Staatliche Bauhaus in Weimar” (April 1919), in Hans M. Wingler, The Bauhaus: Weimar, Dessau, Berlin, Chicago, ed. Joseph Stein, trans. Wolfgang Jabs and Basil Gilbert (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969), 31; see also Hans M. Wingler, Das Bauhaus, 1919–1933 (Bramsche: Gebr. Rasch, 1962), 39; hereafter cited as Wingler, Das Bauhaus. For reproductions of all proofs and states of Feininger’s woodcut, see Leona E. Prasse, Lyonel Feininger: A Definitive Catalogue of His Graphic Work, Etchings, Lithographs, Woodcuts (Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1972), 182–84.

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43 On Schwitters’s Die Kathedrale and its relationship to Gropius’s socialist ideal, see also John Elderfield, Kurt Schwitters (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1985), 115. 44 For the complete text, see Schwitters, Lyrik, 198. This poem was printed from a typescript dated 5 December 1919; it was thus not published at the time it was written. Klee, however, could have heard the poem read or performed. 45 “Doof” appears in Schwitters, Lyrik, 202; it was originally published, along with “Cigarren,” in Elementar. Die Blume Anna, 1922, 28. On critical responses to Apollinaire’s calligrammes, see chap. 1, n. 70. 46 Mark Rosenthal also points to the prominence of the name Montgolfier, referring to it as a play on the watermark and a northern Algerian town; see his Paul Klee, ed. Martha Carey (Washington, DC: Phillips Collection, 1981), unpag. 47 On the Montgolfier paper-manufacturing firm, see Leonard N. Rosenband, Papermaking in Eighteenth-Century France: Management, Labor, and Revolution at the Montgolfier Mill, 1761–1805 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 2000). 48 For a checklist and selected reproductions of the popular prints that proliferated after the Montgolfiers’ successful experiments with flight, see the exhibition catalogue by Roger Pineau, Ballooning, 1782–1972 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1972), 10–15. 49 For reproductions of these works, see the following volumes of the Catalogue raisonné: B.(delicate Landscape), 2:481; With the Balloon, 2:495; Red Balloon, 3:446; The Balloon, 4:476. 50 Sara Lynn Henry, “Paul Klee’s Pictorial Mechanics from Physics to the Picture Plane,” Pantheon 47 (1989): 160. On other images of flight in Klee’s work, see Mark Rosenthal, “The Myth of Flight in the Art of Paul Klee,” Arts Magazine 55 (September 1980): 90–94. 51

The manuscript of this lecture is cited by Henry in “Paul Klee’s Pictorial Mechanics,” 160, 162, 165; Klee left this and other lectures delivered between 29 February 1924 and 2 July 1924 in manuscript form, grouping them under the title “Bildnerische Mechanik oder Stillehre.” 52

Tagebücher #748, January 1906, 234 (Diaries, 194).

53

Tagebücher, #952, 1915, 366 (Diaries, 315).

54

Klee, “On Modern Art,” in Modern Artists on Art: Ten Unabridged Essays, ed. Robert L. Herbert (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1964), 86; see also the German text in Spiller, ed. Paul Klee: Das bildnerische Denken, 92. 55

For reproductions of The Infernal Park, see Catalogue raisonné, 8:142–46. For a list of the fourteen Urchs drawings and one painting entitled Red Urchs (Roturchs 1940/246), see Felix Klee, ed., Paul Klee: His Life and Work in Documents, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Braziller, 1962), 196; hereafter cited as F. Klee, ed., Klee. For reproductions and complete documentation, see Catalogue raisonné, 8:-455–57, 463–65, 471–73; 9:81, 167.

56

See Guillaume Apollinaire and Raoul Dufy, Le Bestiaire ou, Cortège d’Orphée, trans. Lauren Shakely (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1977), unpag. The foreword to this facsimile of the 1911 Delaplanche edition is the source of the factual information about the original publication contained in this and the following

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paragraph. Two of Dufy’s prints are reproduced as a double-page spread, without the poetic text, in Cahiers d’art 1 (1926): 202–3. Klee’s Scanty Words of the Thrifty Man (Karge Worte des Sparsamen 1924/249) is reproduced in the same issue. 57

Le Bestiaire. The English translation is the one contained in this publication.

58

Le Bestiaire.

59

Klee’s illustrations for Voltaire’s Candide and Curt Corrinth’s Potsdamer Platz both appeared in editions published in 1920. See Voltaire, Kandide, oder, die beste Welt (Munich: Kurt Wolff, 1920), and Curt Corrinth, Potsdamer Platz: oder, die Nächte des neuen Messias: Ekstatische Visionen (Munich: Georg Müller, 1920).

60

Petitpierre, Aus der Malklasse von Paul Klee, 32. See also my introduction.

61

Klee clearly linked this title to the other Urchs drawings from 1939 by adding “Urchse” in pencil to the cardboard frame of the drawing. 62

See, e.g., Glaesemer, Handzeichnungen, 3:45. Another ur-ox, this one associated with Zoroastrian mythology, is cited as a possible source by Mark Luprecht in Of Angels, Things, and Death: Paul Klee’s Last Painting in Context, Hermeneutics of Art, 9 (New York: Peter Lang, 1999), 107–8. 63

See Glaesemer, Handzeichnungen, 3:45, and Verdi, Klee and Nature, 46.

64

Gedichte, 121 and Briefe, vol. 2, 1245; here reproduced as recorded in a 1933 pocket diary. 65

Morgenstern, Alle Galgenlieder, 35.

66

Morgenstern, Palma Kunkel, 35. In Klee’s copy of this volume the page with “Der Steinochs” is marked with the slash and X-marks, as are others. 67

Ovid, The Metamorphoses of Ovid, trans. Michael Simpson (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 2001), 9. 68

Simpson, introduction to Metamorphoses, 5.

69

Tagebücher #602, 20 March 1905, 206 (Diaries, 168). The edition to which Klee referred is still in the Klee library, stamped with his name: Des Publius Ovidius Naso Verwandlungen, 2 vols. (Berlin: August Mylius, 1816). The implicit link between Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Klee’s Urchs drawings does not have the negative connotations that Werckmeister attributes to five of Klee’s titles (dating from 1937–40) that incorporate the word “Metamorphoses.” See Otto Karl Werckmeister, “Ob ich je eine Pallas hervorbringe?!”/ “Will I Ever Bring Forth a Pallas?!,” in Paul Klee: In der Maske des Mythos, ed. Pamela Kort (Cologne: DuMont, 1999), 148–49. This bilingual catalogue accompanied an exhibition held in Munich at the Haus der Kunst and in Rotterdam at the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen. For a reproduction of the Aged Phoenix, see Catalogue raisonné, 1:203. 70

Information concerning Darwin was supplied by Kenneth Caneva, historian of science and professor of history at the University of North Carolina Greensboro. 71

The mirror-written text in this drawing reads as follows: “Die Ewigkeit / Kommt mit der Zeit. . . . Lass sie tanzen / Sind kleine Leute / (nicht Leutchen).” The title excerpts and combines three words from this text. For a reproduction of the drawing, see Catalogue raisonné, 8:48. 72

See Catalogue raisonné, 8:47, for a reproduction of Ovidian.

3: A Poetic-Personal Idea of Landscape

I

F ONE SUBJECT CAN BE SAID TO DOMINATE Klee’s writing and his visual production, it is the landscape. Recalling an illness he suffered in 1898 (his last year at Gymnasium), he projected his physical malaise onto his surroundings, observing that “the landscape was just as sick, but magnificent” (“ebenso krank war die Landschaft, aber prachtvoll”).1 Around this time he began to identify himself as a landscape painter, which is entirely reasonable given the number of landscape drawings in his early sketchbooks.2 It is also possible that Klee’s claim to a familiar domain of the visual arts was made, in part, to calm the anxiety of his parents, who were understandably dubious about his decision to pursue a profession for which he had no formal training. Having studied in Munich with Heinrich Knirr, by 1900 Klee had produced additional sketches from nature as well as studies of the figure. While spending the summer of 1900 in Bern, he wrote: “The comparison of my soul with the various moods of the countryside frequently returns as a motif. My poetic-personal idea of landscape lies at the root of this” (“Der Vergleich meiner Seele mit den verschiedenen Stimmungen der Landschaft kehrt häufig wieder als Motiv. Meine dichterisch-persönliche Auffassung der Landschaft liegt dem zu Grund”). As if to underscore his observation with an example, he added in quotes, “Autumn is here. The current of my soul is followed by stealthy fogs” (“Es ist Herbst. Dem Strom meiner Seele schleichen Nebel nach”).3 In 1920, while composing the autobiographical statement for Leopold Zahn, Klee again reflected on his propensity for identifying with nature: “In earlier days (even as a child), the beauty of landscapes was quite clear to me. A background for the soul’s moods” (“Früher [schon als Kind] war mir die Landschaft[liche] [Schönheit] ganz eindeutig. Eine Scenerie [sic] für Stimmungen der Seele”).4 The ideas encapsulated in Klee’s neatly turned phrases locate his thinking in the historical continuum that links German Romantic thought with modernist concepts of abstraction.5 A brief survey of this theoretical tradition defines a context for Klee’s ongoing efforts to renew his “poetic-personal idea of landscape” and rethink his approach to landscape painting, which remained a constant theme in the course of his forty-year career. Like Klee, the writers who framed the theoretical structure of German Romanticism established a reciprocal relationship between nature as catalyst and landscape as subject matter. Alluding by inference to Horace, Friedrich von Schelling noted that the plastic arts were historically defined as “wordless poetry.” To contemporize his paraphrase of the ut pictura poesis paradigm, Schelling interpreted the analogy to mean that the visual

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arts should express ideas whose “source is the soul.”6 Schelling’s contemporary Heinrich von Kleist reiterated this objective in his “Letter from a Young Poet to a Young Painter,” counseling the recipient not to let the pedagogical practice of copying from historical masters deter him from the loftier goal of visualizing his deepest and most sincere ideas and feelings.7 The idea that a landscape vista can provoke feelings, which in turn can be reflected in a work of art, survived among subsequent generations of theorists, notably Friedrich Theodor Vischer and his son, Robert Vischer. It was the younger Vischer who introduced the concept of empathy into modern aesthetic theory.8 Anticipating Klee’s notion of landscape as a “background for the soul’s moods,” Vischer conceived of empathy as a conflation of external phenomena and internal mood.9 Klee’s concept of a “poetic-personal idea of landscape” had historical precedents in the practice as well as the theory of landscape painting. With its asymmetrical composition and expressive brushwork, his untitled 1899 painting of a copse of trees10 conforms to the conventions observed by Carl Blechen and Johann Christian Dahl, whose works mark the transition from Romanticism to naturalism in the manner of some of the Dachau colony painters who worked in and around Munich at the turn of the century. In the 1899 painting as well as other visual exercises from his classes with Knirr, Klee avoided the onus of allegory that weighed heavily on the reputation of Caspar David Friedrich, whose works Klee would have seen at the National Gallery in Berlin in 1906, when he attended the centennial exhibition (1775–1875) of German painting.11 In the exhibition catalogue Friedrich is well represented by thirty-eight entries, including the once controversial altarpiece entitled Cross in the Mountains (Das Kreuz im Gebirge [Tetschener Altar, 1808–9]). The layers of luminous paint had not yet dried on Cross in the Mountains when detractors began to criticize it. Claiming that Friedrich had indulged in religious allegory at the expense of such technical and formal conventions of landscape painting as perspective, Friedrich Ramdohr exhorted other artists not to confuse the desirable quality of expressiveness with the unsuitable veneer of allegory.12 Presciently, albeit unwittingly, Ramdohr identified the very aspect of Friedrich’s painting that gave his work currency among the early modern painters whose works exemplify a new approach to landscape painting. Modernists like Klee would have attributed Friedrich’s poetic invention in part to his circumvention of the traditional pictorial conventions of linear and atmospheric perspective. Although not referring to any specific painting, Karl Ludwig Fernow, Ramdohr’s contemporary, allowed that the poetic mood of a landscape might sanction certain degrees of what he called “contingency and arbitrariness.”13 Like Fernow, the painter-theorist Carl Gustav Carus associated poetry in painting with a process of selection dictated by the artist’s subjective response to nature. In his Nine Letters on Landscape Painting (Neun Briefe über Landschaftsmalerei, geschrieben in den Jahren 1815 bis 1824)

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Carus localized the poetry of a painting in correspondences between the affective life of the artist and the ineffable life of nature. The representation of such a correspondence, he asserted, required a willingness to engage in “abstraction and self-renunciation.” Although couched in the rhetoric of Romanticism, Carus’s professed belief in abstraction and self-renunciation as strategies for aspiring to the “language of God” would eventually be absorbed into modernist ideas about the purity of abstract forms.14 The development of these ideas can be traced in the writings of such later theorists as Adolf von Hildebrand and Wilhelm Worringer, both of whom had a profound influence on the thought and practice of early modern artists. Hildebrand identified “actual forms” as unchanging abstractions distinct from the variable, changing appearances of “perceptual forms.”15 In Worringer’s influential Abstraction and Empathy (Abstraktion und Einfühlung), abstraction is attributed to a penchant for regularity, naturalism to the antithetical desire for empathy. While polarizing abstraction and empathy, Worringer conceded that “the history of art represents an unceasing disputation between the two tendencies.”16 In 1912, just a few years after the appearance of Worringer’s study, Kandinsky published On the Spiritual in Art (Über das Geistige in der Kunst). This treatise defines form as the external expression of inner meaning (“die Form ist also die Äusserung des inneren Inhaltes”) and underscores the importance of the “principle of inner necessity” (“das Prinzip der inneren Notwendigkeit”), thus reviving the variable of personality common to the aesthetics of Romanticism. Kandinsky reframed the theoretical polarities cited by Hildebrand and Worringer in terms of a spectrum defined by “absolute realism” (“reine Realistik”) at one end and “pure abstraction” (“reine Abstraktion”) at the other. Although he acknowledged a range of possibilities between these two polarities, his own work implies a value judgment in favor of abstraction as a means of communicating inner necessity.17 Publications by Hildebrand, Worringer, Kandinsky, and others contributed to an intellectual climate receptive to ideas about abstraction exported to Germany by Apollinaire, who proposed that modern painting was poetic precisely because it was not imitative, substituting the abstract, independently expressive language of line and color for mimetic imagery. Although the theoretical foundations of Klee’s “poetic-personal idea of landscape” were compatible with a modernist aesthetic, he knew that to be modern and to paint landscapes meant challenging a long tradition of conventions and expectations. His own most unforgiving critic, Klee must have realized that the technically competent but unremarkable 1899 painting of trees would not earn him the reputation of his teachers, let alone set him apart as an innovator. Beginning in 1900, he methodically pursued a variety of experimental approaches to painting from nature. An untitled, five-panel screen (1900) depicting landscape vistas along the Aare River, which meanders around Bern, reduces natural forms to expanses of color and art nouveau arabesques. The decorative simplification of the screen painting

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Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Fig. 25: Paul Klee, Landscape with Gallows (1919/115). Oil and pen on primed gauze mounted on cardboard, 36 ⫻ 46 cm. Collection of David M. Solinger. © 2006 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Photograph courtesy of the Zentrum Paul Klee.

takes another form in Well-Tended Forest Path, Waldegg near Bern (Gepflegter Waldweg, Waldegg b. Bern, 1909/16), where vegetation proliferates into the kind of dense, decorative patterning typical of Gustav Klimt’s landscapes. What is noteworthy is that Klee managed to achieve this degree of decorative richness not with vividly colored oil paints but by means of watercolor and ink on glass. Tree-Lined Street, Georgenschweige (Strasse unter Bäumen, 1908/65) was also painted on glass in a monochromatic palette calculated to generate the visual equivalents of white “energy.”18 Although Tree-Lined Street retains the compositional diagonals and broad brushwork of the 1899 landscape, forms are minimally delineated in a manner that anticipates the sketchily defined cityscape set against a deep blue and yellow-green ground in Red Church and White Panel (Rote Kirche u. weisse Tafel, 1912/15). Even before traveling to Tunisia, where by his own account he finally mastered color, Klee had the satisfaction of capping a decade of experimentation with Houses in the Outskirts (Häuser an der Peripherie, 1913/137). This small

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Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book. Fig. 26: Carl Blechen, Gallows Hill under Storm Clouds, c. 1835. Oil on paper mounted on cardboard, 29.5 ⫻ 46 cm. Galerie Neue Meister, Staatliche Kunstsammlung Dresden, Gal. Nr. 2637. Photograph: Deutsche Fotothek Dresden.

watercolor brings together the color fields, repetitive patterning, and skeletal contours found in various permutations in his earlier landscapes.19 During the months following his return from Tunisia in late April 1914, Klee’s landscapes began to assume the formal abstraction of Apollinaire’s “poetic painting.” Not yet ready to abandon the rhetoric of Romanticism, Klee defined abstraction as a “cool Romanticism” that differed from its nineteenth-century predecessor in being a “style without pathos” (“die kühle Romantik dieses Stils ohne Pathos”).20 It is no coincidence that Klee’s choice of the term “cool Romanticism” establishes theoretical continuity between his “poetic-personal idea of landscape” and his no less personal theory of abstraction. The seemingly contradictory phrase “cool Romanticism” aptly characterizes the readily apparent but easily reconcilable oppositions inherent in his postwar landscapes, which were still conceived as “backgrounds of the soul’s moods” even though they staked a claim to the pictorial vocabulary of modernism. Comparisons between his Landscape with Gallows (Landschaft m. d. Galgen, 1919/115) (fig. 25) and selected historical precedents reveal how Klee acknowledged the past while simultaneously critiquing the conventions of traditional landscape painting. Because of the curiosity value of its subject matter, Landscape with Gallows stands out among the nocturnal scenes that recur in Klee’s postwar production. Looming at the top of Klee’s painting is Gallows Hill, identified as such by the gibbet, which stands next to a cross. The viewer negotiates Klee’s compressed pictorial space by following the diagonal lines of the ladders, which indicate directional movement through a hilly terrain dotted with the skeletal frames of buildings and leafless tress. Many

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of the visual particulars of Klee’s painting seem to have been borrowed from Pieter Bruegel’s Landscape with the Magpie on the Gallows (1568), the most famous historical precedent of any landscape with gallows. Even if Klee referred to Bruegel’s painting or to some other pictorial inventory of landscape motifs, he deftly avoided pastiche by self-consciously engaging in the transformational process of parody. Linda Hutcheon points to parody as a major mode of formal and thematic construction in twentiethcentury art across disciplines. Many of the examples of modernist parody that she analyzes involve multiple layers of intertextual allusion.21 Klee’s Landscape with Gallows is yet another example. The German Romantic tradition could arguably have provided Klee with models of parodic construction as well as targets of visual parody. Despite the Romantic cult of originality, numerous examples of parodic imitation can be found in the visual as well as literary arts of the Romantic tradition. A case in point is the work of Blechen, whose early career was not unlike Klee’s. After acquiring the fundamentals of landscape painting during a brief period of academic training, Blechen continued his studies during the requisite “Wanderjahr” in Italy, just as Klee would do several generations later. Although Blechen’s facile technique and dramatic flair assured him steady employment as a painter of stage scenery, he had higher ambitions to become a serious landscape painter. Responding to Goethe’s criticism of the theatrical effects of his landscapes,22 Blechen adopted parody as a visual strategy. His bleak, windswept Gallows Hill under Storm Clouds (Galgenberg bei Gewitterstimmung) dating from around 1835 (fig. 26) parodically subverts the stylistic conventions of the “terrifying” landscape by substituting breadth of handling for specificity of bizarre detail. Any historical survey of parody confirms that parodic transformation is not confined to intertextual relationships within a single art form. Thus, William Vaughan convincingly surmises that Blechen’s pictorial parodies are informed as much by Heine’s parodies of lyric poetry as by visual references.23 Parodic transformation across media is also common to Klee’s Landscape with Gallows. In keeping with the idea that modernist parody involves both oblique homage and critical distance, Klee’s Landscape with Gallows can be read as a parody of landscape painting in the style of Friedrich. The latter’s critics had denounced him for compromising the conventions of illusionistic landscape painting. Klee consciously took even greater liberties with these pictorial conventions in the compressed spatial structure and arbitrary color scheme of Landscape with Gallows. Evidence of the historic consciousness that links Klee’s painting to allegorical landscapes in the German Romantic tradition extends to the relationship of objects in space. According to Ramdohr, Friedrich’s allegorical content is visually manifested in a strange relationship between the appearances of actual objects and how they are represented within a picture.24 Ramdohr’s critique could have been written about Landscape with Gallows, although Klee self-consciously

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renounced allegorical symbolism in favor of a new vocabulary of signs. His mixed sign system includes, in addition to recognizable landscape motifs, letters of the alphabet and what appear to be pictographic characters. Those signs with linguistic value exemplify the ironic inversion that Hutcheon cites as a characteristic feature of parody.25 By replacing allegorical symbols with signs from the language of literature, Klee established a critical distance between his symbolic vocabulary and the literary symbolism of Friedrich, Philipp Otto Runge, and other Romantics. Although the symbolic code of Landscape with Gallows is not literary in the traditional sense, this does not preclude a literary frame of reference. In combination with the visual image of the gallows, the letters generate a chain of references that links Klee’s painting to Morgenstern’s Gallows Songs. Klee was not alone among his contemporaries in laying claim to an affinity with Morgenstern’s subject matter. Ball’s poem “The Hangman” (“Der Henker,” 1913) and Johannes R. Becher’s “To the Hangmen” (“An die Henker,” 1916) attest to a fascination with the theme of hanging in the generation of poets that followed Morgenstern. As for Klee, at least two of his drawings — The Hanged Ones (Die Gehängten, 1913/107) and Gallows Humor (Galgenhumor, 1919/26) — could be included in an illustrated edition of the Gallows Songs.26 By contrast, the relationship between Landscape with Gallows and Morgenstern’s popular collection of poetry is less illustrative than formal, having more to do with poetic form than poetic images. Again, examples of literary parody provide models. Morgenstern’s Gallows Songs and Ezra Pound’s “A Villonaud. Ballad of the Gibbet, Or the Song of the Sixth Companion” (1908) are case studies in Hutcheon’s concept of parodic double coding,27 for both allude to Villon’s Testament, which in turn parodies the conventional medieval ballad. Whereas Morgenstern’s objective was to internalize and contemporize Villon’s ironic voice, Pound targeted Villon’s ballad form with its prescribed rhyme scheme and four-line “envoie.” Although Klee’s Landscape with Gallows parallels Pound’s “Villonaud” in that it parodies conventional form, its specific point of reference is one of Morgenstern’s Gallows Songs. “The Moon” (“Der Mond”) is unusual among the Gallows Songs in that it includes single letters as discrete verbal signs: Als Gott den lieben Mond erschuf, gab er ihm folgenden Beruf:

When God the moon created, he had him clearly dedicated:

Beim Zu- sowohl wie beim Abnehmen To wax and wane, like ‘ab’ and ‘zu’, sich deutschen Lesern zu bequemen, what every German reader knew, ein a formierend und ein z — dass keiner gross zu denken hätt.

forming an a, also a z — simpler it could never be.

Befolgend dies, ward der Trabant ein völlig deutscher Gegenstand.

Obeying this was his delight, a perfect German satellite.28

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In recontextualizing Morgenstern’s idiosyncratic use of letters, Klee painted a landscape that literally incorporates the language of poetry. By 1915 Klee had begun to appropriate letter forms as a way of expanding the vocabulary of pictorial abstraction to include signs that refuse to relinquish the possibility of extrapictorial reference, even if they have no readily identifiable referent. That is precisely the role of the letters in Landscape with Gallows. To borrow the terminology Klee used in his “Creative Credo,” the letters encode references to “latent realities” that are not visible in the external world. Within their pictorial setting the letters are paired with visual images that have the once-upon-a-time specificity of a story. Coincidentally, this implied narrative context is common to both the visual and the poetic traditions that the painting references. More important, it situates the painting within the framework of Klee’s modernist narrative of process.29 Painted the year Klee resumed full-time studio work after almost three years of military service, Landscape with Gallows is one of numerous pictorial experiments with what he called “abstract things such as . . . letters” (“abstrakte Dingen wie . . . Buchstaben”).30 Four letter signs scattered throughout the landscape are clearly legible: on the left are an uppercase T and V, and on the right an initial E, followed by a period, with a slightly smaller Z below. The letters hover somewhere between the landscape setting and an implied typographic space on the surface of the painting. Occupying the same spatial limbo are other signs, most of which are not clearly distinguishable as either alphabetic or pictorial. Similar signs can be found in any number of the illustrated historical narratives that purported to trace the evolution of alphabetic writing from pictorial origins. A typical example is Antoine Court de Gébelin’s illustrated Histoire naturelle de la parole (1816) (fig. 27).31 The tradition of historical narration represented by this study was perpetuated in Klee’s personal narrative of process, which likewise explored visual correlations between alphabetic characters, hieroglyphic signs, and Chinese pictographs. To be sure, Klee’s paintings are not formulaic like the charts that illustrate the Histoire naturelle de la parole, but some of the signs in Landscape with Gallows bear a striking resemblance to the Chinese characters Court de Gébelin identified as the pictorial roots of the letters H and M. It seems that as early as 1919 Klee had settled on at least two of the signs that would ultimately find a place in the lexicon of the language system with which he would compose his later poems in pictorial script. One of the signs that entered Klee’s standard repertoire of pictorial characters is the window. Not coincidentally, the window also proved to be a particularly useful and fluid point of comparison in articulating a modernist aesthetic. From the early teens, when it became a fixture in Delaunay’s painting, to the mid-twenties, when Breton and Magritte adopted it in the interest of surrealism, the window was invoked as both a visual and a verbal metaphor.32 One source of Delaunay’s metaphorical usage is a passage from

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Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book. Fig. 27: Antoine Court de Gébelin, Illustration from Histoire naturelle de la parole, 1816. Digital image by Dan Smith.

Leonardo da Vinci’s Paragone in which the artist’s eye is compared to a “window of the soul” (une “fenêtre de l’âme”).33 Delaunay cited this analogy in his notes on Leonardo’s treatise and appropriated it in his own essay, “La Lumière,” to introduce the idea that the perception of external reality is filtered through an internal or conceptual reality.34 Transferred to his studio practice, the trope figured prominently in Delaunay’s experiments with the multifaceted concept of simultaneity. In his Window series a casement window serves multiple functions, providing both an internal pictorial frame and a reflective surface on which light is refracted into prismatic color patterns. The viewer thus simultaneously registers objects in the external world and the constituent colors of the light that makes them perceptible. Delaunay was at work on the Window paintings when Klee visited him in his studio on the morning of 11 April 1912. There Klee would have seen paintings in which windows are visual signs of a new artistic vision. Up to that point Klee himself had used the window only as an architectural element in a pictorial setting. Seen from the inside in The Draughtsman at the Window (Der Zeichner am Fenster, 1909/70), it separates an undifferentiated but brightly illuminated exterior space from a dimly lit interior. View onto a Square (Blick auf einen Platz, 1912/10), very likely painted before Klee’s trip to Paris, depicts the fenestrated facades of city buildings that would assume an almost ominous appearance in Klee’s postwar paintings, where the window functions as both an architectural motif and a pictorial metonym that signifies a new way of looking at the external world. By the time Klee visited Tunisia in 1914, the window had been schematized into line drawings that hover on the surface of watercolors such as Window and Palms (Fenster u.

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Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Fig. 28: Paul Klee, View from a Window (1920/27). Oil on primed paper, 42 ⫻ 32.7 cm. Private collection, Germany. © 2006 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Photograph courtesy of the Zentrum Paul Klee.

Palmen, 1914/59). In 1915 Klee transposed the patterns of broken forms and refracted light from Delaunay’s window paintings to his own Reflecting Window (Spiegelndes Fenster, 1915/211). With the addition of a swagged curtain, he conflated interior and exterior points of view, and in works such as Window in the Garden (Fenster im Garten, 1918/2), the window becomes a sign of spatial ambiguity. Klee scholars are in general agreement that Composition with Windows (Komposition mit Fenstern, 1919/156) marks a crucial step in Klee’s ongoing effort to internalize Delaunay’s theoretical and visual ideas.35 In 1920 Klee took stock of the metamorphosis of his window motif, cataloguing the changes that had occurred over eight years in Rhythm of the Windows (Rhythmus der Fenster, 1920/20) and View from a Window (Fensterausblick, 1920/27) (fig. 28).36 Both the appearance and function of the window in these works reflect a conscious decision on Klee’s part to make a definitive break with the landscape tradition exemplified in some of Hermann Hesse’s poems and paintings.

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The German-born Hesse moved to Klee’s native city of Bern in 1912, securing safe haven in Switzerland during the war years and becoming a Swiss national in 1924. There is no record that the two men ever met, although they had a mutual friend in the artist Louis Moilliet, who accompanied Klee to Tunisia in 1914. Klee mentioned Hesse only once in his published correspondence, alluding to the author’s friendship with Moilliet.37 Given the terseness of this single reference, it can be inferred that Klee chose to distance himself from Hesse. Klee’s seeming coolness was evidently not mutual. In fact, Hesse cast Klee as one of the travelers in his 1932 novel The Journey to the East (Die Morgenlandfahrt).38 Inscribed on a talismanic object unearthed by the narrator of The Journey to the East is a rhymed couplet that is as memorable for its wit as for its brevity: So blau wie Schnee, So Paul wie Klee.

As blue as snow Paul to Klee is so.39

Hesse’s poetic quip would have appealed to Klee’s propensity for wordplay; indeed, Klee may well have felt a tinge of regret at not having penned the lines himself. Nevertheless, they elicited no response from Klee — or at least none that is recorded. Nor did he mention Hesse’s Poems of the Painter (Gedichte des Malers), a volume consisting of ten poems issued in 1920 by the Bern publisher Seldwyla. Each poem is paired with a colored drawing by the author. Both the imagery and the style of Hesse’s landscape views are derivative. Some resemble the early landscapes of Die Brücke painters, notably Max Pechstein and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, whereas others reflect the influence of August Macke, who traveled with Klee and Moilliet to Tunisia in 1914, shortly before he was drafted and killed in action. At least one — the visual parallel to “Winter Day” (“Wintertag”) — bears comparison with Klee’s A 1 Lower Stockhornsee (Unterer Stockhornsee, 1915/164) and A 2 Upper Stockhornsee (Oberer Stockhornsee, 1915/165).40 Whatever Klee may have thought of Hesse as a poet, he would have recognized in Poems of the Painter a sensibility akin to his own “poetic-personal idea of landscape.” A typical example of these poems is “Houses, Fields, Garden Fence” (“Häuser, Felder, Gartenzaun”), which clings to a late-Romantic aesthetic in the tendency to identify with the natural world, only to find that it is less sympathetic than cautionary. The objects named in the poem are as sharply delineated and as vividly colored as the corresponding motifs in the accompanying visual image: Baum, du Freund, wirst denn auch du zu Staub, Fensterladen grün und rote Dächer?

Tree, friend, will you also turn to dust, Window-lattice green and red roofs?41

Elliptical phrasing gives this verbal evocation of a landscape the same degree of abstraction as its visual counterpart, yet when considered together Hesse’s words and images have the perceptual logic and visual

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coherence of description based on direct observation from nature. This is also true of Klee’s early landscapes and even some of his post-Tunisian watercolors, such as Upper Stockhornsee and Lower Stockhornsee. By contrast, View from a Window conforms to another standard of logic and coherence — a conceptually based standard established by Apollinaire in his poetic and critical responses to Delaunay’s Window paintings. Sometime in late November or early December 1912, Apollinaire agreed to write a preface to the catalogue of an exhibition at the Sturm Gallery featuring Delaunay’s Window paintings. Instead of the customary accolades, Apollinaire composed “The Windows” (“Les Fenêtres”), a poem that was published in an album of images produced to coincide with the exhibition. At the opening in January 1913, Apollinaire delivered the lecture that was subsequently published in Der Sturm as “Die moderne Malerei.” It was in this essay that he predicted the emergence of poetic painting that does not literally record observable phenomena. Klee’s View from a Window is just such a painting. Both the imagery and the pictorial syntax indicate that Klee had read Apollinaire’s poem “The Windows” as well as his essay on modern painting. By his own account “The Windows” was one of Apollinaire’s favorite poems. He called it a “conversation poem,” although what he meant by that is not absolutely certain.42 The poem is usually described as a verbal collage of speech fragments — an explanation that is given credence by the absence of punctuation marks and abrupt shifts in semantic units. According to one of his literary friends, Apollinaire improvised conversational discourse by juxtaposing snippets of dialogue overheard in a café.43 This particular set of circumstances was called into question by Robert and Sonia Delaunay, who claimed that Apollinaire wrote the poem in their studio.44 Wherever Apollinaire was when he actually composed the poem, it clearly incorporates references to conversational exchanges with Delaunay. The opening line, “Du rouge au vert tout le jaune se meurt” (“From red to green all the yellow dies”) imposes poetic syntax on the vocabulary of Delaunay’s color theory, and the last two lines, “La fenêtre s’ouvre comme une orange / Le beau fruit de la lumière” (“The window opens like an orange / the lovely fruit of light”) were the source of Delaunay’s remark that color is the “fruit of light.”45 Mindful that “The Windows” was to be published as an introduction to reproductions of Delaunay’s paintings, Apollinaire made an effort to incorporate the poetic counterpart of Delaunay’s pictorial simultaneity. Although the term itself is not invoked in “The Windows,” the concept informs every aspect of the poem, from the technique of verbal collage to the construction of meaning on the part of the viewer. Given Apollinaire’s title, the reader anticipates that windows will be dominant figurative motifs. Even a cursory reading reveals the extent to which the window motif also introduces and sustains the concept of simultaneity. The title refers not only to the imagery and picture titles of

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Delaunay’s Window series but also to the three times the singular form of the word appears in the body of the poem. Used twice at the ends of lines and once at the beginning, “la fenêtre” is one of several nouns and names that are strategically placed such that sequential repetitions call attention to the poem’s spatial layout. The window motif also afforded Apollinaire the opportunity to incorporate multiple spatial perspectives. When the window is cited as an architectural element (“Une vieille paire de chaussures jaunes devant la fenêtre” [“An old pair of yellow boots in front of the window”]),46 it specifies an interior space. Conversely, when it is invoked figuratively, as it is in the last lines of the poem, it implies an exterior point of view. These changes in spatial orientation have temporal parallels in Apollinaire’s consistent shifts in verb tenses. Nowhere is this more evident than in the following three lines: Tu soulèveras le rideau Et maintenant voilà que s’ouvre la fenêtre Araignées quand les mains tissaient la lumière

You’ll raise the curtain And now see the window opening Spiders when hands wove the light.47

A comparison of these lines with Klee’s View from a Window, reveals a striking similarity between Apollinaire’s verbal imagery and Klee’s visual imagery. This alone would support the conjecture that Apollinaire’s poem “The Windows” contributed to Klee’s changing views of “the poetic.” Not so obvious but even more significant are analogies that extend beyond figurative imagery to the process of fragmentation and the concept of simultaneity. Although not literally a collage, View from a Window is yet another example of Klee’s technique of composing by cutting. An insert that corresponds in its placement to the lower half of a double-paned window disrupts the visual continuity of the view from an interior space looking out. Images of a flower in a vase, a tree, a window, and a hip-roofed tower are as selfcontained as Apollinaire’s fragments of conversation or the fragments of landscape in Klee’s own poem “(help build).”48 Klee’s visual fragments are framed by curtains that incorporate a brick foundation, roof tiles, and variations on the schematic window signs in Rhythm of the Windows, as well as sections of the patterned ironwork from Delaunay’s representations of the Eiffel Tower. View from a Window does not conform to the logic of pictorial perspective but instead intentionally challenges that logic by juxtaposing image fragments represented in different scales. Like the curtains, the landscape imagery is delineated in white paint layered over patches of color. Line and color are perceived simultaneously, even though they function independently, with color having no more representational value than it does in Apollinaire’s evocations of color (“Beauté pâleur insondables violets” [“Beauty paleness fathomless violets”]).49 As in Apollinaire’s poem,

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the window is a figurative motif that indicates shifts in spatial orientation. Beginning in 1918, the window in Klee’s work becomes increasingly schematic and repetitious. Although it reemerges as both an internal frame and an independent pictorial motif in View from a Window, the window is also repeated in patterns that generate structural rhythms. In this capacity it functions temporally, like the structural rhythms of poetry, unifying disparate objects in a nonillusionistic spatial setting. By the mid-twenties Klee had reduced the window motif to a sign that is all but absorbed into the surface patterns of his pictographic paintings, such as Cathedral. In these later works Klee arranged pictographic signs linguistically, in effect obviating any vestiges of difference between spatial and temporal structures. At the same time, he began to design geometric configurations with dense concentrations of parallel lines. He pursued this experimental direction in a suite of drawings initiated by Classical Garden (Klassischer Garten, 1926/1), his first dated work in 1926. The suite consists of no fewer than twelve drawings, most of which combine linear patterns with watercolor grounds. The drawings are linked thematically by titles that evoke classical architecture in garden settings and stylistically by a common visual vocabulary of parallel lines that define forms and the pictorial settings they occupy. Examples include A Garden for Orpheus (Ein Garten für Orpheus, 1926/3) (fig. 29), Ruins of Oi . . . (Ruinen von Oi . . ., 1926/14), View of a Mountain Sanctuary (Ansicht eines BergHeiligtums, 1926/18), and Temple of Bj. (Tempel von Bj., 1926/59).50 The stylistic shift evident in these drawings could have been precipitated by one of the exercises Klee devised for his students at the Bauhaus.51 This kind of reciprocity between Klee’s pedagogical and studio practice was not unusual. It is equally plausible that the parallel line drawings from 1926 were modeled on one or more external sources. Klee scholars have proposed numerous possibilities. Citing similarities between the linear configurations of the 1926 drawings and patterns common to weaving, Werner Haftmann has suggested that Klee may have been looking at the plaited ornamentation of Viking decorative arts.52 More recently the curators of an exhibition on ornament and abstraction placed examples of Klee’s parallel line drawings in the context of “reversible abstraction,” or the figuration of the abstract that is common to some forms of ornamentation.53 Other scholars have detected musical analogies in Klee’s parallel linear patterns. Will Grohmann found the tightly structured composition of A Garden for Orpheus reminiscent of “the stringent conventions of ancient tragedies or the musical style of Gluck’s Greek operas.”54 Indeed, the imitative linear rhythms of Klee’s Garden for Orpheus are not unlike the controlled musical lines of Christoph Willibald Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice. Although analogies such as these are useful in analyzing the stylistic features of A Garden for Orpheus, they do not account for the fact that this drawing is one in a series that

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Fig. 29: Paul Klee, A Garden for Orpheus (1926/3). Pen and watercolor on paper mounted on cardboard, 47 ⫻ 32/32.5 cm. Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern. © 2006 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Photograph courtesy of the Zentrum Paul Klee.

develops a common theme. In this respect Klee’s parallel line drawings have more in common with Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus (Die Sonette an Orpheus), a sonnet sequence composed in 1922 and published a year later. Klee’s documented references to Rilke are more frankly effusive and admiring than his single guarded mention of Hesse. An entry in the Diaries records the circumstances of Klee’s first meeting with Rilke. At the urging of Hermann Probst, who had purchased several of his watercolors, Klee sent a selection of works on paper to Rilke. Much to Klee’s delight, the poet returned the works in person. After reading passages from the Book of Images (Buch der Bilder) and The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge), Klee concluded that Rilke’s sensibility was very similar to his own.55 Rilke’s name surfaces again in Klee’s catalogue of the artists and writers who belonged to his intellectual circle in Munich.56 There is no record of any contact between the two during the war, when both men were drafted into military service. In the postwar years Klee eagerly resumed work, whereas Rilke sunk into a depression

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precipitated by the psychic traumas of the war. By most accounts, Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus and the Duino Elegies (Duineser Elegien) were completed in a creative frenzy after a fallow period of recovery. Both collections of poetry met with popular as well as critical acclaim, so it is not surprising that the Klees acquired copies shortly after they were published.57 Grohmann has speculated as to the possible referential relationship between Klee’s late drawings of angels and the Duino Elegies. Similarly, Geelhaar has cited “Orpheus, Eurydice, Hermes” from Rilke’s New Poetry in commenting on the symbolic implications of A Garden for Orpheus.58 Following their examples, I shall explore other parallels between Klee’s drawing and Rilke’s poetry. Apparently Klee was partial to A Garden for Orpheus, which he decided to keep after initially offering it up for sale.59 An analysis of this drawing suggests that he might well have singled it out as a particularly successful example of transcontextualizing poetry, specifically Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus. The sonnet sequence or cycle has been described as a major vehicle of Romantic and post-Romantic poetic construction,60 with Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus often cited as a high point of the genre in the modern era. Despite the occasional intrusion of the machine and other images of modernity, Rilke’s repertoire of nature imagery is as vestigially Romantic as the sonnet sequence itself. The “immer selig bewässerte Gärten” (“watered, ever-blissful gardens”) in sonnet #17, part 2, and the gardens “wie in Glas / eingegossene” (“like those poured in glass”) from sonnet #21, part 2,61 resonate in the lush but chiseled vegetation of the landscape Klee designed for the mythological Orpheus. Even isolated images such as the “Bienensaug” (“blossoming nettles”) featured in sonnet #10, part 1, and the “Blütenstern” (“blossom-star”) that emerges from sonnet #5, part 2,62 have their visual counterparts in A Garden for Orpheus and other drawings in the series of landscapes dating from early 1926. In addition to the compound nouns and simile cited here, Rilke employed a variety of other poetic figures, creating complex patterns of imagery that are simultaneously dense and lucid. Klee achieved the same combination of density and transparency in A Garden for Orpheus by layering closely spaced lines over cream-colored paper stained with a mottled, pale-gold wash. Less readily apparent are analogies that extend beyond subject matter and imagery to include compositional form and structural devices. A Garden for Orpheus and the other landscapes from early 1926 are not grouped under a single title, nor do the catalogue numbers follow an unbroken sequence, like the drawings that make up The Infernal Park (1939/238–253). In both respects the parallel line drawings are comparable to the etched Inventions that constitute Klee’s Opus One. Very likely Klee did not intend to produce a series any more than Rilke set out to write a sequence. Instead, Klee’s series, like Rilke’s sequence, evolved in

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the process of experimenting with a prescribed compositional form. For Rilke that form was the rhymed sonnet; for Klee it was the traditionally structured landscape. In writing the Sonnets to Orpheus, Rilke adhered to the fourteen-line sonnet form, but he varied line lengths and rhyme schemes, often challenging the regularity of the rhythmic patterns and end rhymes by introducing ellipses, abrupt transitions, and enjambments. Similarly, Klee never tired of investigating new ways to deconstruct and reconstruct landscapes in which the illusion of three-dimensionality is imposed by the conventions of perspective and modeling. In A Garden for Orpheus he replaced the traditionally integrated foreground, middle ground, and background with superimposed horizontal registers that correspond to the four-part stanzaic structure of Rilke’s sonnets. Moreover, just as each stanza of a sonnet has its linear structure, so, too, do Klee’s compositional units. The parallel lines that delineate compositional registers stretch horizontally across the surface of the drawing. In contrast, the linear patterns that define discrete motifs within the layered composition appear to converge toward multiple vanishing points in an indeterminate pictorial space. Thus, A Garden for Orpheus concedes to the expectations of spatial recession but does so with linear patterns that defy the conventions of linear perspective. Klee’s linear patterns also challenge another traditional device for achieving pictorial illusionism. Graphic artists of the past would have used parallel lines to indicate shading, thus creating the illusion of three-dimensional forms. The fact that Klee used parallel lines to achieve the opposite effect is yet another indication that he consulted a structural prototype outside the parameters of the visual arts. In pursuing the comparison with Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus, it would be pushing the point to claim that the configurations of parallel lines in A Garden for Orpheus are literal transcriptions of the figurative patterns in any particular poem or group of poems. It is nevertheless true that parallel constructions are far more prevalent in poetry than in the visual arts. Although not grammatically restricted to verse, parallelism is a common form of poetic syntax. Parallel syntactic patterns can operate at the level of single phrases, like Klee’s own “Weh mir” (“Woe is me”) (fig. 8), or throughout an entire poem or sequence of poems. Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus offers a full range of examples, from the apostrophic “O” to binary pairings that connect the two parts of the sequence. The most striking — because it combines a verb with a quite unexpected object — is “Tanzt die Orange” (“Dance the orange”), which begins the second and third stanzas of sonnet #15, part 1.63 In this instance the parallel construction shapes an extended figure of speech and unifies the verse structure of a sonnet in which lines do not consistently correspond to either syntactical or semantic units. Other examples of parallelism — including recurring references to fruit and invocations of Orpheus — function thematically, unifying the fiftyfive sonnets within a cycle that celebrates a synesthetic response to nature.

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Klee’s parallel-line constructions likewise give shape to individual motifs and serve as unifying elements not only within each drawing but also within a series, albeit a loosely structured one. A Garden for Orpheus and other parallel-line drawings present compelling evidence to support the theory that poetry served as a model for Klee’s modernist challenges to the conventions of landscape painting. Since the Renaissance, shading has traditionally been used to define forms, and linear perspective has been a principal means of unifying a coherently structured pictorial space. In A Garden for Orpheus these traditional functions of line are served by linear patterns that seem to have originated in poetic rather than pictorial syntax. By appropriating a structural device from the domain of poetry, Klee added to his catalogue of linear inventions designed to break down traditional distinctions between the spatial and temporal arts. As with virtually all of his pictorial experiments, Klee did not abandon parallel-line constructions once he had solved the challenge he posed for himself. Later variations include paintings such as Gate in the Garden (Tor im Garten, 1926/81) — in which forms are defined with thickly applied, parallel strokes of oil paint — and Rock Cut Temple (Felsentempel, 1927/61) — a variation on drawings of the same motif dating from 1925 and 1926.64 Klee’s penchant for retrieving and reworking successful pictorial experiments is nowhere more evident than in his periodic return to the palimpsest, a compositional technique that he undoubtedly discovered by chance when he first began working over recycled paper supports. An early example is the Striding Figure (Ausschreitende Figur, 1915/75), which layers the drawing of a figure over the verso of a commercially printed handbill, with its Gothic type visible through the thin paper. More subtle is the late landscape Klee entitled Park Near Lu (Park bei Lu, 1938/129) (fig. 30), which is painted over a barely visible newspaper support. As early as 1917 Hugo Ball described Klee’s works as palimpsests.65 There is no reason to assume that Ball knew the Striding Figure when he used this term in the diaries published as Flight Out of Time (Die Flucht aus der Zeit), so he may well have used it metaphorically rather than literally. In either case he was obviously familiar with the prevalence of the palimpsest as a compositional strategy in modern art. In its earliest manifestations, the palimpsest is a handwritten text layered over the partially obliterated remnants of a previously recorded text. Although the palimpsest probably originated for reasons of economy, there would always have been a value judgment attached to the decision that one text is more worthy of a stone surface or a parchment support than another. In the history of literature the palimpsest as a vehicle of cultural continuity has become a model of writing by editing, critiquing, or otherwise commenting on earlier texts. Thus, while one group of literary theorists referred to the palimpsest as “a master metaphor,”66 another scholar used the term as a synonym for what he called “literature in the second

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Fig. 30: Paul Klee, Park Near Lu (1938/129). Oil and colored paste on newspaper on burlap, with original frame. 100 ⫻ 70 cm. Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern. © 2006 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Photograph courtesy of the Zentrum Paul Klee.

degree.”67 The history of the palimpsest in visual culture can be traced from prehistoric cave paintings to contemporary art practice, with a particularly rich trove of examples available from the twentieth century. Ranging chronologically from the verbal puns of the cubist collages to the postmodern defacing of Arnulf Rainer’s self-portraits, the palimpsest flourished throughout the twentieth century. A common denominator of the modernist and postmodern palimpsest is a high degree of self-consciousness about the integration of process and meaning. Like his modernist contemporaries, Marcel Duchamp, Miró, and Schwitters, Klee exploited the full range of possibilities offered by the multilayered palimpsest. Whether painting over one of his own discarded sketches or working over a newspaper support, Klee made conscious decisions about how much of the original text to reveal. The letters in Alphabet I (1938/187) and Alphabet II (1938/188) are layered over clearly legible pages from daily newspapers, which establish contextual grounds for the alphabetic overlays. In contrast, the oil paint and black paste on the surface of Insula

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Dulcamara (1938/481) covers an underlying newspaper support, concealing a printed text that might encode the kind of autobiographical information Klee was loathe to make available for public scrutiny.68 If the alphabet drawings and Insula Dulcamara represent the polar opposites of transparency and obscurity, respectively, Park Near Lu can be placed at a midpoint on the spectrum. Here landscape motifs are drawn in thick black paste and framed by organically shaped fields of colored pigment. Each black form is separated from its colored backdrop by a negative contour that recalls Klee’s earlier experiments with “white energy” on a dark ground. In this case the white contours were neither added to the surface nor scratched out of it. Rather, they were delineated by leaving a space between the top layer of oil paint and the white ground. Beneath the exposed, transparent ground are fragments of a printed text that are visible though not legible. As in all of Klee’s palimpsests, this residue of an underlying text is an integral part of the structure and content of Park Near Lu. The term “palimpsest” applies figuratively as well as literally to Park Near Lu. Klee’s works are often reiterations of familiar subjects, motifs, and experimental methods.69 Such is the case with Park Near Lu, which is one among literally hundreds of memory images of parks and gardens that give thematic continuity to Klee’s oeuvre.70 More often than not, these landscapes filter perceptual experience through remembered imagery. The tree forms in Park Near Lu have their origin in a series of ten penmanship exercises dating from 1892, each of which pairs an initial letter with a text copied out in a different script. The trompe l’oeil twigs that shape the initial F and the leafy curves of the illuminated I and R are grafted together in Park Near Lu to form a composite sign that can simultaneously be read as an uppercase L and a stylized tree.71 As in Landscape with Gallows and other paintings that contain alphabetic signs, the letter forms are visual abstractions that retain the possibility of linguistic reference. Klee himself provided just such a reference with the fragment “Lu,” which is actually written out in his oeuvre catalogue as “L(uzern).” Many scholars connect this place reference to the fact that Lily Klee periodically retreated to a health resort near Lucerne during the thirties.72 Such a circumstantial allusion merits further consideration because it brings Klee’s Park Near Lu full circle, back to the “poetic-personal idea of landscape” that informs his early artistic practice. According to Klee’s published correspondence with family members, Lily Klee was initially in residence at Sonnmatt, near Lucerne, from late March to early October 1930. This prolonged stay was followed by shorter visits in the fall of 1933 and again in the spring of 1939. Presumably the establishment, variously described as a sanatorium and a resort hotel, was the Kurhaus Sonnmatt, which specialized in diet and physical culture.73 A 1930 photograph of the Klees in an outdoor setting at Sonnmatt shows

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a serene, smiling Lily next to her husband, whose facial expression could be described as either grimly serious or stubbornly petulant.74 Whatever his mood, Klee seems to have been determined to maintain a cheerful facade in his letters, writing at length about his activities and the weather, alluding to his wife’s health regime only briefly and reassuringly. There are, however, occasional hints of strain, as in Klee’s awkward effort at lighthearted banter about who should be congratulated on the occasion of the couple’s twenty-fourth wedding anniversary, which the two spent apart.75 Lily Klee’s subsequent stay at Sonnmatt in 1933 seems to have been arranged to coincide with her husband’s Mediterranean holiday. His breezy notes to her enroute to Port Cros again allude only briefly to the state of her health, and they make no mention of the increasingly hostile political climate that would force the Klees to leave Germany in December 1933, just two months after Lily’s return from Sonnmatt.76 Two years after returning to Bern, Klee began to suffer from the early symptoms of scleroderma. He alluded to his own illness by way of explaining to his wife why he was not up to visiting her in Sonnmatt in May 1939.77 There is no way of knowing exactly when Lily Klee began making plans for her return to Sonnmatt in April 1939 or when Klee began painting Park Near Lu the year before. It can only be speculated that the anticipation of her return visit was the catalyst that triggered the memory image externalized in Park Near Lu. In one of those ironies that retrospection often reveals, when he painted Park Near Lu in 1938, Klee could look back wistfully to the visit with his spouse in Sonnmatt eight years earlier. His visual reminiscence of an autumnal landscape is rich in hue, subdued in tone, and graceful in its linear rhythms. It has been described by one Klee scholar as melodious and by another as lyrical.78 Both of these descriptive modifiers suggest a parallel to poetry — specifically to lyric poetry, which originated in music. Although definitions of lyric poetry have been modified over time, the one constant feature is a structural form based on its melodic origins. In addition, modern usage displays a pronounced tendency toward subjectivity in the choice of subject and imagery. Given this combination of structural and thematic elements, it is not surprising that lyric poetry lends itself to both musical and visual settings. By integrating spectral fragments of a printed text into the linear structure of his painting, Klee seems to have invited speculation concerning the relationship between his image and its textual support. Yet he intentionally obscured the specific identity of the text, implying either that he had no particular text in mind or that the specific content was not as important as its linguistic structure. Parallels between Park Near Lu and the first movement of composer Max Reger’s Romantic Suite (Eine romantische Suite) support the speculation that Klee’s palimpsest was conceived as a visual gloss on the structural and thematic features of lyric poetry in the Romantic tradition.

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In 1912 Reger premiered A Romantic Suite, program music for orchestra based on poems by Joseph von Eichendorff. At the time, Klee was living in Munich and attended a performance. Although he mentioned it only briefly in a review he wrote for Die Alpen,79 his practice as a poet and musician would have given him a particularly keen insight into Reger’s treatment of Eichendorff’s poetry. A Romantic Suite is technically identified as such because of its three movements, yet each movement closely corresponds to a specific poem printed in the score and therefore assumes the character of an individual tone poem. “Notturno,” the first movement of the suite, was written to Eichendorff’s “Night Magic” (“Nachtzauber”), a pensive, deeply personal evocation of sensory responses to nightfall in a mountain landscape. Reger’s symphonic interpretation of Eichendorff’s nocturnal theme begins with a plaintive melody, wistfully articulated by strings. As the orchestral support expands, chromatic harmony and tonal color create heightened emotional intensity. At a point in the movement that corresponds to the midpoint of Eichendorff’s ten-line poem, the orchestral volume diminishes as the melodic line descends: Von den Bergen sacht hernieder, Softly coming down the mountains, Weckend die uralten Lieder, Awakening the ancient songs, Steigt die wunderbare Nacht The wondrous night descends.80 Klee may or may not have recalled hearing Reger’s Romantic Suite, but his Park Near Lu is similarly Romantic in mood and lyrical in its linear structure. As in the past, Klee envisioned the landscape as a “background for the soul’s moods,” in this case one of melancholic nostalgia. A palettedominated by blues, pale violet, burnt umber, and yellow ochre conveys a resiliency of spirit that is perceptibly tempered by a muted, crepuscular light. Line in Klee’s painting is no more literally descriptive than color. Its primary function corresponds to the function of line in lyric poetry, which is to impose a melodic, rhythmic structure. Just as the linear patterns of a lyric poem give form to the words and the images they evoke, the linear rhythms of Park Near Lu define forms that are both linguistic and pictorial, thereby reinforcing the possibility that a remembered poetic text underlies Klee’s painted palimpsest. Even as Klee resigned himself to the inevitability of his own end, he could celebrate the cyclical continuity of nature in a painting that revives and reinvents a concept of landscape painting that had its origins in the theory and practice of Romanticism across artistic media. His “poeticpersonal idea of landscape” is Romantic in its affirmation of human feeling and its implicit understanding of nature as a site of introspective rumination.81 Just as his concept of the poetic changed over time, merging with his allegiance to pictorial abstraction, so did his “poetic-personal idea of landscape,” although his landscape painting remained a vehicle for expressing moods and feelings. Klee’s measured moves toward abstraction

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coincided with what he identified in his “Creative Credo” as one of the seismic shifts of modernism, namely, from recording the visible to making the invisible visible. No doubt because the tradition of landscape painting is intrinsically associated with the representation of visible reality, he looked to poetry as an alternative source of imagery and formal structure. In experimenting with the visual equivalents of these aspects of poetry, Klee developed a personal vocabulary of forms and an equally personal style of expression. Not coincidentally, he also discovered the rhythmic patterns that he characterized as “architectonic” or structural.

Notes 1

Tagebücher #56, 31 January 1898, 24 (Diaries, 16).

2

Tagebücher, #63, 1898, 28 (Diaries, 21). The early sketchbooks are reproduced in the Catalogue raisonné, 1:59–120. 3

Tagebücher, #109, 1900, 50 (Diaries, 39).

4

Tagebücher, #421 in the text for Zahn, 1920, 520. In writing the text for Zahn, Klee retained the numbered diary entries but made substantive changes and refinements. This is one of many instances where a passage from one of three autobiographical texts is incorporated into the English translation (Diaries, 122). 5 Scholarly assessments of Klee’s relationship to the German Romantic tradition range from firm conviction (Glaesemer, “Paul Klee and German Romanticism,” 65–81) to concurrence with a note of caution (Franciscono, Klee, 2–4). 6 Friedrich von Schelling, “Concerning the Relation of the Plastic Arts to Nature” [“Über das Verhältnis der bildenden Kunst zu der Natur,”1807], trans. Michael Bullock, in The True Voice of Feeling: Studies in English Romantic Poetry, ed. Herbert Edward Read (New York: Patheon, 1953), 324. 7

Heinrich von Kleist, “Brief eines Jungen Dichters an einen Jungen Maler,” in Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, ed. Helmut Sembdner (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1961), 2:336–37. This essay was first published in epistolary form in November 1810. 8

This observation is made in Art in Theory, 1815–1900: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. Charles Harrison, Paul Wood, and Jason Gaiger (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 690. 9

See Robert Vischer, “On the Optical Sense of Form: A Contribution to Aesthetics,” in Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873–1893, trans. Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou (Santa Monica, CA: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1994), 102–9. 10 11

For a color reproduction of this untitled work, see Catalogue raisonné, 1:147.

A comprehensive list of exhibiting artists is contained in the catalogue Ausstellung deutscher Kunst aus der Zeit von 1775–1875. Gemälde: Königliche Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Januar bis Mai 1906. Klee recorded his visit to this exhibition in the Diaries, listing Anselm Feuerbach, Adolph Menzel, and Max Liebermann

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among those artists to whom he devoted the most attention (Tagebücher #765, 11 April 1906, 239; Diaries, 200). Although he did not name Friedrich here or in his correspondence, at some point Klee acquired a pamphlet with color reproductions of his work now in the Klee library (Caspar David Friedrich, Acht farbige Wiedergaben nach seinen Bildern (Leipzig: E. A. Seemans Künstlermappen, #74, n.d.). 12 See Friedrich Ramdohr, “Über ein zum Altarblatte bestimmtes Landschaftsgemälde von Herrn Friedrich in Dresden, und über Landschaftsmalerei, Allegorie und Mystizismus überhaupt,” in Caspar David Friedrich in Briefen und Bekenntnissen, ed. Sigrid Hinz (Munich: Rogner & Bernhard, 1974), 134–51. 13 Karl Ludwig Fernow, “On Landscape Painting” [“Über die Landschaftsmalerei,” 1803], in Art in Theory, 1648–1815: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. Charles Harrison, Paul Wood, and Jason Gaiger (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 1069. 14 Carl Gustav Carus, Neun Briefe über Landschaftsmalerei, geschrieben in den Jahren 1815 bis 1824, ed. Kurt Gerstenberg (Dresden: W. Jess, n.d.), #5, 96–97. On purity and modern art, see Mark A. Cheetham, The Rhetoric of Purity: Essentialist Theory and the Advent of Abstract Painting (New York: Cambridge UP, 1991). 15

Adolf von Hildebrand, The Problem of Form in Painting and Sculpture, trans. and ed. Max Meyer and Robert Morris Ogden (New York: G. E. Stechert, 1907), 36. 16

Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, trans. Michael Bullock (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1997), 45; originally published as Abstraktion und Einfühlung: Ein Beitrag zur Stilpsychologie (Munich: R. Piper, 1908). A 1918 edition of this publication is in the Klee library. Numerous scholars link Klee’s theories to this publication. See Carol Ann Lees, “Klee and Worringer: Elective Affinities in an Aesthetic Partnership” (M.A. thesis, McGill University, 1991). See also Jenny Anger, Paul Klee and the Decorative in Modern Art (New York: Cambridge UP, 2004), 25–27; hereafter cited as Klee and the Decorative. 17 Wassily Kandinsky, On the Spiritual in Art, ed. and trans. Hilla Rebay (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1946), 47, 54–55, 88; Über das Geistige in der Kunst, with an introd. by Max Bill (Bern: Benteli, 1952), 69, 78–79, 127. For Worringer’s influence on both Kandinsky and Klee, see Mark Roskill, Klee, Kandinsky, and the Thought of Their Time: A Critical Perspective (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1992), 14; hereafter cited as Klee, Kandinsky. 18

For an analysis of Klee’s references to energy, see my essay “Paul Klee and the Energetics-Atomistics Controversy,” Leonardo 26 (1993): 311. 19

Many scholars have written extensively about Klee’s early landscapes. See, e.g., Franciscono, Klee, 24–31, and Glaesemer, Colored Works, 12–23. For reproductions of the works cited in this paragraph, see the following volumes of the Catalogue raisonné: untitled screen, 1:170; Well-Tended Forest Path, 1:289; Tree Lined Street, 1:261; Red Church and White Panel, 1:419; Houses in the Outskirts, 2:95. 20 Tagebücher #951, 1915, 365 (Diaries, 313). For a detailed study of Klee’s concept of Romanticism, see Glaesemer, “Klee and German Romanticism,” 65–81.

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21

Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms (New York: Methuen, 1985), 1–29; hereafter cited as Theory of Parody.

22 Goethe’s critique, contained in an 1826 letter to F. Förster, is cited in William Vaughan, German Romantic Painting (New Haven: Yale UP, 1980), 137. 23

Vaughan, German Romantic Painting, 133, 154–56.

24

Ramdohr, “Über ein zum Altarblatte bestimmtes Landschaftsgemälde,” 147.

25

Hutcheon, Theory of Parody, 6. Although not in the spirit of parody, Glaesemer compares Klee’s Mural from the Temple of Longing “Over There” (Wandbild aus dem Tempel der Sehnsucht “dorthin,” 1922/30) with Friedrich’s Wanderer over a Sea of Fog, c. 1818 (“Klee and German Romanticism,” 67–69).

26 For reproductions of these works, see the following volumes in the Catalogue raisonné: The Hanged Ones, 2:85; Gallows Humor, 3:45. 27

Hutcheon introduces this concept in Theory of Parody (14), although she uses examples other than those cited here. Pound scholar Gail McDonald of the University of North Carolina Greensboro informed me that Pound added another layer of parodic coding in writing an opera entitled Le Testament de Villon.

28 Morgenstern, Galgenlieder, 41. Translation by Fritz Janschka. I again cite the copy in the Klee library, in which this poem, like others, is marked with a red ‘X’ next to the title. 29 On references to Klee’s narrative of process, which I compare to the process narratives of contemporary writers, see the index to my book Klee’s Pictorial Writing, 242. 30

“Creative Credo,” sec. 5, 186 (Schriften, 121).

31

For a historical analysis of this study, see Johanna Drucker, The Alphabetic Labyrinth: The Letters in History and Imagination (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1995), 221–25. 32

For surrealist analogies between a painting and a window, see André Breton, “Le Surréalisme et la peinture,” La Révolution surréaliste, no. 4 (1925): 27. Cf. Magritte’s painting The Human Condition (La Condition humaine) of 1933. 33

Cited by Delaunay in “De Leonardo da Vinci,” Du Cubisme à l’art abstrait, 175. Delaunay’s annotations may pertain to the following French edition of Leonardo’s writings: “Parallèle entre la peinture et la poésie,” #73, Traité de la peinture (Paris: Libraire Ch. Delagrave, 1910), 33. 34

Delaunay, “La Lumière,” in Du Cubisme à l’art abstrait, 146.

35

See, e.g., Glaesemer, Colored Works, 50; Jordan, Klee and Cubism, 170–71; and my “Paul Klee’s Composition with Windows: An Homage and an Elegy,” Word & Image Interactions (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998), 2:109–20. For documentation and analysis of Delaunay’s influence in Germany, see the exhibition catalogue Delaunay und Deutschland, ed. Peter-Klaus Schuster (Munich: Staatsgalerie Moderner Kunst / Cologne: DuMont, 1985). 36

Wolfgang Kersten places View from a Window in the context of other works that incorporate the window motif; see his essay “Hoch taxiert: Paul Klees Ölbild Bühnenlandschaft 1922/178. Versuch einer historischen Einordnung,” in 9 Gemälde des Deutschen Expressionismus, vol. 1 of Meisterwerke (Munich: Galerie

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Thomas, 1995), 112–21. For reproductions of the works cited in this paragraph, see the following volumes in the Catalogue raisonné: The Draughtsman at the Window, 1:308; View onto a Square, 1:417; Window and Palms, 2:162; Reflecting Window, 2:310; Window in the Garden, 2:435; Composition with Window, 3:111; Rhythm of the Windows, 3:159. 37

Briefe, vol. 2, 2 July 1919, 958. Klee mentioned that Moilliet was in Ticino with Hesse at the time. Although Felix Klee informed Verdi that his father knew Hesse’s work (Verdi, Klee and Nature, 251 n. 90), Klee never mentioned any of Hesse’s publications, nor are any listed in the inventory of the Klee library. 38

For an extensive discussion of Klee and Hesse, see Verdi, Klee and Nature, 233–37.

39

Hermann Hesse, Die Morgenlandfahrt (Zurich: Fretz und Wasmuth, 1932), 94; also cited in Verdi, Klee and Nature, 233. Translation by Fritz Janschka. 40 For a reproduction of Hesse’s work, see Hermann Hesse, Gedichte des Malers: Zehn Gedichte mit Farbigen Zeichnungen (1920; reprint, Freiburg: Kirchhoff, 1954), 20; hereafter cited as Gedichte des Malers. Compare it to Klee’s two paintings, both reproduced in the Catalogue raisonné, 2:295. 41

Hesse, “Häuser, Felder, Gartenzaun,” Gedichte des Malers, 10–11.

42

Quoted in Apollinaire, Calligrammes: Poems of Peace and War (1913–1916), trans. Ann Hyde Greet, with an introd. by S. I. Lockerbie (Los Angeles: U of California P, 1980), 4; hereafter cited as Caligrammes. 43

Caligrammes, 349.

44

Caligrammes., 349.

45

For the English translation cited here see Caligrammes, 27, 29; for the full text see Apollinaire, “Les Fenêtres,” in Oeuvres complètes, 3:160–61. The Delaunay reference is to Du Cubisme à l’art abstrait, 60. 46

Apollinaire, “Les Fenêtres,” 160.

47

Apollinaire, “Les Fenêtres,” 160.

48

This poem, which I quoted and discussed in chapter 1, was recorded in the notebook of “Geduchte” in the mid-twenties and probably postdates View from a Window. For an analysis of this painting, see Kersten and Okuda, Im Zeichen der Teilung, 75. 49

Apollinaire, “Les Fenêtres,” 160.

50

For comprehensive documentation of these and related works dating from 1925–26, see Catalogue raisonné, 4:394–419. For reproductions, see: Classical Garden, 4:399; Ruins of Oi . . ., 4:404; View of a Mountain Sanctuary, 4:405; Temple of Bj., 4:419. 51 Geelhaar notes that the parallel line drawings of 1926 mark a shift from the static to the dynamic; see his Paul Klee and the Bauhaus (Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, 1973), 100; hereafter cited as Klee and the Bauhaus. Kersten and Okuda discuss A Garden for Orpheus in the context of the principle of “cardinal progression”; see Im Zeichen der Teilung, 192. 52

Werner Haftmann, The Mind and Work of Paul Klee (New York: Praeger, 1954), 175–76; this is a translation of his Wege bildnerischen Denkens.

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53 The quotation is from Markus Brüderlin, “Die Einheit in der Differenz: Die Bedeutung des Ornaments für die Abstrakte Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts, von Philipp Otto Runge bis Frank Stella” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wuppertal, 1995), which is cited by Philippe Büttner in the catalogue essay, “In the Beginning Was the Ornament: From the Arabesque to Modernism’s Abstract Line,” in Ornament and Abstraction: The Dialogue between Non-Western, Modern and Contemporary Art, ed. Markus Brüderlin (Basel: Fondation Beyeler / Cologne: DuMont, 2001), 100; hereafter cited as Brüderlin, ed., Ornament and Abstraction. For an in-depth analysis of the complexities related to ornament and abstraction in Klee’s work, see Anger, Klee and the Decorative. 54

Will Grohmann, Paul Klee (New York: Abrams, n.d.), 87, 260; hereafter cited as Klee. Max Huggler pursued the musical analogy in Paul Klee: Die Malerei als Blick in den Kosmos (Frauenfeld: Huber, 1969), 94–95; hereafter cited as Die Malerei als Blick in den Kosmos. See also my “Paul Klee’s Operatic Themes and Variations,” Art Bulletin 68 (September 1986): 452–53; hereafter cited as “Paul Klee’s Operatic Themes.” 55

Tagebücher #959, 1915, 369 (Diaries, 317).

56

Tagebücher, #963, summer 1915, 373–74 (Diaries, 322). On Rilke’s relationships with Klee and other artists, see Gisela Götte, Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker, and Ursel Berger, eds., Rainer Maria Rilke und die bildende Kunst seiner Zeit (Munich: Prestel, 1996). 57

The copy of Rilke’s Sonette an Orpheus (Leipzig: Insel-Verlag, 1923) in the Klee library is signed and dated Lily Klee, 24.XII.23. This is one of eleven volumes of Rilke’s poetry and letters owned by the Klees. The probability that Klee read these sonnets is also noted by Kathryn Elaine Kramer in her “Mythopoetic Politics and the Transformation of the Classical Underworld Myth in the Late Work of Paul Klee” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1993), 42. 58

Grohmann, Klee, 350, 357; Geelhaar, Klee and the Bauhaus, 106.

59

See Glaesemer, Handzeichnungen, 2:99. See also Christian Rümelin, “Klee’s Interaction with His Own Oeuvre,” in Paul Klee: Selected by Genius, 1917– 1933, ed. Roland Doschka, trans. Elizabeth Schwaiger (New York: Prestel, 2001), 35. 60

See Roland Greene, “Sonnet Sequence,” in The New Princeton Handbook of Poetic Terms, ed. T. V. F. Brogan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1994), 279.

61

Rilke, sonnet #17, part 2, and sonnet #21, part 2, in Sonnets to Orpheus, trans. David Young (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 1987), 88–89 and 96–97, resp. 62

Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus, sonnet #10, part 1, 20–21; sonnet #5, part 2, 64–65.

63

Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus, sonnet #15, part 1, 30–31.

64

For reproductions of these works, see the following volumes in the Catalogue raisonné: Gate in the Garden, 4:450; Rock Cut Temple, 5:81. 65 66

Ball, Flight Out of Time, 103.

George Bornstein, introduction to Palimpsest: Editorial Theory in the Humanities, ed. George Bornstein and Ralph G. Williams (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1993), 5.

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67

See the title page of Gérard Genette’s Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree, trans. Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1997).

68 This point is made about another work by Klee in an interview with Antoinette King, formerly director of conservation at the Museum of Modern Art, which is reprinted in Holland Cotter’s “The Gentle Art of Those Who Preserve Art,” New York Times, 17 October 1994, sec. C. For reproductions of works cited, see Catalogue raisonné, Alphabet I and Alphabet II, 7:392; Insula Dulcamara, 7:420. 69

On Klee’s pictorial reiterations from an earlier period, see Osamu Okuda, “Erinnerungsblick und Revision: Über den Werkprozess Paul Klees in den Jahren 1919–1923,” in Paul Klee: Kunst und Karriere, 159–72. It is interesting to speculate on Klee’s choice of the fragment Lu in his title. Mount Lu, or Lushan, located in southeast China, is a famous site that is often invoked in Chinese poem-paintings. This introduces the possibility that the title links Park Near Lu to the earlier poempaintings discussed in chapter 1. 70

Klee scholars generally agree that Park Near Lu marks a high point in Klee’s garden imagery. See, e.g., Huggler, Die Malerie als Blick in den Kosmos, 180.

71 The uncatalogued studies referenced here are found in one of the many school notebooks Klee kept, now housed in the archives of the Zentrum Paul Klee. I am here referring to the Schulheft Schreiben, IIIc, 1, 4, 7. 72

See, e.g., Glaesemer, Colored Works, 318.

73

See Karl Baedeker, Switzerland, together with Chamonix and the Italian Lakes (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1938), 108. 74

This photograph is reproduced in F. Klee, ed., Klee, 86.

75

For examples of Klee’s letters, see Briefe, vol. 2, 15 April 1930, 1112–13; 3 May 1930, 1118; and 14 September 1930, 1140 (the last containing the wedding anniversary reference).

76

See Briefe, vol. 2, 8–15 October 1933, 1235–37.

77

See Briefe, vol. 2, 23 May 1939, 1291. As Vishny notes (“Klee’s Self-Images,” 160), Klee cropped his own image in a painting dating from the same year entitled Wedding Anniversary (1939/477/E17), so that he appears to be partially “out of the picture.” In a letter to a friend, Lily Klee explained that she returned to Sonnmatt in 1939 because of a nervous breakdown, which she attributed in part to the strains brought on by her husband’s illness. This letter is quoted by Stefan Frey in “Chronologische Biographie (1933–1941),” in Das Schaffen im Todesjahr, 116.

78 79

Grohmann, Klee, 334, and Franciscono, Klee, 289, respectively.

Despite the fact that Klee made no mention of Eichendorff in his Diaries or correspondence, he did refer to the Eichendorff texts that accompany Reger’s music in a review first published in Die Alpen (December 1912, 239–40) and reprinted in Geelhaar, Schriften, 114. In this review Klee referred to the “Romantische Serenade,” apparently confusing the title with Reger’s numerous serenades for various combinations of instruments.

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80 This passage from Eichendorff’s poem is taken from the liner notes (p. 8) in Max Reger, Music of Max Reger: Reger and Romanticism, London Philharmonic Orchestra, Leon Botstein, compact disc, TELARC. #80589. The translation is by Gila Fox. 81

For a discussion of eight characteristically Romantic features of modern art, see Deniz Tekiner, Modern Art and the Romantic Vision (Lanham, MD: UP of America, 2000), 5–26.

4: Harmonizing Architectonic and Poetic Painting

L

“POETIC,” “ARCHITECTONIC” WAS COMMON in the cultural discourse of the early twentieth century. In his program announcement for the Weimar Bauhaus, Gropius predicted that bringing all the arts together would infuse a building with an architectonic spirit (“mit architektonischem Geiste füllen”).1 Klee had used the term as early as 1902 in the same letter to Lily Stumpf in which he formulated his concept of a poetic-painterly opposition. When he wrote this letter he had recently returned from an extended stay in Italy, where, by his own account, he had acquired an understanding of the “architectonic” (“Architektonische”). Instead of restricting the term to an architectural context, he implied a more general definition, citing as examples rhythmical arrangements of lines and planar surfaces (“(Linien, Flächen, rhythmische Anordnung)”).2 Rephrasing the letter in his autobiographical notes for Zahn, he stated that on his return from Italy he had determined “to reconcile architectonic and poetic painting, or at least to establish a harmony between them” (“architektonische und dichterische Malerei in Einklang oder doch in Zusammenklang zu bringen”).3 In a parenthetical aside, he clarified the meaning of “architectonic,” noting that “today I would say constructivist” (“heute würde ich sagen das Konstructive”).4 In 1902 he did not elaborate on how he planned to bring the architectonic and the poetic into harmony, no doubt because the idea was still a form of wishful thinking. By 1920 Klee was closer to achieving this goal, and in the midtwenties he produced paintings that are poetic in their figurative language and architectonic in their structural principles. By that time, however, he himself was no longer referring to the poetic-architectonic polarity as a guiding principle. While teaching at the Bauhaus during the twenties, Klee gradually substituted the term “structural” for “architectonic,” defining structure as a system of internal relations based in part on the dynamics of duality. In this respect, his theory of structure was a reprise of his youthful ambition to reconcile opposites (“Die Gegensätze versöhnen zu können!”).5 Even before settling into the productive routine of Bauhaus teaching, Klee realized that what he was after was not so much a definitive reconciliation of opposites as a dynamic relationship between them. Many of the lecture notes he amassed during the Bauhaus years outline a practical program for implementing his theory of dynamic structural relationships. IKE THE TERM

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Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Fig. 31: Paul Klee, Two-Dimensional Diagrams Illustrating Structural Rhythms in Three- and Four-Part Time (PN5 M4/28). Colored pencil on paper, 33
21 cm. Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern. © 2006 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG BildKunst, Bonn. Photograph courtesy of the Zentrum Paul Klee.

Expanding on his earlier references to the linear and planar rhythms that constitute the “architectonic,” he developed pedagogical exercises in structural rhythms, some based on nature and others on the arts.6 Among his comparative analogies between the visual arts and other art forms are diagrams of a conductor’s baton marking two- and three-part time, and grids that schematize stanzaic form and illustrate structural rhythms with notations used for marking poetic meter. Read either horizontally or vertically, like a word square, one such grid (fig. 31, top) visualizes three-part time as combinations of poetic feet.7 As he devised exercises in rhythmical repetition, Klee fine-tuned the skill of visualizing commonalities in the formal structures of poetry, music, and painting. This was a skill he applied to his studio as well as his pedagogical practice, creating bodies of work that usually originated as attempts to find pictorial solutions to specific formal problems and subsequently developed in different directions,

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often intersecting and merging with other visual explorations. Historically Klee scholars have grouped his work into discrete categories as a way of imposing order on the vast and richly varied oeuvre of an extraordinarily prolific artist. Works from two of these categories reveal some of the sources of Klee’s structural rhythms and the inventiveness with which he integrated them. The first two works discussed in this chapter are among Klee’s so-called lace pictures, the next two are operatic line drawings, and the last two combine the stylistic features of the lace pictures with operatic references.8 During the early twenties Klee developed a vocabulary of pictographs, which he repeated in linear patterns that could be cut into a number of separate images. Although linguistic in their syntactical arrangements, many of the pictographs are iconic not only in their individual forms but also in their patterned repetitions. A similar relationship between figurative motifs and repetitive patterning is common to many examples of the decorative arts. Klee himself invited this analogy in using titles such as Embroidery and Curtain. He was no doubt familiar with the kinds of mass-produced curtains that would have been banned from the Bauhaus but were staples of bourgeois decor. The most common of the machine-made curtain fabrics was a loosely woven, gridded weave that incorporates decorative patterns based on the European tradition of lace making, hence the euphemism “lace curtains.” This was the type of openwork patterning that Grohmann had in mind when he characterized a group of Klee’s works from the midtwenties as lace pictures. More recently other scholars have cited lace making and other forms of decorative art in reassessing the term “abstraction” as it applies to Klee’s art and modernism in general.9 As is evident from Klee’s writing, he himself referred to multiple sources and resorted to many different analogies in describing the construction of his theoretical and practical models. I am taking this precedent as license to propose poetic models for selected paintings that conform to the stylistic criteria of lace pictures. One common denominator of the lace pictures is a compositional grid. Linear grids made tentative appearances in Klee’s art in 1913, when he undertook his systematic investigation of cubism, and subsequently emerged as a characteristic compositional device in the Tunisian watercolors. In 1918 he cut the gridded composition of Once Emerged from the Gray of Night into two sections and mounted them with a space in between. When Klee initiated the technique of composing with scissors, he seems to have cut apart drawings and paintings he deemed disproportionate, lacking in compositional variety, or unresolved in some other way.10 In a diary entry documenting some of the studio experiments he was conducting during early 1911, he noted that he often applied “the basic pseudoimpressionist principle: ‘What I don’t like, I cut away with the scissors’ ” (“nach dem pseudo-impressionistischen Grundsatz ‘was mir nicht

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passt schneide ich mit der Schere weg’ ”).11 Combining the practice of composing by cutting with a conceptual form of decomposition, he next explored cubist theory and practice from 1913 to 1915. By the twenties he was applying the destructive principle as a constructive compositional strategy. As documented in photographic reconstructions expressly undertaken to illustrate this process by reversing it, in most cases works were cut in two, although some yielded three or more related works.12 An example is Mural (Wandbild, 1924/128) (fig. 32), the largest of six works cut from a brush drawing layered over watercolor washes on muslin and a colored paste ground.13 The title Mural implies a site-specific wall painting, but the component parts and structural rhythms of the linear grid point to another frame of comparative reference. Some of the microcosmic architectural signs in the linear overlay are identifiable as the arched openings of Bern’s famous arcades and the bridges spanning the Aare River. Less topographically specific are the mullioned window and Klee’s house sign, which consists of an X encased in a rectangular frame and topped by a gabled roof. Both the window and the X are familiar from the earlier View from a Window (fig. 28). The sprouting bulb that figures so prominently in Flower Myth (fig. 20) is here reduced to a generic sign of growth. By reducing architectural and natural forms to recognizable but schematized shapes, Klee invented a pictographic language that he used in Mural to denote a cityscape with a degree of abstraction that approaches verbal notation. A pronounced horizontality in the arrangement of the abstract pictographic signs further encourages a temporal reading. As the viewer assumes a temporal mode of perception and begins to read Klee’s visual text, it becomes apparent that the visual signs are repeated in structural rhythms that are not unlike the sound and metric patterns of poetry. Given the internal evidence of a rhythmic linear structure comparable to poetry, it can be argued that the title Mural refers to a specific poetic text. A likely possibility is Schwitters’s “Wall” (“Wand”) (fig. 33), which was written just a year before Klee visited Schwitters in Hannover in 1923. Klee stopped in Hannover on his return from a trip to the North Sea island of Baltrum. Unfortunately, the visit with Schwitters is as sparingly documented as the earlier meeting with Delaunay in Paris. Klee and Schwitters had known each other since 1919 — if not before. Both were associated with Walden’s journal Der Sturm and the gallery of the same name, where they exhibited, together with Johannes Molzahn, in January 1919. Although Klee would transfer his sales relationship from Walden to Hans Goltz later that same year, his name appears — along with those of Kandinsky, Marc Chagall, Carlo Carrà, Gino Severini, and others — in Schwitters’s Der Sturm, a collage from 1919 that catalogues a number of the artists who had established the Sturm Gallery’s reputation as a magnet for the avant-garde. During the early twenties Schwitters continued to

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Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book. Fig. 32: Paul Klee, Mural (1924/128). Watercolor on primed muslin on paper mounted on cardboard, 25.4
55 cm. Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern. © 2006 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Photograph courtesy of the Zentrum Paul Klee.

publish in the journal Der Sturm and participated in dada touring performances. In 1922 he attended the dada convention in Weimar, where Klee was teaching at the Bauhaus, so the two could have seen each other again at that time. In any event, Klee would have seen his name on numerous occasions in Schwitters’s critical writing. Schwitters did not single Klee out for either praise or opprobrium, usually reserving the latter for critics rather than fellow artists. Typical of Schwitters’s attitude toward critics is an article from 1926 with the provocative title “Mein Merz und      / Meine Monstre Merz   / Muster Messe im Sturm.” Here he grouped Klee with Kandinsky and Oskar Kokoschka to ridicule what he perceived as a fashion for alliteration among unimaginative and uninformed critics.14 Schwitters’s penchant for plays on words and letters was an intellectual proclivity he and Klee shared. Klee acknowledged as much when he inscribed C for Schwitters (C für Schwitters, 1923/161) to his host on the occasion of their reunion in 1923.15 Since Klee also shared Schwitters’s contempt for inanities that passed for art criticism, one can assume that this was a topic of conversation during their visit. Presumably their shoptalk touched on mutual friends in the arts as well as bêtes noires; at some point it must have drifted into discussions of their own work. Klee was then in his third year of teaching at the Bauhaus and was still exhibiting at Goltz’s Neue Kunst Gallery in Munich. Schwitters had founded Merz magazine and was beginning to construct his “Merzbau.” Never one who needed prompting to promote his challenges to convention,

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Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Fig. 33: Kurt Schwitters, “Wand,” 1922. © 2006 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. © 1973 DuMont Literatur und Kunst Verlag.

Schwitters might well have produced the recently published “Wand” as an example of his experimental poetry.16 “Wand” opens with the line “Fünf Vier Drei Zwei Eins,” repeated as an intertextual refrain from the 1922 number poem “Zwölf.” This enumeration corresponds to the numeric repetitions of the word “Wand” in Schwitters’s twenty-line poem. In a tour de force that drew on his visual sensibilities as well as his verbal dexterity, Schwitters composed a poem by visualizing the sound values of poetry. He accomplished this by applying compositional techniques that have been called “opto-phonetic,”17 among them alternations of upper and lower cases, periodic shifts in point sizes, and calculated variations in both the number of repetitions per line and the spaces between repeated words. These constitute the visual parallels of emphasis, volume, rhythm, and other aspects of recited poetry that Schwitters addressed in his theoretical and critical writings. The use of a numeric sequence and standardized variations on an architectural term can be read as a witty reference to the numbered, prefabricated components of wartime military installations and postwar reconstructions. Klee would have recognized a source of Schwitters’s idea in one of the theoretical models that shaped Gropius’s program for the Bauhaus. Although prefabrication and mass production had precedents in nineteenth-century architecture, they were not widely applied until the twentieth century. Gropius advocated a system of standardization utilizing industrially produced component parts assembled according to a sequential process. In 1910 he had drafted a “Program for the Founding of a General Housing-Construction Company Following Artistically Uniform Principles”

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(“Programm zur Gründung einer allgemeinen Hausbaugesellschaft auf künstlerisch einheitlicher Grundlage”). The idea was revived at the Bauhaus, albeit experimentally rather than programmatically.18 Georg Muche’s “Haus am Horn” was constructed for the 1923 Bauhaus Exhibition in Weimar, using new construction techniques and a number of prefabricated parts.19 In theory, Muche’s model house was a prototype for the twentieth century’s commodification of domestic architecture. Some readers might have predicted the same about “Wand” and twentieth-century poetic practice, but despite the use of a single component unit and repetition — the underlying principle of prefabrication — Schwitters’s poem was not assembled according to any formulaic model. Klee seems to have understood the irony in Schwitters’s implied analogy to a prefabricated architectural structure, for his “wall painting” perfectly complements Schwitters’s “wall” in its use of “prefabricated” units to create a unique structure. “Wand” reads like a poem because its typographic structure imposes a distinctive rhythm on a verbal symbol that is not in and of itself poetic. To use Klee’s terminology, “Wand” is a single verbal unit made poetic through the use of architectonic or structural rhythms. Structural rhythms also characterize Mural and the works that immediately precede it in Klee’s numerically ordered oeuvre catalogue: Structural I (1924/125), Structural II (1924/126), and Structural Composition (Structurale Komposition, 1924/127).20 Like other works from 1924, Mural was composed by cutting into a sequence of patterns prepared in advance for use as prefabricated design units.21 As Schwitters’s did in “Wand,” Klee used abstractions that reference architecture. The architectural motifs that constitute the component parts of Klee’s pictorial vocabulary are as repetitive yet as subtly varied as the typographic forms that make up the verbal components of Schwitters’s poetic text. Variations in size and spacing, for example, are common to both. Despite these similarities, Mural is fundamentally different from “Wand” in ways that assert Klee’s own ideas about structural rhythms. Mural consists of rhythmically repetitive patterns that Klee characterized in his pedagogical notes as “dividual” (“Rhythmische Repetition, dividuell”), meaning indefinitely extendable.22 One example of the concept of dividual structural rhythms is the grid with notations traditionally used to mark the metric feet of poetic verse (fig. 31). On other pages of teaching notes he elaborated on these basic patterns and demonstrated how they could be extended by applying the structural principles of change, uniformity, multiplication, and displacement.23 When it came to putting pedagogical theories to practice, Klee took the same liberties with dividual rhythms that he did with the metric structures of his poetry. The ballad quatrains that are the earliest surviving examples of his poetry can be scanned, but the verses do not strictly conform to regular patterns of stress or numbers of syllables. Similarly, the 1926 poem that he himself

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scanned in the notebook of “Geduchte” (“Der Wolf spricht”) combines trochees, iambs, and dactyls with extra syllables in irregular lines with no prevailing meter. Close scrutiny of the rhythmic structure of Mural reveals that the dividual units likewise contain variations in numbers and types of signs, which break the rhythmic repetition of one pattern and signal the beginning of another. Changes in the structural rhythms of Mural correspond to variations on a subtly nuanced color theme, which unfolds simultaneously in depth and in planar rhythms that progress from burnt sienna red to pale rose, sporadically superimposed with washes of golden yellow and light cobalt blue. In layering his drawing over color, Klee established a parallel relationship between the temporal rhythms of his linear script and his progressive color theme. The viewer accustomed to constructing analogies grounded in familiar imagery might compare the relationship between line and color to a succession of poetic images evoking the fleeting temporal transition from sunset to dusk. Klee’s Bauhaus lectures on color theory place this frame of reference in a pedagogical context. Instructing his students on the principles of peripheral movement, Klee demonstrated how color movement would look if rendered in musical notation or in writing.24 Mural is a pictorial application of this exercise, with a linear overlay of pictographic signs substituting for a written text or musical notation. A number of years earlier, Klee had made claims for the superiority of polyphonic painting over music because the time element is spatialized, thereby visualizing the concept of simultaneity.25 He did not make the same point about painting in relation to poetry, no doubt because he knew that poetry had changed as radically as painting. Both Schwitters and Klee succeeded in spatializing temporal rhythms, Schwitters by manipulating typographic elements, Klee by integrating line and color to trigger the simultaneous perception of time and space. This breakdown of the timespace polarity places Schwitters’s “Wand” and Klee’s Mural within a modernist sphere of innovation. So, too, does each artist’s vocabulary and the way it relates to structural rhythms. Schwitters’s “Wand” consists of typographic variants of the singular and plural forms of one word. As early as 1913 the “zaum” poets Velimir Khlebnikov and Alexei Kruchonykh had announced not only that a work of art could consist of a single word but “simply by a skillful alteration of that word the fullness and expressivity of artistic form might be attained.”26 In the same essay they dismissed the Italian futurists as self-serving imitators of their ideas. Whatever they may have thought about Schwitters, his “Wand” conforms to their theory without slavishly imitating their experimental practice. Klee’s vocabulary is more varied, consisting of figurative abstractions combined with linguistic and geometric signs. Individually the signs denote. Collectively they form new visual metaphors that serve a dual function: they accrue in repetitive patterns that generate compositional rhythms, while at the same time

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Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Fig. 34: Paul Klee, Cathedrals (1925/65). Watercolor on paper with oil ground mounted on cardboard, with original frame, 27.3
32 cm. Private collection, Japan. © 2006 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Photograph courtesy of the Zentrum Paul Klee.

taking on symbolic value as signs of growth and structure. Like Schwitters’s “Wand,” Klee’s Mural does not describe what is visible in the world but rather visualizes the process of making a work of art that is architectonic in its structural rhythms and poetic in its vocabulary. Throughout the twenties Klee continued to develop the pictorial possibilities inherent in layering linear scripts over colored grounds. Architecture was a recurring theme, with titles ranging from general architectural references to specific building types, like the 1924 Cathedral (fig. 21). In 1925 Klee quite literally multiplied his cathedral imagery. The linear patterning of Cathedrals (Kathedralen, 1925/65) (fig. 34) can be read as multiple views of a single cathedral or images of three or possibly four different structures, each anchored in one quadrant of the painting. The plural form of the title could also point to multiple frames of reference, including Klee’s own earlier pictorial images of cathedrals and one of the most memorable images of place he recorded in the Diaries. On 13 November 1916 Klee had been

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Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Fig. 35: Ernst Stadler, “Fahrt ueber die Coelner Rheinbruecke bei Nacht,” Die Aktion, April 23, 1913. Digital image by Dan Smith.

dispatched from his military post in Schleissheim with a shipment of airplanes destined for a base near Cologne. Three days later, his mission accomplished, he anticipated a night’s rest in a comfortable hotel and a free day to explore the city. Before setting out to see the sights of Cologne on the morning of 17 November, he wrote a letter to Lily Klee in which he described a walk he had taken the previous night. An edited version of this letter is contained in the Diaries as entry #1026. The result of his editing is a succession of graphic images that reads less like a letter from a military transport courier on furlough in a big city than notations of poetic imagery jotted down for future reference. Models for Klee’s self-consciously poetic prose can be found on the pages of Die Aktion and in the editions of war poetry that proliferated during and after the war. In addition to editorials and essays on contemporary politics and culture, Die Aktion regularly featured a section devoted to new poetry. Ernst Stadler was a frequent contributor, first from Brussels, where he had a university appointment, and then from the western front. “On Crossing the Rhine Bridge at Cologne by Night” (“Fahrt ueber die Coelner Rheinbruecke bei Nacht”) was first published in 1913 in an issue of Die Aktion (fig. 35) and reprinted in Der Aufbruch, a collection of Stadler’s poetry published in 1914, the same year he was killed in action.27 The poem evokes a remembered view of Cologne, framed by the window of an express train roaring through the night. Stadler’s journey would take him to the same train station where Klee began his nocturnal stroll through the city center a few years later. Impressed, as Klee would be, by flashes of illumination, Stadler punctuated his visual impressions of the darkened city

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with images of lights that momentarily come into view (“Nun taumeln Lichter her”), then disappear.28 As a graphic artist Klee would have responded to the dramatic visual effects of such imagery. By the same token, this is precisely the kind of imagery he could have envisioned on his own, without benefit of a literary source. It is syntax rather than imagery that provides the most compelling evidence that Klee’s diary entry reflects the influence of poets such as Stadler. Stadler was known for his use of long, flowing verses that juxtapose sentence fragments, elliptical phrases, and strings of descriptive modifiers in carefully crafted syntactical patterns. These patterns give his poetry its urgency and sensory impact. The impact was arguably not lost on Klee. A comparison between his description of Cologne by night in his letter to Lily Klee, followed by the corresponding passage from the Diaries, illustrates the effect of changes in syntax: The crazy railroad station, in front of which that larger-than-life museum piece, the cathedral, and in complete darkness, the heavily guarded Hohenzollern Bridge. The river, and finally, the beams of four crafty searchlights cutting through, and high above the colossal cathedral a Zeppelin maneuvering quietly and easily. [Der verrückte Bahnhof, davor dicht das überlebensgrosse Museumsstück, der Dom, die im völligen Dunkel belassene, scharf bewachte Hohenzollernbrücke. Der Strom, und zum Schluss, die Linien von vier listigen Scheinwerfern schneidend, höchst oben über dem hypertrophischen Dom in aller Ruhe und Leichtigkeit manövrierend ein Zeppelin.]29 The mad railroad station. Right in front of it, that more-than-lifesize museum piece, the cathedral. The Hohenzollern Bridge, totally dark and heavily guarded. The river. The sharp beams of four wily searchlights. Far above the towers of the cathedral, the bright little bar of a Zeppelin, maneuvering gracefully, speared by one of the beams. [Der verrückte Bahnhof. Dicht davor das überlebensgrosse Museumsstück der Dom. Die völlig unbeleuchtete scharf bewachte Hohenzollernbrücke. Der Strom. Die scharfen Linien von vier listigen Scheinwerfern. Zuhöchst oben über dem Türmen des Domes mit Grazie manövrierend das helle Strichlein eines Zeppelins, von einer der Linien gespiesst.]30

Despite similarities in descriptive language, the differences between Klee’s discursive letter and the more fragmented diary entry are significant. To give the passage in his diary a sense of breathless immediacy, he made changes in phrasing and punctuation, transforming a prosaic description into a poetic evocation of an eerie nocturnal spectacle. The poetic syntax gives his diary entry the staccato rhythm of front-line reportage and the vividness of a verbal sketch. Assuming that Cathedrals visually represents a remembered image subjected to poetic syntax, the next step in reconstructing Klee’s process is

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to determine how he effected the transition from mnemonic verbal imagery to a painting that integrates the poetic and the structural. The architectural structures named in the title loom close to the picture plane and are all but absorbed into an overall linear pattern. Klee modified the linear-patterning technique he had applied previously in Mural, using closely spaced parallel lines. Individual forms are fused into a graphic scrim that is worked into varnished watercolor washes unevenly absorbed into linen-textured paper coated with a layer of oil paint. In some areas the partially saturated layers of violet and rose emerge as negative spaces. These spaces give the image a spectral presence that makes it a fitting backdrop for the “festival of evil” (“ein wahrhaft festlicher Akt des Bösen”) Klee had evoked as a metaphor of nocturnal Cologne.31 Indeed, it is possible to read Klee’s drawing as a composite view of the towers and spires that define the skyline of Cologne’s city center. In the course of his evening stroll through the city in 1916, Klee very likely wandered along the west bank of the Rhine River and into the Heumarkt. Approaching the river from the railroad station, he would have been struck by the anachronistically medieval towers framing the recently built Hohenzollern Bridge. Looking to the west of the Heumarkt, he would have seen the triple-towered St. Maria im Capitol, to the north the turrets of Gross-St. Martin, and — most impressive of all — the High Gothic cathedral with its two majestic, soaring towers. If Klee consulted his diary entry as an aide-mémoire, he also eliminated from his painting any visual signifiers that would imply either an illustrative relationship to a specific textual source or an imitative relationship to any particular architectural monument.32 Just as he had reduced his epistolary prose to a string of poetic images, so Klee edited his painting to give his visual images the indeterminacy of poetic language. Reduced to linear abstractions, the structures in Klee’s Cathedrals are as generic as Feininger’s Cathedral (fig. 22) and as potentially poetic in their symbolic possibilities. Because of its original use in publicizing the goals of the Bauhaus, Feininger’s image inevitably acquired the metaphorical status of a Cathedral of Socialism. With characteristic verbal wit, Klee himself suggested one possible symbolic reading of the architectural forms in his Cathedrals when he described Cologne Cathedral as “that larger-than-life museum piece.”33 What distinguishes Klee’s image from Feininger’s is not the nature of their visual language — which is symbolic in both cases — but rather a linear structure that reinforces the poetic resonance of the imagery. Despite differences in materials, technique, and format, Cathedrals is reminiscent of Mural in the character and variety of the pictographic signs and in their rhythmic repetitions, which accrue in dividual patterns. The linear repeats of Cathedrals, like those of Mural, are textbook examples of the dividual rhythms that Klee devised to illustrate his Bauhaus lectures on basic structural articulation. Here the dividual structural rhythms become

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“individual in a figurative sense” (“individuell im übertragenen Sinne”) when they assume a complexity beyond repetitive, dividual rhythms.34 Seen as the vertical components of an overall grid, the linear rhythms minimally describe the architectural forms of cathedral towers. Seen as horizontally aligned patterns, they constitute the architectonic or structural components of an abstract painting. The subtle yet dynamic tension between figuration and structural rhythm has analogies in Stadler’s spatialized poetic texts. Like Schwitters, Stadler was keenly aware of the relationships between the horizontal and vertical elements of poetic form. Unlike Schwitters, Stadler never ventured into the experimental domain of shaped poetry. His work remained firmly grounded in traditional poetic imagery that at times achieves an oppressive level of intensity through the accumulation of images in relentlessly long lines. A phrase from “On Crossing the Rhine Bridge at Cologne by Night” succinctly captures the effect his poem has on the reader: “o ich fühl es schwer / Im Hirn” (“O heavily / I feel it weigh on my brain”).35 Typical of Stadler’s versification are vertical layouts counterbalanced by the pronounced horizontality of his stanzaic units. The layout of “On Crossing the Rhine Bridge at Cologne by Night” as it was published in Die Aktion illustrates this point. Fourteen run-on stanzas coalesce in a format that generates a reciprocal tension between the horizontal pull of the lines and the vertical orientation of the composition. This tension is also evident in Cathedrals, where sign clusters can be read horizontally as abstract linear rhythms and vertically as representational signifiers. The horizontally aligned patterns of Klee’s visual signs have the rhythmic repetition and flow of Stadler’s acoustic patterns. Moreover, perceptible breaks in the patterned repetitions of Cathedrals delineate square and rectangular units that are as densely concentrated and as metrically varied as Stadler’s verse paragraphs. Stacked vertically, Klee’s aggregate of architectural signs gives shape to the images named in his title, just as Stadler’s formal structure shapes his accumulation of sensory impressions into an extended poetic image of Cologne by night. At the same time Klee was expanding the poetic vocabulary of his rhythmical linear overlays, he was considering ways to develop the expressive potential of his parallel-line drawings. Among the earliest examples of these drawings are images that incorporate the scored lines of sheet music. During the postwar years and throughout the twenties, Klee broadened his experiments with pictorial abstraction to include references to music, inherently the least mimetic of all the arts. As Klee explained to his students at the Bauhaus during this period, music presents the opportunity to visualize something that is at once abstract and compellingly real.36 An accomplished violinist who continued to perform long after he abandoned any professional ambitions as a musician, Klee was speaking from experience. Although he himself played in chamber groups or with his spouse,

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Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book. Fig. 36: Paul Klee, River Spirit (1920/233). Pen on paper mounted on cardboard, 9.6
28.7 cm. Location unknown. © 2006 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Photograph courtesy of the Zentrum Paul Klee.

who was a pianist, his knowledgeable, passionate interest in music encompassed opera as well.37 For Klee opera offered the challenge of interpreting a musical score that is integrally related to a poetic text and a narrative context. Operatic music consequently gave Klee the license to experiment with visual equivalents of abstract melodic lines that are rhythmically structured to support and reinforce the declamation of a poetic libretto. That was not, however, the sole focus of his interest in opera. In addition to providing prototypes of linear structures that parallel poetry, opera afforded Klee ample opportunity to indulge his penchant for play. Whether paying homage to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, his favorite composer, or having fun with the characters of Richard Wagner’s music dramas, Klee took great delight in reducing the ambitions of grand opera to the modest scale of small drawings and paintings.38 Klee’s play with opera, like his play with words, was never trivial or self-indulgent but rather purposeful, his purpose being to experiment not to denigrate. The following examples demonstrate how he borrowed from operatic sources to visualize temporal rhythms that communicate poetic content. His operatic themes and variations invariably incorporate some combination of textual fragments, musical notations, and pictorial abstractions that include reductive figurative motifs as well as nonrepresentational signs. Such is the case with River Spirit (Stromgeist, 1920/233) (fig. 36). Were it not for the presence of staves, notes, and rests in a range of durational values, plus the fermata sign, the central figure could represent any river sprite. The musical setting suggests that she is one of the Rhinemaidens, swept along by the undulating rhythms of Wagner’s Rhinegold (Das Rheingold), one of four music dramas that make up the operatic cycle The Ring of the Nibelung (Der Ring des Nibelungen). The Rhinegold had its premiere in 1869 at Munich’s State Opera House. By the time Klee moved to Munich

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in 1898, the opera had lost its avant-garde edge and acquired the reputation of a repertory favorite. In letters to his family Klee mentioned numerous performances of The Rhinegold,39 which is usually programmed as the prologue of the Nibelung trilogy, although parts of the score are occasionally arranged for orchestra or even transcribed for solo instruments. What is missing in any concert performance is the impact of Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk, a theoretical concept that evolved from the nineteenth century’s integrative impulse to layer music into the analogies established by the ut pictura poesis paradigm.40 In volumes of polemical writing Wagner advocated a synthesis of all the arts in a grand, performative totality. Undeterred by conventional practice, he put himself in a unique position to realize this ambitious goal by assuming the role of poet/librettist as well as composer, and by controlling every aspect of staged productions. The operas of the Ring cycle were his experimental testing grounds. Wagner selected his cast of characters from the gods, goddesses, nymphs, and gnomes of German mythology. His epic narrative, which begins in the depths of the Rhine River and ends on the heights of Valhalla, pits rapacious greed against selfless love. Each opera in the cycle was conceived as an artistic synthesis in which meaning is primarily conveyed not by either the poetic text of the libretto or the musical score but by a confluence of sound, visual effects, and movement. In the opening scene of The Rhinegold the sinister Alberich precipitates the dramatic action of the entire Ring cycle by snatching a cache of gold from the protective custody of three less than vigilant Rhinemaidens. The melodic lines that propel the action forward are introduced successively, the first by a single horn, the others added as the orchestral accompaniment rises to its full volume. Invested with narrative momentum and symbolic value, these lines recur as leitmotifs throughout the Ring. As the principal carriers of meaning, they function like the figurative language of poetry, giving symbolic form to the content of Wagner’s libretto. Opera was one of many sources Klee tapped to devise a sign system that could visualize conceptual abstractions without recourse to pictorial allegory. He experimented with such a system in River Spirit. Shown clutching musical staff lines, the figure named in the title could well depict Woglinde, the Rhinemaiden who sings the opening vocal line of The Rhinegold. She is suspended between nonmimetic symbols, some derived from the conventional symbols of musical notation, others from medieval neumes, a system of musical shorthand that visualizes the pitch and flow of melody. The distribution of symbolic signs to the left of the central figure corresponds to the placement of notes in the ascending melodic line of the Rhine motif, whereas those on her right can be read as a condensed notational form of the Ring motif. Assuming that the figure doubles as an operatic character and a personified musical phrase, she can be interpreted as both Woglinde and a figuration of the motif of the Rhinemaidens that accompanies

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Woglinde’s opening solo. If read sequentially from left to right, Klee’s graphic symbols correspond to three of Wagner’s recurring musical motifs and preserve their order within the melodic structure of the first scene of The Rhinegold. Klee’s signature arrows are placed such that they graphically reinforce the horizontal flow of Wagner’s melodic lines and point to the recurrence of these lines within the musical superstructure of the Ring cycle. Arrows would feature prominently in the repertoire of symbolic forms in motion that Klee began to develop in his Bauhaus lectures and subsequently incorporated into the Pedagogical Sketchbook (Pädagogisches Skizzenbuch), published in 1925.41 Given the obvious analogy between the temporal nature of musical notation and the visual representation of forms in motion, it is hardly surprising that the arrow and other visual symbols of motion often appear in musical settings such as River Spirit. Here the musical setting is minimally indicated by staff lines. Like the lines of a text on a printed page or the lined pages of his notebook of “Geduchte,” the staff lines of a musical score gave Klee an experimental model for delineating a nonillusionistic pictorial space. By filling the indeterminate space with a playful combination of figurative motifs and abstract visual notations of temporal movement, he produced an illustrative example of the idea that “space is a temporal concept,”42 even as he mischievously reduced Wagner’s epic pretensions to the level of a comic interlude. Long Hair and Soulful (Langes Haar und Seelisches, 1929/299) (fig. 37) refers to an altogether different operatic context and incorporates the pendulum, another of Klee’s symbolic forms in motion.43 The genesis of this drawing indicates that Klee’s sense of play enlivened his classroom instruction as well as his studio production. To teach his Bauhaus students how to generate movement with the graphic equivalent of a pendulum, he invoked a nonmusical motif from Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande. Instructing the students to “take a very long hair (one of Mélisande’s), attach the lead weight, and let the hair hang slack” (“Nehmen wir ein sehr langes Haar [ein Haar der Melisande] und führen wir daran das Blei mit sensibler Lockerung”),44 he illustrated the concept of independent movement and countermovement (fig. 38). Long Hair and Soulful neatly brings this exercise in generating a symbol of movement full circle to its genesis. With the addition of curvilinear patterns, Klee reconfigured the pendulum, transforming it into the very head that gave the schematic symbol its original form. The title Long Hair and Soulful is an oblique reference to Debussy’s heroine. Like her wide-open eyes, Mélisande’s long hair is one of the symbolic motifs that are woven throughout the opera’s libretto. Adapted by the composer from a play by Maurice Maeterlinck, the libretto is characterized by language that is suggestive rather than explicit. Without offering any explanations, the text implies that Mélisande has every reason to be soulful: she suffers from amnesia about her identity; she is confined to a gloomy castle;

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Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Fig. 37: Paul Klee, Long Hair and Soulful (1929/299). Pen on paper mounted on cardboard, 28
22.5 cm. Private collection, Canada. © 2006 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Photograph courtesy of the Zentrum Paul Klee.

and, to make matters worse, she is in love with her brother-in-law Pelléas. What seems to have attracted Debussy to Maeterlinck’s text was the challenge of writing music that would convey the rich symbolism and dense mood of the play.45 Whereas Klee’s title alludes to these features of Maeterlinck’s text and Debussy’s score, his image draws on other aspects of the opera. In deeming Pelléas et Mélisande the “most beautiful opera since Wagner’s death” (“[die] schönste Oper seit Wagners Tod”), Klee acknowledged the lingering influence of Wagner on Debussy’s vocal writing.46 Although Wagner’s legacy is evident in the recurrence of leitmotifs, by the time Debussy composed his only opera, he was determined to renounce the symphonic grandeur of Wagner’s music dramas. Pelléas et Mélisande is a model of musical restraint and understatement. To restore the controlled, parallel relationship between vocal and musical lines that existed in the early history of opera, Debussy made a conscious effort to subordinate his music to the structure of his libretto. Typical of the libretto is dialogue

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Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Fig. 38: Paul Klee, Page 117, Beiträge zur bildnerischen Formlehre. Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern. © 2006 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Photograph courtesy of the Zentrum Paul Klee.

constructed by means of the repetition of single words (“perdue” [lost]) and phrases (“Ne me touchez pas” [Do not touch me]).47 Repetitive phrasing is also audible in the musical lines, which underscore the rhythmic patterns of declamatory speech with unrelenting — even somniferous — consistency. The imitative linear rhythms of Klee’s Long Hair and Soulful recall this parallel relationship between Debussy’s score and Maeterlinck’s text. Occasionally the sustained dramatic stasis of the opera is broken by changes of rhythm. One such musical moment occurs in the tower scene of the third act when Mélisande lowers her long hair to a waiting Pelléas. Debussy described the movement with a surging wave of sound that interrupts the smooth continuum of the orchestral background. Although analogies can be drawn between Debussy’s music for the tower scene and Klee’s rippling linear rhythms, his drawing is not a literal transcription of any single passage from Debussy’s opera. Similarly, Klee’s image of Mélisande, with her stylish marcel waves is not a portrait of Mary Garden or any of the other famous interpreters of the role. Klee was less interested in the cast and costumes for a specific performance of Pelléas et Mélisande than he was in the opera’s unique symbolic and formal structures. In Long Hair and Soulful he used the underlying graphic structure of the pendulum, which he particularized as Mélisande by reiterating the repeated references to her hair and eyes, both of which are integral to the symbolic coherence of the libretto. By delineating these symbolic motifs with the visual analogues of Debussy’s meandering musical lines and abruptly shifting rhythms, Klee defined poetic figures with linear rhythms.

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Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Fig. 39: Paul Klee, Palace (1928/133). Watercolor on paper mounted on cardboard, 28.5
55 cm. Museo Frida Kahlo, Casa Azul, Mexico City. © 2006 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Photograph courtesy of the Museo Dolores Olmedo Patiño, Mexico City, Mexico.

Klee’s parallel-line drawings are not exclusively graphic, often being inscribed over or into colored grounds. The perforated facade of Palace (Palast, 1928/133) (fig. 39) is a linear grid layered over pale watercolor washes. This work revives the poetic language and structural armature of Mural and Cathedrals while retaining the musical allusions of Klee’s operatic themes and variations. The transparent architectural fantasy represented in Palace is anchored to the ground by building blocks from Klee’s familiar repertoire of arches and rectangles, some topped with gables, others with scallops. The roofline unfolds as a pattern book of fairy-tale architecture, beginning with double towers on the left, then morphing into a succession of turreted, domed, and crenellated projections of varying heights. Klee’s palace is architecturally eclectic, but it does not appear to be particularly forbidding until the viewer discovers the words inscribed on the first level, just to the right of center: “wer hier eintritt / kommt nicht mehr” (“Who enters here / comes no more”). This ominous warning introduces not only an undercurrent of unease but also the possibility of an extrapictorial reference. Given the fact that the linear scaffolding of the drawing resembles the staff lines of a musical score, the “here” could be a reference to the setting of Béla Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle, which Klee had anticipated hearing at a Dessau theater in May 1926. In a note to Lily Klee he expressed frustration that the performance was cancelled (“Natürlich

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hatte ich Aussicht, etwas Gutes am Theater zu hören, nämlich Bartók[s] ‘Blaubart,’ natürlich ist er am letzten Tag wieder abgesagt worden”). Klee could have heard the opera on another occasion, but in any case his reference to “something good” indicates that he had at least read about the work and was most likely familiar with the libretto and perhaps even with the score.48 The nameless bard who intones the rhymed prologue to Bartók’s musical drama entreats the audience to listen carefully to a tale that is as old as the castle in which the drama unfolds: Régi vár, régi már Az mese, ki róla jár. Tik is hallgassátok.

Old is the castle, and old the tale that tells of it. Listen in silence.49

As a reward to those who comply, the bard holds out the promise of selfdiscovery. What Klee seems to have discovered in Bartók’s opera was the model of a graphic language that could communicate poetic content and articulate structural form simultaneously. Klee’s ongoing effort to reconcile the poetic and the structural was shared by artists across disciplines, including composers such as Arnold Schoenberg and Bartók, both of whom sought to infuse new concepts of tonal structure with the emotional intensity of nineteenth-century music. In early works such as Bluebeard’s Castle Bartók retained vestiges of the harmonic and melodic vocabulary of late Romanticism as he reformulated the traditional concept of tonal music by introducing new tonal patterns, chord formations, and a vocal style inspired by folk songs.50 Given his subject matter, Bartók could easily have fallen prey to the seductions of “castle Romanticism,” to borrow a phrase from the lexicon of literary criticism.51 Instead, he experimented with the relatively new conventions of “literature opera.” As defined by Carl Dahlhaus, a literature opera is a vocal work written to complement and reinforce the dramatic structure of a preexisting literary text.52 The libretto for Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle was written by his friend, the writer Béla Balázs. Influenced by French Symbolist drama and poetry, yet intent on retaining the intonations of spoken Hungarian, Balázs transformed a perennially popular fairy tale into a one-act play. In adapting the play as his libretto, Bartók preserved what Balázs made a point of referring to as the poetry of his text.53 Although Bartók completed the score of Bluebeard’s Castle in 1911, it was initially dismissed as incomprehensible by the judges of not one but two Hungarian vocal competitions. Disappointed but undaunted, Bartók made revisions to his score between 1911 and 1917. The work was finally premiered at Budapest’s Royal Opera House in 1918, followed by a production in Germany in 1922. By the time Klee anticipated attending a performance of the opera in the mid-twenties, he had heard and visually interpreted other literature operas, including Richard Strauss’s Salome.54 He would therefore have had a keen appreciation of the skill and imagination with which Bartók achieved dramatic tension and

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coherence by layering a tightly structured libretto over a loosely articulated musical score. Following the bard’s prologue, the enigmatic Bluebeard and his new bride, Judith, appear in front of the first of seven locked doors within his castle. At Judith’s increasingly assertive and alarmed insistence, Bluebeard successively turns the seven keys over to her. Behind each door are tainted treasures not fully visible to the audience, but verbal allusions and lighting effects hint that they are clues to the fate of Bluebeard’s former wives. Once the fifth door is opened, the denouement of Bluebeard’s Castle seems inevitable, and with the opening of the seventh door, the drama reaches its chilling climax. In Palace, as in his other operatic themes and variations, Klee recontextualized elements of both the score and the story line of Bluebeard’s Castle. The horizontal linear supports of Klee’s open-work structure are left unframed at either end, suggesting the possibility that they correspond to the unbroken musical continuum Bartók composed to serve as the background of his musically contiguous scenes. Scene shifts are indicated not by breaks in the action or by musical interludes but by shifts of rhythm and changes in musical motifs. Similarly, Klee’s intricately wrought linear patterns change perceptibly from left to right with the introduction of different signs and rhythmical patterns. These changes in repetitive patterning divide the palace facade into unequal sections that parallel the differences of temporal duration in Bartók’s scenic divisions. If the delineation of structural rhythms in Palace visually parallels aspects of Bartók’s score, other correspondences are suggested by Klee’s use of color. Just as the symbolic implications of the story line of Bluebeard’s Castle are elucidated in performance by flashes of orchestral color and a spectrum of variously tinted stage lighting, Klee’s linear patterns are invested with meanings implicit in his symbolically charged color accents. The red watercolor wash that bleeds into the upper right corner of the drawing evokes not only the recurring blood motif in Bartók’s score but also the reddish glow that floods the stage set, staining all of Bluebeard’s possessions with the color of blood. In subtle contrast, the drawing’s underlying support and internal frame are washed with a watery blue — the coloristic equivalent of the moisture that seeps from the stones of Bluebeard’s dank castle, filling the lake of tears behind the sixth door. Clearly, the touches of watercolor in Palace are not gratuitous, even though the economy with which color is used relegates it to a subordinate position in relation to line. Here, too, a parallel can be found in the structural relationship of music to libretto in the Bartók/Balázs literature opera, where the superstructure is defined by the poetic text rather than the musical score. The structural function of Balázs’s text is reinforced by the stage setting, with its seven doors that visually articulate the scenic structure of Bluebeard’s Castle. Adapting this peculiar relationship of text and stage scenery, Klee imposed pictorial structure with signs that are read simultaneously as the

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visual analogues of a poetic text and the structural elements of a graphically rendered palace that could have served as a design for a stage set. By inserting vertical projections at irregular intervals into the horizontal linear rhythms of his drawing, Klee divided the palace facade into seven subtly differentiated sections that visually echo the sectional divisions of the opera. Woven into Klee’s progressive architectural notations like a thematic subtext are torsos, some with clearly delineated breasts, others surmounted by phalluses. Seen as isolated ornamental motifs, these architectural curiosities can be read as a doubly gendered version of Max Ernst’s “phallustrade.”55 In the context of their rhythmically structured palatial setting, they become visible signs of the sexual dynamics between Bluebeard and Judith.56 In much the same way that Balázs’s poetry dictates the structure of Bluebeard’s Castle, Klee’s graphic symbols assume a structural dimension as they accrue in repetitive patterns. Poetic signs are once again dynamically integrated into the structural rhythms of Klee’s graphic text. The two lines of verbal text written into the linear structure of Palace nevertheless serve as a lingering reminder that Klee was still referring to extrapictorial models. By the late 1920s Klee was well on his way to inventing a pictographic language that could communicate content through linear structures and without reference to external sources. He was tempted to return to an operatic model only by the challenge of recapitulating the theoretical framework and symbolic content of the most controversial opera of the early twentieth century. Although Klee would continue to interpret operatic themes in his drawings as late as 1940, Stricken City (Betroffene Stadt, 1936/22) (fig. 40) is the last of his operatic paintings. One of only twentyfive catalogued works dating from 1936, it reverts to his earlier practice of referencing both the libretto and the musical score of an opera. A unique confluence of formal and pictorial elements suggests that Stricken City was conceived as a gloss on The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny), a hallmark of Weimar musical culture featuring lyrics by Bertolt Brecht, a musical score by Kurt Weill, and stage sets by Caspar Neher.57 During the spring of 1927 Brecht began discussions with Weill about composing music to accompany his five satirical “Mahagonny Songs,” which were published the same year in Manual of Piety (Die Hauspostille), his first book of poetry. Their collaboration resulted in the Mahagonny Songspiel [sic], performed in the summer of 1927 at a music festival organized by the composer Paul Hindemith in Baden-Baden. The projected backdrops, designed by Neher for each song, proved to be a catalyst for Brecht’s alternative to Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk. In his notes on the production of Mahagonny Brecht outlined the concept of an “epic opera” (“eine epische Oper”) in which music, text, and setting communicate the same message independently yet simultaneously. What Brecht characterized as a “radical separation of the elements” (“eine radikale Trennung der

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Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Fig. 40: Paul Klee, Stricken City (1936/22). Gypsum and oil on canvas with original frame, 45.1
35.2 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Berggruen Klee Collection, 1987 (1987.358). © 2006 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Photograph © 1985 The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Elemente”) was fully realized in the longer operatic version of Mahagonny, which retains sections of the original songs, interspersed throughout twenty scenes.58 The opera, which sparked opening-night riots at Leipzig’s Neues Theater on 9 March 1930, traveled on to Kassel and Frankfurt. The following year another production was staged at Berlin’s Kurfürstendamm Theater, where, despite arguments between Brecht and Weill during rehearsals, performances took place without incident. Although Brecht’s name appears nowhere in Klee’s voluminous correspondence, he did mention a 1932 performance of Weill’s opera The Pledge (Die Bürgschaft) in Düsseldorf.59 Unfortunately, there is scant documentation of Klee’s familiarity with any of the operas written and staged by the trio of Brecht, Weill, and Neher. Felix Klee did cite Weill, along with Debussy, to substantiate his father’s interest in contemporary operatic composers, so it is reasonable to assume that Klee knew works other than the relatively obscure The Pledge.60 A likely candidate would be The Threepenny Opera (Die

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Dreigroschenoper), the popular Brecht/Weill/Neher collaboration that Klee could have seen during its phenomenally successful run in Berlin beginning in late summer 1928, and in provincial German theaters for much of the following year. Given the proximity of Dessau to Leipzig, it seems equally likely that Klee might also have attended a performance of Mahagonny. If so, he would have found Neher’s set designs remarkably similar to some of his own works dating from the twenties. Eighteen years Klee’s junior, Neher had dabbled in playwriting and the visual arts but had not yet committed himself to a profession when he volunteered for military service in 1915. Following his discharge, he pursued formal training in illustration and painting at the Munich Academy. Neher’s renewed contact with Brecht, a Gymnasium friend, introduced him to Munich’s theater world and reinforced his proclivity for art that challenged established conventions. In 1924 both Neher and Brecht moved to Berlin, where they met Weill. Despite personality differences, their aesthetic views coalesced, resulting in some of the most innovative theater of the late twenties and early thirties. For the Leipzig and Berlin productions of Mahagonny, Neher replaced the stage curtain and traditional sets with a suspended screen on which scene titles and visual images were projected. The projections combined transparent color with symbolic signs and descriptive motifs intended to mirror and comment on the opera’s dramatic action.61 As specified in stage directions for the end of scene 11 and the beginning of scene 12, the progress of a storm was charted on an aerial map by an animated arrow, which functioned as a sign of directional movement and a symbol of impending destruction. Arrows are similarly deployed in a number of works by Klee, one example being Stricken Place (Betroffener Ort, 1922/109), where the arrow, as a symbolic form in motion, is layered over bands of color ranging from pale yellow to burnt sienna.62 As early as 1915 Klee had appropriated the arrow from war maps in the news media to give a sense of immediacy to his View of the Severely Threatened City of Pinz (fig. 17). By 1922, when he painted Stricken Place, he could also have known Karl Froelich’s Ikarus (1918), an experimental film that spliced together different systems of representation, including an aerial map, a schematic diagram, and figurative symbols.63 Any similarities between Neher’s projections and Klee’s earlier paintings could conceivably be attributed to common visual sources such as these. There is, however, ample visual evidence to counter this argument, for Neher’s watercolor and ink studies of stage sets throughout the twenties leave little doubt that he was looking at the works of George Grosz and Otto Dix, as well as Klee, who was exhibiting regularly at the Alfred Flechtheim Gallery in Berlin. Stricken Place and other works by Klee were also featured in an exhibition at Berlin’s National Gallery in February 1923. If Stricken Place was one of many models for Neher’s Mahagonny projections, Klee subsequently returned the compliment, thereby initiating

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a creative exchange. In 1936 he reworked Stricken Place by framing it in the contemporary operatic context of Mahagonny. In Stricken Place Klee applied concepts he had developed in his Bauhaus lectures on movement and countermovement, creating the illusion of threedimensional space with color gradations rather than linear perspective, and countering movement into depth with surface movement controlled by directional arrows. The formal tension between surface and depth reverberates at the level of content, where the pure pictorial relations of abstract art are counterbalanced by small figurative motifs that imply a narrative. Fourteen years later, in Stricken City, Klee contemporized the narrative content of Stricken Place and recast its formal vocabulary, although forms still oscillate between imitation and abstraction. Stricken City is not unlike Mural, Cathedrals, and Palace in that horizontal lines provide structural supports for patterned repetitions of sign units. The rows of signs are stacked into a shaped configuration that resembles a walled or fortified town — thus Klee’s descriptive title. A musical model for Stricken City is indicated internally by its calligraphic notational system and by what Carola GiedionWelcker characterizes as a visual adaptation of the patterns of change and repetition found in musical variations.64 Like Weill and other contemporary composers who invented new markings and otherwise made creative use of standard musical notation, Klee designed his own system of schematized visual signs. Abstractions of architectural and landscape motifs are strung across stavelike linear supports in densely concentrated notational patterns comparable to bars of music.65 It is perhaps coincidental that Klee’s expanding and contracting linear rhythms combine the lyrical flow of Weill’s melodic accompaniment to the “Alabama Song” with the staccato syncopation that punctuates Brecht’s sardonic invocation of “God in Mahagonny.” Yet coincidence is given credibility in the company of less fortuitous correspondences, the most obvious being the link between the monochromatic palette of Stricken City and the title Mahagonny. The ground of Stricken City is saturated with brown oil paint applied in varying degrees of intensity. Although it can be argued that the dark palette was intended only to evoke a general sense of doom, the choice of color takes on a more specific meaning in light of the persistent rumor that Brecht’s title was a satirical reference to the brown shirts of Adolf Hitler’s storm troopers. Brecht himself prevaricated about any topical meaning encoded in the name Mahagonny, cagily distancing his fictional city from current events by locating it in a geographic region of America that cannot be found on any map.66 This transparent dissimulation did not fool contemporary audiences, who readily equated the unlicensed pleasures and venal greed of Mahagonny with the moral corruption and rampant inflation of Weimar Germany. Nor was Brecht’s thinly disguised political agenda lost on the Nazis’ cultural police, whose tolerance for artistic and political provocation has been well documented. Suspicious of Brecht’s motives, Hitler’s

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brownshirts purportedly fueled the public demonstrations on the opening night of Mahagonny. Because of their reputations in avant-garde circles, Brecht and Weill were subjected to persistent harassment. Both fled Germany in 1933, their works being burned or confiscated and branded as “degenerate.” Klee, too, was forced into exile, with his art suffering the same fate. By the time he painted Stricken City in 1936, Klee was following global politics from neutral Switzerland, apparently resigned to the imminent fulfillment of the prophetic message implicit in Mahagonny. Stricken City tacitly acknowledges the inevitability of the destruction of war and can thus be interpreted as covert commentary on a climate of conflict. In the context of Klee’s ongoing experiments with integrating the structural and the poetic, it can also be seen as a pictorial exercise in appropriating a radical new approach to a traditional art form. Throughout his artistic practice Klee periodically turned to opera as a model for bringing together poetic content and structural form. The innovations of twentieth-century composers and librettists posed alternatives to traditional operatic models of integration. Bluebeard’s Castle exemplifies one alternative, Mahagonny another. In his notes to Mahagonny, compiled in 1930 after the work’s premiere, Brecht redefined the constituent elements of opera. The role of music in what he called “epic opera” would be to communicate the meaning of a didactic text, as opposed to heightening the emotional impact of a poetic libretto. Brecht characterized the text of Mahagonny as the exposition of a “moral tableau” (“eine Sittenschilderung”), which is articulated by both the spoken and the printed word. Like the printed titles, the setting would be projected, providing “visual aids” (“Anschauungsmaterial”) that not only adopt an attitude toward the stage action but also inculcate a new attitude on the part of the audience. This new attitude marks the fundamental difference between the pleasure principle of dramatic opera and the social function of epic opera, which requires the audience to take a stance on controversial issues.67 Although Klee’s visual response to Mahagonny can hardly be said to take a stance in favor of radical innovation, it does explore the pictorial possibilities of Brecht’s “radical separation of the elements,” even if only tentatively. In other examples of Klee’s operatic paintings, including Palace, the relationship between line and color parallels the relationship between an operatic text and its musical score. In Stricken City the separation of elements is indicated by a structure in which color, line, and the symbolic arrow are confined to discrete layers. The arrow, isolated on the surface plane, visually reiterates Klee’s title, very much like Neher’s symbolic projections for Mahagonny. Incised beneath the arrow are aggregates of signs not unlike the words of a text, in the sense that they are both descriptive and abstract. To the extent that linear patterns define a rhythmical structure, they also function like the notes of a musical score. To use Brecht’s terminology, individual signs articulate the text, and linear rhythms

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communicate or “set forth the text” (“den Text auslegend”). Finally, the colored ground of Stricken City refers to both the title and the narrative content of Mahagonny, injecting a generic landscape with contemporary political implications as well as experimental artistic value.68 Klee’s investigations into the possibilities of effecting a dynamic relationship between the poetic and the structural were open-ended but by no means inconclusive. The works discussed in this chapter exemplify his experiments in juxtaposing, layering, and otherwise combining the signs and syntactical patterns of different language systems. This process resulted in new compositional structures for poetic subject matter while also giving new meaning to metaphor. A metaphor, whether verbal or visual, is usually defined as a poetic figure that generates fresh associations through a shift in context or normative usage. Klee mastered this kind of metaphorical language in his postwar paintings. During the twenties he expanded his repertoire of source material for visual metaphors, in effect inventing a new pictorial language that defines metaphors in terms of new structural relationships between linguistic and visual elements. His poems in pictorial script are composed utilizing various permutations of this language.

Notes 1 Gropius, “Program of the Staatliche Bauhaus in Weimar,” 31 (Wingler, Das Bauhaus, 39). 2

Briefe, vol. 1, 11 July 1902, 254.

3

Tagebücher #429, 521.

4

Tagebücher #429, 521.

5

Tagebücher #389, Easter 1902, 123 (Diaries, 98).

6

Spiller, ed., The Thinking Eye, 267–77, 289 (Spiller, ed., Paul Klee: Das bildnerische Denken, 267–77, 289), and Klee, Beiträge zur bildnerischen Formlehre, 49–51. 7

Spiller, ed., The Thinking Eye, 273, 289 (Spiller, ed., Paul Klee: Das bildnerische Denben, 273, 289), and Klee, Beiträge zur bildnerischen Formlehre, 51. 8

For the term “lace picture,” see Grohmann, Klee, 208, 257, 394; on Klee’s operatic line drawings, see Andrew Kagan, Paul Klee: Art & Music (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1983), 95–143; hereafter cited as Klee: Art & Music.

9

See Anger, Klee and the Decorative, and Philippe Büttner, “In the Beginning was the Ornament: From the Arabesque to Modernism’s Abstract Line,” in Brüderlin, ed., Ornament and Abstraction, 100–101. 10

Klee cut apart drawings and rearranged fragments in 1905–7 and consistently began applying the process of composing by cutting in 1910. For photographic documentation, see Kersten and Okuda, Im Zeichen der Teilung, 82–83, 322–68. 11

Tagebücher #892, February 1911, 311 (Diaries, 256). On Klee’s “pseudoimpressionist principle,” see Kersten and Okuda, Im Zeichen der Teilung, 31–32.

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Kersten and Okuda, Im Zeichen der Teilung, 11–24, 321–68.

13

Klee assigned the title Curtain to the five smaller works cut from the same watercolor (Vorhang, 1924/129 and 129 a–d); for reproductions and an analysis of the process, see Kersten and Okuda, Im Zeichen der Teilung, 185–92, 352. On the relationship of these works to textile design and structure, see Jenny Anger, “Klees Unterricht in der Webereiwerkstatt des Bauhauses,” in the exhibition catalogue Das Bauhaus webt: Die Textilwerkstatt am Bauhaus, ed. Magdalena Droste and Manfred Ludewig (Berlin: Bauhaus-Archiv, 1998), 38, 41.

14

Schwitters, Manifeste und kritische Prosa, 5:242–43; originally published under the same title in Der Sturm 17 (October 1926): 106–7. 15

For a reproduction, see Catalogue raisonné, 4:116. On parallels between Klee and Schwitters, see Temkin, “Klee and the Avant-Garde,” 17–18. The occasion for Klee’s gift is noted by Temkin and also by Roskill in Klee, Kandinsky, 89. On Schwitters’s cordial relations with Klee and other Bauhaus masters, see Florian Steininger, “Kurt Schwitters — Leben und Werk,” in Schwitters, ed. Ingried Brugger, Siegfried Gohr, and Gunda Luyken (Vienna: Kunstforum / Salzburg: Jung und Jung, 2002), 56. 16

“Wand” was originally published in Anna Blume Dichtungen (Hannover: Paul Steegmann, 1922), 42; it is reprinted in Schwitters, Lyrik, 203.

17 The term “opto-phonetic” is applied to Schwitters’s sound poems by Jasia Reichardt, “Type in Art,” in the exhibition catalogue published by the Institute of Contemporary Arts, Between Poetry and Painting (London: Institute of Contemporary Arts and W. Kempner, 1965), 17; hereafter cited as Between Poetry and Painting. Variations on the term have been applied to other examples of dada sound poetry; see, e.g., Richard Huelsenbeck, ed. The Dada Almanac, trans. Malcolm Green (London: Atlas Press, 1993), x. 18 On Gropius’s original proposal and its relationship to Bauhaus initiatives, see Gilbert Herbert, The Dream of the Factory-Made House: Walter Gropius and Konrad Wachsmann (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984), 33–42. 19 It is interesting to note parallels between Muche’s “Haus am Horn” and Klee’s postcard announcing the 1923 Bauhaus Exhibition (1923/47), which likewise made creative use of “prefabricated” parts, in this case the sign language used in his earlier Script-Architectural (Schrift-Architectonisch, 1918/8). 20

For reproductions of these works, see Catalogue raisonné: Structural I and Structural II, 4:219; Structural Composition, 4:220.

21 See Glaesemer (Colored Works, 142), who describes the rhythmically repeated details as “assembled units.” See also Anger (Klee and the Decorative, 170–71) on the extent to which Mural was both mass-produced and one-of-a-kind. 22 Spiller, ed., The Thinking Eye, 239 (Spiller, ed., Paul Klee: Das bildnerische Denken, 239). 23

Spiller, ed., The Thinking Eye, 247–53 (Spiller, ed., Paul Klee: Das bildnerische Denken, 247–53). 24

Spiller, ed., The Thinking Eye, 491 (Spiller, ed., Paul Klee: Das bildnerische Denken, 491); and Klee, Beiträge zur bildnerischen Formlehre, 177. 25

Tagebücher #1081, July 1917, 440 (Diaries, 374).

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26 Khlebnikov, “The Word as Such,” 1:255. On the relationship of “zaum” poetry to other types of experimental verse, see Johanna Drucker, The Visible Word: Experimental Typography and Modern Art, 1909–1923 (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994), 168–92. 27

Die Aktion (23 April 1913): 451; Ernst Stadler, Der Aufbruch: Gedichte (Leipzig: Weissen Bücher, 1914). 28

Hamburger, German Poetry, 45–46.

29

Briefe, vol. 2, 17 November 1916, 835.

30

Tagebücher #1026, 17 November 1916, 410 (Diaries, 350).

31

Tagebücher #1026, 17 November 1916, 410 (Diaries, 350).

32

By contrast, the architecture of Cologne is readily identifiable in Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Rhine Bridge at Cologne (1914), which Sherwin Simmons characterizes as a pictorial fusion of personal experience and collective memory in “ ‘To Stand and See Within’: Expressionist Space in Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Rhine Bridge at Cologne,” Art History 27 (April 2004): 250–81. 33

Tagebücher #1026, 17 November 1916, 410 (Diaries, 350).

34

On the relationship between the “dividual” and “individual” in Klee’s work, see Spiller, ed., The Thinking Eye, 217, 249 (Spiller, ed., Paul Klee: Das bildnerische Denken, 217, 249), and Glaesemer, Colored Works, 142. For analyses of Klee’s theoretical and pedagogical writings from the Bauhaus years, see the following essays in the Bremen Kunsthalle exhibition catalogue Paul Klee — Lehrer am Bauhaus, ed. Wulf Herzogenrath, Anne Buschhoff, and Andreas Vowinckel (Bremen: H. M. Hauschild, 2003): Michael Baumgartner and Rossella Savelli, “Die kunsttheoretischen und pädagogischen Schriften Paul Klees am Bauhaus in Weimar und Dessau,” 28–36; Andreas Vowinckel, “Beiträge zur Bildnerischen Formlehre (1921/1922) und zur Bildnerischen Gestaltungslehre (1928) von Paul Klee,” 52–55. 35

Hamburger, German Poetry, 45.

36

Spiller, ed., The Thinking Eye, 287 (Spiller, ed., Paul Klee: Das bildnerische Denken, 287), and Klee, Beiträge zur bildnerischen Formlehre, 53. 37 In addition to Kagan’s Klee: Art & Music, there are numerous other publications on Klee and music. For factual information and various perspectives, see Centre Georges Pompidou, Klee et la musique, ed. Ole Henrik Moe (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1985); hereafter cited as Klee et la musique. 38

For Klee’s response to Mozart, see Kagan, Klee: Art & Music, 51–59, 96–98, 114–16, 132–34, 141–53; for his response to both Mozart and Wagner, see my article “Paul Klee’s Operatic Themes,” 450–66. 39

See, e.g., Briefe, vol. 1, 20 June 1899, 56; 10 October 1900, 98. If Klee owned a copy of the libretto, it is no longer in his library. The only complete Wagner libretto listed in the catalogue of the Klee library is Götterdämmerung. 40

On the nineteenth century’s integration of music into the theory of ut pictura poesis, see: Roy Park, “ ‘Ut Pictura Poesis’: The Nineteenth-Century Aftermath,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 28 (winter 1969): 155–64; Elizabeth Abel, “Redefining the Sister Arts: Baudelaire’s Response to the Art of Delacroix,” Critical Inquiry 6 (spring 1980): 364–84; and the section entitled “Music and the Sister

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Arts” in Siglind Bruhn, Musical Ekphrasis: Composers Responding to Poetry and Painting (Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon, 2000), 3–54. Although Klee’s name appears throughout Bruhn’s study, no mention is made of the works discussed here. 41 Paul Klee, Pedagogical Sketchbook, ed. and trans. Sibyl Moholy-Nagy (London: Faber and Faber, 1968), 54–58. On arrows in Klee’s work, see Mark Rosenthal, Paul Klee and the Arrow (Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms, 1979); idem, “The Myth of Flight in the Art of Paul Klee.” 42

“Creative Credo,” sec. 4, 184 (Schriften, 119).

43

The following analysis of Long Hair and Soulful revises and expands a section of my article “Paul Klee’s Operatic Themes,” 453. 44

Spiller, ed., The Thinking Eye, 388 (Spiller, ed., Paul Klee: Das bildnerische Denken, 388), and Klee, Beiträge zur bildnerischen Formlehre, 117. 45

On Debussy’s adaptation of Maeterlinck’s text, see Joseph Kerman, Opera as Drama, rev. ed. (Berkeley: U of California P, 1988), 142–57. 46 Tagebücher #847, January 1909, 286 (Diaries, 234). Felix Klee identified Pelléas et Mélisande as one contemporary opera that Klee heard on numerous occasions and very much admired; see Moe, “Entretien avec Felix Klee,” in Klee et la musique, 168). 47

For the original libretto plus a translation, see Pelléas and Mélisande: Lyric Drama in Five Acts, trans. Charles Alfred Byrne (New York: F. Rullman, 1907). 48 Briefe, vol. 2, 8 May 1926, 1011. According to Felix Klee, Bartók wrote a note in the Klee family guestbook (Moe, “Entretien avec Felix Klee,” Klee et la musique, 165–66), so Klee must have met the composer, possibly on one of the occasions when Bartók’s music was performed at the Bauhaus. See Andreas Hüneke, “Musik am Bauhaus,” in Musikkultur in der Weimarer Republik, ed. Wolfgang Rathert and Giselher Schubert (Mainz: Schott Musik International, 2001), 189–97. 49 Translations of the Hungarian libretto of Bluebeard’s Castle are included in most modern recordings. The lines cited here are from the translation by Christopher Hassall in the performance by the London Symphony Orchestra, István Kertész, long-playing record, Decca 414 167–1 LE. 50

I wish to thank Carl S. Leafstedt, author of Inside Bluebeard’s Castle: Music and Drama in Béla Bartók’s Opera (New York: Oxford UP, 1999), for sharing information about Bluebeard’s Castle — and literature operas in general — with me.

51 On the use of this term, see, e.g., Miroslav John Hanak, A Guide to Romantic Poetry in Germany (New York: Peter Lang, 1987), 153. 52

Cited in Leafstedt, Inside Bluebeard’s Castle, 7.

53

Leafstedt, Inside Bluebeard’s Castle, 7.

54

On Klee and Salome, see my article “Paul Klee’s Operatic Themes,” 460; Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, discussed earlier, is another example of a literature opera. 55 “Phallustrade” was cited by Ernst as an example of a “verbal collage” in “Beyond Painting,” originally published in the Cahiers d’art in 1937 and reprinted in “Beyond Painting” and Other Writings by the Artist and His Friends, trans. Dorothea Tanning and Ralph Manheim (New York: Wittenborn, Schultz, 1948), 15–17.

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56

It is tempting to speculate that Diego Rivera — who purchased Palace from Galka Scheyer as a gift for Frida Kahlo — personally responded to this aspect of the imagery even if he knew nothing about its source. On the circumstances of the purchase, see Naomi Sawelson-Gorse, “Kleine Kreise und brüchige Bündnisse: Galka Scheyer und amerikanische Sammler der ‘Blauen Vier,’ ” in Die Blaue Vier: Feininger, Jawlensky, Kandinsky, Klee in der Neuen Welt (Bern: Kunstmuseum / Düsseldorf: Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen / Cologne: DuMont, 1997), 57–58.

57

For accounts of this collaboration see Douglas Jarman, Kurt Weill: An Illustrated Biography (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1982), 39–70; hereafter cited as Kurt Weill. See also John Willett, Caspar Neher, Brecht’s Designer (London: Methuen, 1986), 48, 120–22; hereafter cited as Caspar Neher. This catalogue accompanied an exhibition organized by the Arts Council of Great Britain. 58 See Bertolt Brecht, “The Modern Theatre Is the Epic Theatre: Notes to the Opera Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny (1930),” in Modern Theories of Drama: A Selection of Writings on Drama and Theater, 1850–1990, ed. George W. Brandt (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), 228; hereafter cited as Modern Theories of Drama. For the original German, see “Anmerkungen zur Oper Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny,” in Schriften I: Zum Theater, vol. 7 of Gesammelte Werke, ed. Elisabeth Hauptmann (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1967), 1010–11; hereafter cited as Schriften I. To see how the original songs were incorporated into the libretto, compare the “Mahagonny Songs” in Die Hauspostille / Manual of Piety, the bilingual edition with English text by Eric Bentley (New York: Grove., 1966), 184–205, with The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, trans. W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman (Boston: David. R. Godine, 1976). 59

Briefe, vol. 2, 13 April 1932, 1186; 17 April 1932, 1187.

60

F. Klee, ed., Klee, 94.

61

For more complete biographical information and photographs of Neher’s designs for Brecht’s plays, see Willett, Caspar Neher. 62

For a color reproduction of Stricken Place, see Catalogue raisonné, 3:401.

63

On Froelich’s Ikarus, see Paolo Cherchi Usai, Lorenzo Codelli, and JanChristopher Horak, Prima di Caligari: Cinema Tedesco, 1895–1920 (Pordenone, Italy: Biblioteca dell’immagine, 1990), 249. Regine Prange also compares Klee’s Stricken Place to the earlier View of the Severely Threatened City of Pinz; see her study Das Kristalline als Kunstsymbol — Bruno Taut und Paul Klee: Zur Reflexion des Abstrakten in Kunst und Kunsttheorie der Moderne, Studien zur Kunstgeschichte, 63 (Hildesheim: G. Olms, 1991), 305. 64

Carola Giedion-Welcker, Paul Klee, trans. Alexander Gode (New York: Viking, 1952), 104.

65 This paragraph incorporates and expands upon some observations in my article “Paul Klee’s Operatic Themes,” 454. 66 On Brecht’s prevarication, see the introduction to Brecht, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, 16. 67

This paragraph summarizes the points made by Brecht in Modern Theories of Drama, 224–31; see also Schriften I, 1004–16.

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68 Schriften I, 1011. Peter-Klaus Schuster notes that the title Stricken City functions as a kind of “motto,” which would be consonant with my reference to the Brecht/Weill/Neher collaboration; see his essay “ ‘Diesseitig bin ich gar nicht fassbar,’ Klees Erfindungen der Wirklichkeit,” in Klee aus New York: Hauptwerke der Sammlung Berggruen im Metropolitan Museum of Art (Berlin: Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Preussischer Kulturbesitz, 1998), 14.

5: Poems in Pictorial Script

B

Klee had spent the better part of two decades forging a unique visual language. While at the Bauhaus he began to consider how he might develop a language system that would obviate the differences of form and syntax that distinguish alphabetic writing from pictorial representation. To this end, he transferred his theories of form generation from pedagogical exercises to discursive pictorial structures. In works of the mid-twenties, such as Mural (fig. 32) and Cathedrals (fig. 34), Klee drew from a lexicon of predominantly architectural and geometric signs that served as building blocks for larger architectural structures. By 1926 he had introduced a greater variety of iconic signs into his pictorial vocabulary, thereby generating an increasingly pronounced tension between individual signs that are inscribed and arranged like written characters and compositional structures that are perceived as visual images. In his Bauhaus lecture notes dating from about 1923–24, Klee referred to the temporal reading of a “kind of pictorial writing” (“die Form einer Bilderschrift”).1 Although he did not elaborate on the meaning of “pictorial writing,” it seems clear that he meant something other than “artistic writing” (“künstlerische Schrift”). That term would have been familiar in print shops and artists’ studios from Rudolf von Larisch’s Beispiele künstlerischer Schrift, a multivolume source book of typefaces and layouts designed by artists active in Great Britain and throughout continental Europe in the early twentieth century. In choosing terminology that would have been more familiar in archaeological and philological rather than artistic circles, Klee invited comparisons between his visual language and the signs of pre-alphabetic writing systems. His pictorial writing also has conceptual analogies in literary “word painting” and theoretical analogies in the surrealists’ concept of “automatic writing.” Like other forms of pictorialism, word painting is a poetic device of long standing. Not surprisingly, examples of word painting proliferated in the fluid domain of modernist poetic practice, where observing traditional boundaries between the visual and verbal arts was considered not only obsolete but counterproductive. Klee himself had tried his hand at the kind of word painting that colors so much expressionist poetry. In 1918 he inscribed an exercise in expressionist verse into the pictorial setting of Once Emerged from the Gray of Night (fig. 10), pairing verbal imagery with corresponding colors. During the twenties and thirties he produced numerous works that retain the linear structure of poetry, although visual Y THE LATE TWENTIES

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transcriptions of verbal imagery give way to signs drawn from the vocabulary of his pictorial writing. Klee’s concept of pictorial writing posed one of many challenges to traditionally observed distinctions between temporal sequencing and spatial organization. Such challenges were commonplace in the rhetoric of modernism, from Delaunay’s theory of rhythmic simultaneity to the surrealists’ proprietary claims on automatic writing and drawing. Automatism was invoked by surrealist theorists and artists alike to characterize a technique applicable to the production of either verbal or visual art. Although there was no single definition of automatism, it was generally assumed to be a process predicated on an unmediated synchrony between mental and manual activity. In theory automatism could generate carriers of meaning that function as either verbal or visual signs — or as both. In fact, few works illustrated in La Révolution surréaliste, the principal vehicle of surrealist thought, achieved that level of indeterminacy. However, Klee’s concept of pictorial writing implies just this degree of calculated equivocation. Even though he coined the term prior to being exposed to any surrealist theory, visual evidence suggests that he responded to the provocations of surrealism well into the thirties. Because the products of Klee’s pictorial writing engage the viewer’s visual and verbal faculties simultaneously, the viewer assumes a participatory role in activating oppositional relationships that Dee Reynolds has characterized as “rhythmic structures.” Reynolds first introduced the idea of rhythmic structures in an important study of early abstract art. The objective of her study is to explore the role of the imagination in the reception of “semantically disruptive poems and paintings,” by which she means works that challenge traditional modes of representation and perception.2 The two painters represented in her study are Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian, both of whom aimed to transform the spectator’s perception and experience of medium. They did so, she argues, by foregrounding rhythmic structures. Her definition of rhythm embraces but is not limited to the compositional principle common to all artistic media, one that is a recurring theme in Klee’s theoretical and pedagogical writing. She proposes that rhythm be more broadly interpreted as an effect of the interactions between an artist’s signifying processes and the receiver’s imagining activity. These interactions effect changes in the way the receiver experiences a work of art, and these changes in turn replace definable subject matter as the principal content of the work.3 Rhythmic content is a common denominator of the verbal and visual poetry that Klee produced during the last decade of his life. Throughout the thirties he continued to experiment with the kinds of modernist poetry he had written earlier. The verbal bestiary (see chapter 2) and most of his other poems in manuscript form were jotted down in pocket diaries, while others, such as Alphabet AIOEK (fig. 14) have visual frames of reference.

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Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Fig. 41: Paul Klee, Tree Nursery (1929/98). Oil with incised gesso ground on canvas, 43.815 ⫻ 52.3875 cm. The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, acquired 1930. © 2006 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Photograph courtesy of The Phillips Collection.

However, a majority of his poetic production took the form of paintings and drawings that incorporate a pictorial vocabulary into compositional structures adapted from linguistic and literary models. These experiments in pictorial writing culminated in what Klee himself entitled Poem in Pictorial Script. I am appropriating this drawing title to encompass a number of visual images that counter traditional modes of conception, construction, and perception. Despite certain commonalities, including a degree of visual abstraction that approximates any number of writing systems, Klee’s poems in pictorial script never ossify into formulaic repetition. This chapter follows Klee as he bridged the distance that separates the pictographic signs and linear structure of Tree Nursery (Junge Pflanzung, 1929/98) (fig. 41) from the more abstract imagery and indeterminate formal structure of Poem in Pictorial Script. Tree Nursery marks a reflective pause in Klee’s autobiographical narrative of process.4 It is both a summative assessment of his efforts to

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harmonize poetic imagery and structural form and a prototype of his poems in pictorial script. In the lower-right-hand corner of the painting are two small stick figures, both seemingly overwhelmed by the vastness of the cultivated natural setting they are charged with tending. In this respect Tree Nursery perpetuates Klee’s “poetic-personal idea of landscape.” By the late twenties, however, Klee’s experiments with visual constructs generated by dividual and individual rhythms had resulted in significant changes in the appearance of his landscape paintings. These changes are evident in Tree Nursery, which exemplifies a fully developed pictorial writing system. Comparing this painting to expressionist poetry reveals the extent to which Klee’s pictorial writing parallels contemporary word painting. The poetry written by Georg Heym provides a fitting comparative framework since he, like Klee, responded to the modernist impulse that instinctively rejected boundaries between media. Characterized by Patrick Bridgwater as a “painter manqué,” Heym thought iconographically and spatially in composing his verbal texts.5 Like other poets of his generation, he was initially seduced by neo-Romanticism, producing numerous examples of poems that parallel Klee’s “poetic-personal idea of landscape.” Between 1910 — when he discovered his own niche within the experimental preserve of German expressionism — and 1912 (the year of his death) Heym’s poetry changed perceptibly. Galvanized by a letter from his friend John Wolfsohn, Heym assimilated and combined diverse visual influences into a unique literary style. It was Wolfsohn who encouraged Heym to pursue the idea of infusing Ferdinand Hodler’s unified vision of nature with Vincent van Gogh’s transformative color.6 The idea was realized in a series of landscape poems that bear comparison with Klee’s Tree Nursery. Heym’s seasonal landscape poems, which date from 1910 and 1911, affirm Wolfsohn’s assessment that the poet’s resemblance to Hodler was most striking in their shared affinity for “parallelism,” or “reduplication” of imagery.7 By adding van Gogh’s expressive color to Hodler’s accumulation of images, Heym applied the technique of word painting to a personal poetic language that evokes the sensory specifics of observable reality, as opposed to the compulsive obsessions of an internal reality. These features are readily apparent in the opening quatrain of “Winter” (“Der Winter”), composed sometime in November 1910: Der blaue Schnee liegt auf dem ebenen Land, Das Winter dehnt. Und die Wegweiser zeigen Einander mit der ausgestreckten Hand Der Horizonte violettes Schweigen.

The blue snow lies on flat ground, Which winter stretches. And the signposts show One another with hands outstretched The horizon’s violet silence.8

Klee’s Tree Nursery is not a literal transcription of the imagery in any of Heym’s seasonal landscapes. Nor should any particular significance be

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accorded to the coincidence that the bands of color in Tree Nursery combine the stretches of blue and violet in “Winter” with the wide, flat strand of yellow road and the broad green heights of the forest in “Autumn” (“Autumnus”).9 More to the point is the fact that Klee, like Heym, was not using color descriptively but rather as the backdrop for a dense scrim of crisply delineated images, each of which retains its specific identity. Wolfsohn had recognized the same tendency in Heym’s verbal landscapes: “You repeat yourself, you juxtapose all sorts of disparate things, giving each one the same status, and treating them all as equivalent.”10 As Bridgwater has observed, the visual effects in Heym’s seasonal poems were no longer conveyors of mood in the Romantic tradition but were instead the vehicles of a postimpressionist vision of the natural world.11 The fact that the same generalization could be made about Klee’s Tree Nursery does not justify a claim for Heym’s direct — let alone exclusive influence on this particular painting. Nevertheless, Klee, like Heym, was exploring the potential of cross-pollination as a creative strategy. Assuming that Klee knew Heym’s poetry and recognized its visual sources, he would no doubt have responded more enthusiastically to traces of van Gogh’s intense color than to evidence of what he had once dismissed as Hodler’s tiresome “Dinge an sich.”12 Whatever he may have thought of Heym’s preferences in the visual arts, Klee would have discerned the novelty of the poet’s approach to composing verbal landscapes. Heym’s seasonal landscape poems are emphatically visual not only in the use of vivid color imagery but in the clarity with which objects are located in their spatial settings. A particularly apt example is found in the third stanza of “Winter,” where crossroads are oriented toward the four points of the compass: Dann ziehn sie weiter in die Einsamkeit Gen Nord und Süden und nach Ost und Westen

Then they wend their way into the solitude Of North and South, East and West.13

These precise spatial indicators notwithstanding, the semantic units of “Winter” appear to be strung together in no preconceived order and based on no implied hierarchy. Repetitive sounds such as the sibilant s are likewise iterated in irregular patterns. These, too, assume a visual dimension, accumulating in what Jean Chick has described as thickly textured verses.14 The linear organization of Heym’s discrete visual images and alliterative sound patterns are remarkably similar to Klee’s distribution of repetitive signs along superimposed registers, which more closely resemble lines of text than a conventionally structured pictorial space. Klee himself drew on the same analogy in coining the phrase “a kind of pictorial writing,” which he equated with the notations on a page of printed text or music. Although he used the term figuratively, it was grounded in his methods of pictorial construction. In the case of Tree Nursery, Klee’s choice of medium and his

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technical processes had parallels in his own writing practice and in the history of writing in general. As his ground and support, Klee chose a gesso-primed canvas. He probably began by dividing the surface area into eleven registers, organizing his pictorial space into the kind of lined textual space he was accustomed to using in his writing. However, unlike the ruled lines of the notebooks in which he recorded his diary entries or transcribed his poems, the linear registers of Tree Nursery were drawn freehand and are therefore intentionally uneven, just as they are in Palace (fig. 39) of the previous year. Before applying any color, Klee worked into the surface with a sharp, pointed instrument — possibly an etching needle or perhaps one of the tools he designed and made for his personal use.15 As he incised signs into the soft gesso ground, he retraced the movements of many a Mesopotamian scribe deftly manipulating a stylus to make legible marks in a clay tablet. Probably working from top to bottom, he must have decided that the painting required more variations in dividual patterning and individual characters than are evident in the top two registers. At that point he began varying the sizes and character of the signs and introducing subdivisions within the linear registers. From the outset Klee was conscious of applying different degrees of pressure as he inscribed the surface with a variety of signs. Once oil paint was wiped over the surface, filling the incised lines, even subtle differences in line thickness and depth of incision became more pronounced. When applied in superimposed bands, color reinforces the linear structure of the painting, yet it also seeps across linear boundaries, asserting its own material properties. An oppositional relationship between the painted surface of Tree Nursery and its textual linear structure is among the first indicators that this image will challenge conventional expectations about looking at a work of visual art. The viewer who approaches Tree Nursery as a painting soon realizes that it requires a temporal as well as a visual mode of perception. To ascertain what the painting represents, the viewer scans the linear registers looking for recognizable signs, thereby reexperiencing the temporal dimension generated as Klee incised graphic signs into the linear divisions. The initial perception of repetition encourages the viewer to abandon a sequential reading and to begin to make spatial connections not only within this particular painting but throughout Klee’s oeuvre. The most familiar of his many tree signs triggers this process. The sign consisting of a vertical line crossed by curved branches may well have originated in the diary entry that records his association with the Sema group in Munich. Klee noted that he had been recruited as a founding member in the fall of 1911 and carefully inserted a sign that visually punctuates the name Sema, which itself means sign (fig. 42).16 In the end, the skeletal tree sign had greater longevity than his affiliation with the Sema group. The sign was incorporated into the hybrid vocabulary of Landscape with Gallows (fig. 25) and other postwar landscapes, then into Klee’s

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Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Fig. 42: Paul Klee, Entry 902 from the Diaries (Tagebücher, III, Munich, 1911). Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern. © 2006 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG BildKunst, Bonn. Photograph courtesy of the Zentrum Paul Klee.

vocabulary of pictographs, and was eventually enlarged as the central pictorial motif of a late drawing entitled Shoots (Schösslinge, 1938/242).17 The viewer who recognizes this familiar pictograph in Tree Nursery and identifies many of the other signs as tree forms will have no difficulty associating the linear organization of the signs with the orderly rows of a tree farm. The gratification of establishing a link between Klee’s title and the iconic imagery in the painting will satisfy some viewers. A nagging curiosity about the signs that appear to be more alphabetic than pictographic might send others in search of similar signs in the history of writing. This quest would uncover contradictions that pertain to the related processes of making and interpreting. Given the fact that the technique applied in Tree Nursery has historical precedents in cuneiform writing, it is surprising to find that relatively few of the signs have the appearance of cuneiform characters, which typically combine short lines with triangular wedges.18 Evidently linguistic consistency was irrelevant. Klee took the liberty of foraging among a variety of historical writing systems to compile his lexicon of signs. The knowledge that Tree Nursery contains inventive variations on signs from the Irish Ogham alphabet and the ancient Linear B script provides insight into Klee’s experimental working methods but is of little help in deciphering the meaning of his visual text.19 Tree Nursery is not a painting that lends itself to either linguistic or iconographic decoding. Its meaning resides in the structural rhythms set in motion by the viewer, who attempts to reconcile these two fundamentally different approaches to interpretation.

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Although Tree Nursery is recognizably a landscape, rhythmic structures counter the conventions of traditional landscape painting, thus generating a new level of content. As conceived by Reynolds, a defining characteristic of rhythmic structure is the tension between temporal and spatial elements experienced and activated by the receiver.20 This tension is immediately apparent in the nonillusionistic spatial structure of Tree Nursery. In notes on the pictorial representation of space, Klee pointed out that in breaking with the conventions of illusionistic space, “we gain possibilities of spatio-plastic representation and movement that were limited under earlier methods” (“wir erreichen damit die Möglichkeit der räumlichplastischen Darstellung und der Bewegung, die nach der früheren Darstellungsweise begrenzt war”).21 In Tree Nursery he expanded on these possibilities, replacing a conventional pictorial space with a textual, discursive space. Graphic signs are arranged like linguistic units along horizontal linear supports that approximate the visual appearance of stanzas in much modernist poetry, most notably where Klee subdivided horizontal registers into the visual equivalents of the quatrains favored by some of the experimental poets of his generation, including Heym. The expanding and contracting rhythms of the hand-drawn registers are compounded by variations in the distribution of signs. Signs tend to be densely concentrated on the left side of the painting, with more variety in placement on the right — a device that simulates variations in the line lengths of poetic verse. As in the earlier Mural, color spatializes the linear structure of Tree Nursery, but here it does so by functioning like rhyme, which adds a spatial dimension to poetry. The palette conforms to Klee’s principle of repetition by reflection, or mirror imaging (“Spiegelung”).22 Applied to color, this principle introduces the one dominant rhythmic pattern that imposes order on a complex pictorial structure. Rhythmic content is also perceptible in the syntactical arrangements of signs, although here, too, rhythm is structured by means of opposition. Examples of the repetitive patterning that Klee associated with dividual rhythms are rare. The patterns in Tree Nursery are less like the rhythmical repetitions found in the decorative arts than the repetitions of sounds in poetry. To cite one example, Klee’s recurring “Sema” sign is comparable to the alliterative sibilant sound in Heym’s “Winter.” Extending the literary analogy, the predominantly individual rhythms of the sign clusters in Tree Nursery might be compared to verbal units were it not for the fact that signs span a spectrum from reductive landscape forms to alphabetic abstractions. The variety of tree signs is displayed in the strips of blue and violet near the top of the painting, where changes in what Klee referred to as weight and measure transform an evenly spaced row of trees into beds of shrubs.23 The bands of yellows and greens at the center are dominated by more abbreviated signs that could be shorthand notations with linguistic value. In the lower third of the painting the sign types are combined,

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Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Fig. 43: Paul Klee, Album Leaf (1935/6). Pen on paper mounted on cardboard, 27.8 ⫻ 17.9 cm. Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern. © 2006 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Photograph courtesy of the Zentrum Paul Klee.

and in some cases even obviously pictorial signs could be residually or potentially linguistic.24 Once again the “Sema” tree can be cited as an example. It functions as a graphic sign that retains its original identity as a visual substitute for a verbal sign, while at the same time assuming pictorial value in a landscape setting. Within a matrix of signs that range from the iconic to the geometric, the two stick figures are the most semantically disruptive precisely because they appear to be exclusively iconic. As such they lay claim to the figurative tradition of conventional landscape painting. This claim is countered by a pictorial structure that generates a dynamic tension between figuration and abstraction and between visual and textual space. Variations on the rhythmic relationships established by these tensions are common to all of Klee’s poems in pictorial script. Although Klee continued to explore the poetic possibilities of rhythmic structures embedded in the oppositional relationship between graphic signs and painted surfaces, he increasingly turned to drawing as the medium of his pictorial writing. By the early thirties drawing and

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writing had become not only parallel but in some cases indistinguishable activities in Klee’s mind. The graphic notations in Abstract Script (Abstracte [sic] Schrift, 1931/284) and Report on Events at Dui (Bericht über Vorgänge in Dui, 1932/106) have the cursive flow of a handwritten text, yet they are legible only as visual abstractions in a pictorial space.25 Whereas the slippage between two forms of communication is subtle in these two drawings, it becomes more pronounced in Album Leaf (Albumblatt, 1935/6) (fig. 43). Instead of referencing content, the title names a material support that was torn from a pad of the writing paper Klee occasionally used for drawing. Written in the upper-right-hand corner rather than centered at the bottom of the page beneath a ruled line, Albumblatt reads less like a picture title than the indicator of a graphic space that could be the site of either verbal or visual activity — or both in this case. Klee’s choice of pen and ink on paper as his medium was likewise appropriate to both writing and drawing. Because of the historical evolution of writing from drawing, the graphic media have long been associated with both forms of expression. These historical connections converged in modernist practice, achieving privileged status among the surrealists. Album Leaf closely parallels surrealist theory and practice, albeit in unexpected ways. In the first issue of La Révolution surréaliste (1 December 1924) Max Morise equated the stroke of a pencil with a word. A drawing and a handwritten text by Robert Desnos, reproduced on the page following Morise’s article, lend credence to his claim, but they do so by maintaining a quasiillustrative relationship between visual and verbal imagery.26 Automatic drawing and writing were frequently invoked as quintessentially surrealist techniques. When André Breton looked back at the origins and development of surrealism from the vantage point of the early forties, he observed that graphic and verbal automatism (“l’automatisme graphique, aussi bien que verbal”) achieved a “rhythmic unity” (“l’unité rythmique”) that could be perceived by either the eye or the ear.27 It was in this retrospective summary of surrealism that Breton famously described Klee as a practitioner of “(partial) automatism” (“l’automatisme [partiel]”).28 True to Breton’s assessment, Album Leaf does not qualify as a product of unpremeditated graphic automatism, if only because the sections of handwritten text are semantically coherent. It does, however, establish a “rhythmic unity” between writing and drawing, which it achieves by modifying the compositional format of a popular type of surrealist poetry. Album Leaf successively engages the viewer in two modes of perception. Four lines of handwritten text are placed slightly off center, well beneath Klee’s signature, the date, and the intentionally ambiguous title. Although the words are not consistently aligned or evenly spaced, they are easily readable as: “Jetzt ist / der Winter / drüberweg / geschritten” (“Now / Winter / has trod / over it”). A space separates this verbal text

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from two columns of calligraphic notations and a diagonal vector of cursive script that is initially indecipherable. What appears to be illegible handwriting is, in fact, a line of mirror writing that reads: “dann ist es doch gesagt” (“yet it has been said”). This line introduces a proliferation of looped linear scrawls that assume a distinctly visual character where the drawing is sporadically overlaid with ink wash. The impression that a verbal text is progressively dissolving into visual abstractions is abruptly reversed by the insertion of two additional lines of text: “Das war einmal / ein Gemüsegarten” (“This was once / a vegetable garden”).29 Although written in the same hand as the other legible words, these are more generously spaced, with individual letters less cramped, mirroring the breadth of handling in the final linear flourish, which replaces the last line of a legible text with a visual substitute. Assuming a reciprocal relationship between a verbal text that describes and a visual text that does not, the linear rhythms can be perceived as nonmimetic substitutes for both illustrative figurative imagery and legible verbal imagery. By pairing fragments of a verbal text with complementary visual rhythms rather than representational remnants of a vegetable garden, Klee salvaged the poetic potential of what would otherwise have been a prosaic combination of words and images. In an article published in the final issue of La Révolution surréaliste, René Magritte analyzed the various ways that words and images could interact in a pictorial space. Occasionally, he noted, “words written in a painting designate precise things, and images vague things” (“les noms écrits dans un tableau désignent des choses précises, et les images des choses vagues”).30 Such is the case with Album Leaf — and intentionally so. In other respects Album Leaf is anything but vague or tentative. Confidently executed in pen on paper, with no apparent hesitations or corrections, Album Leaf is the material form of a carefully thought out idea rather than an exploratory or preliminary sketch. To borrow from archival terminology, it is a final manuscript rather than a working draft.31 Had Klee wanted to render his handwriting illegible, he could have mirror-written the entire text or reinvented his Abstract Script, which mirrors the rhythm and slant of his own handwriting.32 Alternatively, he could have reduced words to sound values, as he had done in Éhatévauih (fig. 13). Evidently, he wanted to explore the possibilities of combining the figurative imagery of verbal poetry with nonfigurative drawing in a new compositional structure. The composition of Album Leaf refers back to the surrealists’ “exquisite corpses”(“cadavres exquis”), featured in the 1927 issue of La Révolution surréaliste devoted to automatic writing.33 Some of the examples reproduced are either exclusively verbal or visual, whereas others combine the written word with predominantly figurative visual imagery. All have the vertically oriented, disjunctive composition that was the by-product of a process involving successive folding. This composition type is common to Klee’s Album Leaf, as is the combination of verbal and visual signifiers.

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For the most part the exquisite corpses did not pair verbal and visual signs any more imaginatively or provocatively than Klee himself did in a work such as Seventeen, Mad (Siebzehn, irr, 1923/136), which is reproduced in the third issue of La Révolution surréaliste.34 What Klee would have seen in the surrealists’ exquisite corpses was a poetic composition that could be adapted to his pictorial writing. In Album Leaf he imposed a coherent verse structure on the vertical format and sectional divisions of the exquisite corpses. Although the units of verse are not literally delineated as they are in Tree Nursery, the textual components of Album Leaf are organized into four sections, each with its own linear structure. The line breaks in the first section spatialize the breaks and slashes Klee used to indicate a verse structure when he recorded poems or line endings in his Diaries. Arranged in a neatly staggered quatrain, the words establish the rhythm and typographic arrangement of free verse. The spatial layout of the visual text in the second stanza introduces a variation on the diagonal orientation of the first stanza, initiating a rhythmic pattern that is carried through the entire compositional structure, echoing and reinforcing the rhythmic alternation between alphabetic writing and an abstract pictorial writing. The idea of combining a readable poetic text with visual abstractions was not original with Klee. He was deliberately seeking a way to repackage an idea dating back to Hiberno-Saxon manuscript illumination and that had produced more recent progeny in modernist circles. In 1908 Kandinsky conceived the project that would be realized in his only livre d’artiste, the 1912 publication Sounds. The black-on-white woodcuts printed above the poems are abstractions that relate rhythmically rather than figuratively to Kandinsky’s poetic images.35 Although they occupy the same pages as the printed texts of the poems, the visual designs are contained within their own pictorial spaces, rather like modernist paraphrases of the framed filigree patterns that grace the pages of illuminated manuscripts and illustrated books produced down through the centuries. By the mid-twenties there were numerous examples of artists’ books in which textual and pictorial spaces merged, notably the 1927 edition of Sleeping, Sleeping in the Stones (Dormir, dormir dans les pierres), a collaboration between Benjamin Péret and Yves Tanguy.36 Here letters meander into the pictorial spaces of the illustrative images, yet they maintain their typographic distance from both Péret’s poetry and Tanguy’s abstract dreamscapes. Not until decades later was there a surrealist publication that fully realized a rhythmic unity between writing and drawing. Miró’s Lizard with Golden Feathers (Le Lézard aux plumes d’or), published in 1971, is a minimally revised but liberally illustrated version of his “Poetic Games” (“Jeux poétiques”), which originally appeared in the 1946 issue of Cahiers d’art.37 Although the relationship between word and image varies throughout the publication, in some cases verbal and visual signifiers intermingle on the same page (fig. 44). Using the medium of

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Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Fig. 44: Joan Miró, Lithograph from The Lizard with Golden Feathers (Le Lézard aux plumes d’or, 1971). © Successió Miró / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. Digital image by Dan Smith.

lithography, which allowed him to write and draw with equal fluidity, Miró copied out his text, arbitrarily inserting arabesques that would have looked remarkably similar to his handwriting on the lithographic stone, where the text was written out in reverse. Miró’s drawing disrupted the linear continuity of the poem in its printed version, while his handwriting liberated the poem from the confines of its original verse structure. At the expense of semantic coherence, he displaced words from their usual textual order, substituting a visual order that complements the graphic space shared by a handwritten text and free-form linear embellishments. Many of these distinctive features of Miró’s design are anticipated in Klee’s Album Leaf. Common to Miró’s lithograph and Klee’s drawing is the visible trace of the artist’s hand, with writing and drawing in a unified graphic space. Both works require the participation of the viewer to activate rhythmic relationships between verbal and visual texts that flow from the same hand. Like Miró, Klee exploited textual displacement and fragmentation as poetic devices, while simultaneously imposing visual unity with emphatic linear rhythms and more subtle graphic transitions. Despite these similarities, there are perceptible differences. Klee, an unapologetic purist when it

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Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Fig. 45: Paul Klee, Park N (partial sketch) (1935/15). Chalk on paper mounted on cardboard, 17.9 ⫻ 27.9 cm. Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern. © 2006 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Photograph courtesy of the Zentrum Paul Klee.

came to poetic form, declined to take liberties with verse structure, which is preserved as a way of identifying the verbal and visual texts as a single poetic entity. To the extent that his illegible scrawls are intended to be read as visual substitutes for lines of text, Klee’s looped lines are even more subtly integrated than Miró’s decorative swirls. These differences point to the more fundamental distinction between an illustrated edition of poetry and an entirely new way of writing poetry. For Miró The Lizard with Golden Feathers provided an exhibition venue for displaying his facile command of the art of book illustration. The page reproduced here underscores the artist’s double role as poet and illustrator. Seen in context, it has the cachet of an autograph page, albeit in facsimile. Klee’s Album Leaf may well have been conceived as part of a projected publication, but it was also an experimental model for poetry that is neither exclusively verbal nor predominantly visual, shifting between verbal and visual modes of conception, execution, and perception.

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The speculation that Klee was exploring an alternative to a book of illustrated poetry is supported by another drawing that reinvents historical precedents. Park N, (1935/15) (fig. 45) is so close to Album Leaf in Klee’s numeric cataloguing system that the two must have been executed within several days of each other. In Park N Klee reduced the legible text to a single, uppercase letter, juxtaposing letter and image in a drawing executed with just two unbroken lines. One line flows between a point just below the letter N and another point just above Klee’s signature; the second begins and ends within the linear interlace at the far right. The overlapping arabesques give pictorial form to a graphic idea Klee had previously explored in a pedagogical exercise. Using nine sheets of paper, he illustrated how the letter N could assume different visual properties as it expanded horizontally and vertically, eventually filling the space available on a single page.38 Transferred from Klee’s teaching notes to the space of a drawing, the letter acquires new meaning as well as a new setting. Looking at Park N, it is not at all clear which of the two lines Klee set in motion first, nor is it possible to determine the formative directions of the linear movements, which complement each other figuratively as well as rhythmically. The expansive flow of one line minimally indicates the ground plane and horizon line of a landscape, whereas the more tightly controlled movement of the other line defines a cursive letter N that visually mirrors the peaked projection in the center of the page. Even without benefit of the title, the viewer can identify the central projection as a conifer and the scribbled arabesque at the far right as a mound of rocks or a leafy tree. In addition to generating a pictorial structure that is recognizably a landscape, the lines intersect at three points, forming a graphic unit that can be characterized as a monogrammatic combination of a letter and nonalphabetic visual abstractions. As specified in the title Park N, the uppercase N functions as an initial that abbreviates a place name. The landscape forms that visually represent a park are likewise abbreviated, giving them the same degree of abstraction as the letter form. Although differently configured, initial letters and landscape imagery are also paired in the history of illuminated manuscripts and printed books. Klee’s unique combination of elements reflects selective borrowing from a range of historical precedents. With respect to letter type, the N can be identified as a penwork initial. These handwritten letters, adorned only with simple flourishes, abound in Gothic manuscripts, where they are perceived as integral elements of the written text and as visual transitions between the illuminated decoration and the cursive script of the text body.39 The spatial setting for Klee’s initial has antecedents in the more richly ornamented Gothic initials that serve as frames for narrative vignettes. By the end of the thirteenth century, the spatial settings of these narrative scenes had become increasingly illusionistic and elaborate, with landscape forms echoing the shape of the framing letter on a smaller scale.

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Although initials assumed various three-dimensional figurations in the ensuing centuries, letters shaped from trompe l’oeil nature imagery did not proliferate until the availability of lithography in the early nineteenth century.40 Judging from ten ornamental initials that Klee copied into a notebook containing school exercises in 1892, decorative letters in the guise of figurative motifs would have been familiar to him from illustrated children’s books and the pattern books that served as models in his penmanship classes.41 For all of its informed references to past traditions, Park N has nothing of the nostalgia of historicism. With its reductive simplicity, this drawing is clearly an exercise in modernist revisionism. Klee himself confirmed the experimental nature of Park N by appending an unusual clarification in parentheses “partial sketch” (“teil entwurf [sic]”) to the title on the drawing support and in his oeuvre catalogue. Just as Album Leaf explores a new way of composing poetry, Park N represents a modernist variation on the illuminated initial. It takes no leap of the imagination to envision these two drawings as studies for a publication featuring Klee’s visual poetry. In such a volume the kind of monogram he designed in Park N would conceivably double as title and initial letter for the kind of poem he was constructing in Album Leaf. As early as 1917 Klee had outlined the prospectus for a minimally illustrated anthology of verse. He may have written “Once Emerged from the Gray of Night” (Einst dem Grau der Nacht enttaucht”) for inclusion in this volume, but nothing ever came of the project at the time.42 If he revived the idea in 1935, it was not with the intention of producing a conventional volume of illustrated poetry. What Klee seems to have entertained, if only briefly, was a publication of his poems in pictorial writing that would restore the “aura” Walter Benjamin claimed was lost in the era of mechanical reproduction.43 If published by a lithographic offset process, the book could have circumvented the typographic consistencies of a mass-produced book by introducing some of the idiosyncrasies of a hand-copied manuscript. This method of production would have engaged the viewer in the process of interpreting the rhythmic content generated by shifts from writing to drawing and from linguistic to visual abstractions. Assuming that Park N and Album Leaf were conceived for potential publication, the question remains as to why Klee would have revisited the livre d’artiste some fifteen years after he had given up book illustration, apparently by choice and with no regrets.44 Had he wished to reconsider his decision, there was no shortage of opportunities. In 1928 he was asked to contribute illustrations to a volume of Paul Eluard’s poetry. No doubt recalling that Eluard had composed a dedicatory poem on the occasion of his 1925 exhibition at the Vavin-Raspail Gallery, Klee responded enthusiastically, but the proposal never materialized.45 Klee seems to have preferred solo pursuits to collaborative projects, choosing to preserve his independence even as his professional options narrowed in proportion to

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the expanding power of the National Socialist Party. Exiled to Switzerland in 1933, he no longer had the security of even a meager teacher’s salary. His income was reduced to modest returns on his investments and proceeds from whatever sales were transacted through the Simon Gallery in Paris, which was operated by the formidable Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler.46 When Alfred Flechtheim, Klee’s German dealer, was forced to close his gallery and leave Germany, he asked Kahnweiler, a longtime friend and business associate, to take over his exclusive contract with Klee. Kahnweiler agreed but had limited success selling Klee’s works in a depressed art market.47 At a time when Klee’s financial situation looked increasingly precarious, a book showcasing his innovative poetic production may have seemed like a marketable commodity. In any event, Klee’s idea for reinventing the livre d’artiste never advanced beyond a few drawings. Why he temporarily abandoned the mixed-language system represented in Park N and Album Leaf remains a matter of speculation. Whatever the determining factors, by 1938 he was experimenting with two types of poetry. In one set of experiments he used letters of the alphabet as basic compositional units, producing the sequence of alphabet drawings that includes Alphabet AIOEK (fig. 14). In another group of drawings he deconstructed alphabetic signs into visual abstractions that serve no immediately apparent linguistic function. Klee’s interest in the pictorial origins of alphabetic writing date back to the years immediately following the First World War, when he incorporated letter forms and variants of their pictorial antecedents into works such as Landscape with Gallows (fig. 25). He pursued this interest throughout the twenties, compiling the lexicon of invented signs featured in Tree Nursery. Although Klee’s interest in the history of language was prompted by artistic rather than scholarly ambitions, his pictorial experiments were assuredly informed by scholarly research. Circumstantial evidence confirms that he consulted numerous sources, including Karl Weule’s Vom Kerbstock zum Alphabet, which was in his library.48 He would also have had access to the lavishly illustrated articles on pre-alphabetic writing published in periodicals such as the Cahiers d’art. During the early thirties his focus shifted to the relationship between drawing and writing. Later in the decade he broadened the scope of his investigation. In a group of drawings dating from 1938 he reflected on the place of pictorial writing in a print-centered culture. To restore the textural materiality lost in the era of mechanical printing, Klee created his graphic texts with thick, viscous pastes and paints, often working over newspaper as a site of comparative reference. Growth Is Stirring (Wachstum regt sich, 1938/78) (fig. 46) is a typical example.49 Broadly executed in paste, Growth Is Stirring contrasts hand-painted marks with an underlying typeset support. As in Park Near Lu (fig. 30), a hairline gap between the black signs and the white ground cover reveals

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Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Fig. 46: Paul Klee, Growth Is Stirring (1938/78). Colored paste on newspaper mounted on cardboard, 33/32.4 ⫻ 48.7 cm. Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, on loan from a private collection. © 2006 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG BildKunst, Bonn. Photograph courtesy of the Zentrum Paul Klee.

fragments of a newspaper printed in uniform, die-cast type, with letters separated by regular spaces and lines of text by standard leading strips. The printed text was set in both Gothic and Latin typefaces that delineate readable words in German (“Haus”) and French (“École”), word fragments (“Luxu”), and numbers as well as letters (“bis 100”). Although the visual text of Growth Is Stirring is no less carefully laid out than the blocks of printed type, there is no uniformity in either the signs or the spaces between them. Unlike the visible segments of printed text in the underlying typographic space, the signs in the pictorial space are not constructed utilizing legible alphabetic units. The shapes of Klee’s signs resemble some of the script designs reproduced in Larisch’s Beispiele künstlerischer Schrift.50 This presents the possibility that Klee deconstructed an existing typeface, reducing the letter forms to the discontinuous lines of an illegible script. In doing so, he gave the thick black marks a distinctly visual appearance, as if they were the contours of iconic forms fragmented

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beyond recognition or pared down to linear abstractions that in some instances retain vestiges of figuration. Alternatively, the graphic signs can be interpreted as some form of shorthand notation that has both linguistic and visual properties. In the upper left is a sign cluster that could be read either as an embellished initial I or as the skeletal shape of a tree. The grouping of the signs in the upper right is equally ambiguous. What looks like an uppercase Y faces its mirror image in an arrangement that recalls Victor Hugo’s essay on the visual properties of letter forms. Describing his journey through the Jura Mountains in 1839, Hugo mused on the “picturesque” quality of the letter Y: “A tree is a Y; the fork of two roads is a Y; the confluence of two rivers is a Y.”51 Klee shared Hugo’s curiosity about the visual dimension of letters but reversed his process of association. Instead of assigning alphabetic signs to identifiable landscape forms, Klee designed letters to look as if they could once have represented objects in nature — specifically trees. Analogies based on tree imagery are found in Klee’s theoretical writing as well as in works such as Growth Is Stirring. In the lecture he delivered at the Jena Kunstverein in 1924, Klee posed the idea of using “a simile, the simile of the tree” (“Lassen Sie mich ein Gleichnis gebrauchen, das Gleichnis vom Baum”).52 He then proceeded to develop this figure of speech into one of his most eloquent comparisons between nature and art. Although this lecture was not published until 1945 under the title “On Modern Art” (“Über die moderne Kunst”), Klee kept his notes in manuscript form and evidently consulted them from time to time. Given the reciprocity of Klee’s art and theory, it is entirely plausible to posit a relationship between the symbolic language of his studio work and the figures of speech elaborated in his theoretical notes. The tree image recurs in his pictorial and theoretical writing as one element of a simile that establishes a parallel relationship between the growth and structure of a natural object and the genesis and evolution of a work of art. Visually contextualized, as it is in Growth Is Stirring, this familiar analogy provides a key to the meanings encoded in Klee’s abstract signs. If the sign language in Growth Is Stirring is based on verbal figures of speech, it follows that the syntax could likewise be linguistic. At first glance there appears to be no clearly articulated linear structure as in Tree Nursery. In other drawings dating from 1938 (notably Alphabet I and Alphabet II) Klee worked directly on a newspaper support, intentionally disrupting the compositional grid defined by vertical columns of horizontally aligned text. In Growth Is Stirring the disruptive action takes a more subtle form. Here Klee turned the newspaper on its side so that the visible fragments of type are vertically oriented, like various forms of oriental calligraphy. Conforming to the pattern established by the typeset text, the marks embedded in the palpably tactile ground appear to be vertically aligned, yet they are arranged in self-contained clusters that correspond to words or phrases. In the absence

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of any predetermined order, they can be read either vertically or horizontally. Thus, the initial letter in the upper left forms a visual unit with the two signs beneath it and is also linked by a visual conjunction on the right to a pair of visual abstractions that could be either logograms or syllabic fragments. There are at least two models for such a doubly oriented syntactic structure: crossword puzzles and experimental poetry — including some of Klee’s own. These two structural models — one from the popular press, the other from the more rarefied realm of high art — are endemic to the two cultures of communication Klee referenced when he chose to layer the tactile surface texture of a work of art over the machine-printed text of a daily newspaper.53 Despite obvious differences, crossword puzzles and poetry do share common ground. Crossword puzzles are thought to have originated in Greek acrostics, which are verses that incorporate letter ciphers, and in the Roman SATOR square, a word square in which letters spell the same words down and across.54 Even though they have a lineage dating back to the ancient world, crossword puzzles have been standard fare in the print media for only a relatively short period of time. Exported from the United States and England to Germany in 1925, they quickly developed into a national obsession that was fed by specialized magazines and dictionaries. By the midthirties the popular word games were featured in weekly and daily newspapers across Europe. Virtually all were designed to be read vertically as well as horizontally. Some served as vehicles of political propaganda, while others were rumored to be cryptically encoded for clandestine communication.55 It is perhaps serendipitous that Klee’s Growth Is Stirring is similarly structured and encoded. There is no reason to believe that Klee had any particular interest in crossword puzzles, although anyone with his proclivity for wordplay would be a likely devotee. Conversely, there is ample evidence that Klee was knowledgeable about word squares and acrostic verse, both of which he appropriated as models for his illustrative diagrams and verbal poetry. The diagrams illustrated in fig. 31 are variations on word squares. “Abel and His Brothers” (1933) is a modernist acrostic, with the first syllable of each line phonetically transcribing a letter of the alphabet. Each of the twenty-three lines is read horizontally, whereas the letters of the alphabet and the repetitive syllable “bel” are visually perceived as vertical columns.56 In Growth Is Stirring Klee retained the distinctive syntactic structure common to the word square and acrostic verse, replacing words with graphic signs that could be either alphabetic or iconic. Within their compositional matrix, signs are clustered in discrete yet related groups, in some cases paired like the repetitive sounds of a rhyme scheme and spatially distributed like the words of a refrain — both devices common to poetry. If its symbolic language and a compositional structure based on experimental verse invite the viewer to consider Growth Is Stirring as visual poetry, then it is not unreasonable to ask what the poem is about. The title

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suggests early signs of spring, but the visual signs themselves suggest early forms of writing. Conveniently, there is a fairly straightforward response to the question of why Klee would have cast a theory about the pictorial origins of language into poetic form: he was ironically inverting — and thereby modernizing — an established poetic tradition, one invoked by Goethe in a pair of essays entitled “The Fate of Handwriting” (“Schicksal der Handschrift”) and “The Fate of Printing” (“Schicksal der Druckschrift”). Their portentous titles notwithstanding, these essays are anecdotal accounts detailing the lukewarm reception of Goethe’s scientific inquiries into plant morphology. Coyly skirting names, Goethe reminisced that some of his female friends were not pleased with his “abstract gardening” (“mit meiner abstrakten Gärtnerei”).57 To make his research on the structure of plants more accessible, he included a poem that is a masterpiece of word painting. Klee’s visual poetry differs from Goethe’s conventional poetic conceit in one significant respect. Whereas Goethe’s flowery language made his theories about plants less abstract, Klee’s visual metaphors rendered plant life more abstract.58 Growth Is Stirring is not a landscape depicting recognizable objects from the natural world, nor is it manifestly a poem about incipient spring. It is visual poetry with rhythmic content generated by the inherent ambivalence of Klee’s pictorial script and by the viewer’s perception of the relationships between pictorial writing and alphabetic texts, each with its corresponding spatial setting. By layering the thickly textured pictorial surface of Growth Is Stirring over a typographic space, Klee knowingly placed his experiment with poetic language in the context of a recurring theme in the history of modernism. In the early years of the twentieth century the cubists had selectively encroached on the popular press. The proponents of dada followed suit, brashly staking claims to commercial advertising. Although Klee was familiar with these precedents, his own use of newspaper as a site of creative activity may well have originated in the practical need for an available surface to absorb excess ink and to clean brushes. Once he began to use newspaper as a support, he tended to cover most of the surface, usually revealing only fragments of legible text.59 By compromising the legibility of the printed word, Klee was pointedly questioning conventional expectations about reading. To recognize that this challenge to legibility extends to the reading of his pictorial script does not preclude the possibility that the underlying newspaper texts might be as relevant as the visual texts layered over them. In works such as Alphabet I, where the newspaper support is not covered with a ground, the text seems to have been the source of doubly coded metaphors that lend themselves to plays on both words and images. Given the text that is legible beneath the surface of Growth Is Stirring, it seems entirely possible that this drawing was also conceived as a visually encoded response to classified advertisements that had caught Klee’s eye in the newspaper. Whatever may have been his initial motivation,

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Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Fig. 47: Paul Klee, Poem in Pictorial Script (1939/170). Pen on paper mounted on cardboard, 10 x 21 cm. Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, on loan from a private collection. © 2006 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Photograph courtesy of the Zentrum Paul Klee.

the visual image evolved into a multilevel visual and verbal commentary on the role of language in his creative process. A number of themes come together in Growth Is Stirring. Principal among them is the relationship between the pictorial origins of language and the pictorial sign language that was Klee’s preferred medium for composing visual poetry and one of his principal contributions to the aesthetics of modernism. As a thematic corollary, Klee ruminated on the relative merits of manuscript and typographic spaces as the settings of visual poetry. He pursued this line of investigation in Alphabet I and Alphabet II before declaring his allegiance to poetry in a visual context. The three self-contained sections of Poem in Pictorial Script (Gedicht in Bilderschrift, 1939/170) (fig. 47) represent the practice as well as the product of pictorial writing. The legible signature in the upper-left corner seems to have been placed there to identify the box of abstract shapes and the human head immediately below it as the artist/author and his thoughts. Presumably the actual “poem” is in the larger framed box to the right. Although signs are as broadly defined as they are in Growth Is Stirring, the thick brushstrokes of the earlier work have contracted into the thin, brittle lines of a pen. Klee’s Poem in Pictorial Script attests to the fact that, like any living language, his pictorial sign language was in a constant state of evolution. By telescoping the historically glacial processes of assimilation and change, Klee could renew his familiar vocabulary of signs for each new work. Thus, each sign type looks as if it is unique to Poem in Pictorial Script, even though it has precedents in numerous other works by Klee. For example, he plucked the angular abstractions below his signature from Tree Nursery and then distorted shapes and manipulated scale before placing

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them in their new setting. The visual text of the poem itself was composed in a script of bulbous forms that recall the free renderings of petrographs in Signs on Rocks (Zeichen auf Felsen, 1938/271).60 In short, Klee’s eclectic pictorial vocabulary is so uniquely his that it reads like a kind of visual signature, rendering its alphabetic counterpart all but redundant. Although Klee’s descriptive title identifies his language as pictorial, it does not specify how the pictorial abstractions communicate meaning or in what respects they are poetic. Despite formal analogies to signifiers in other paintings and drawings, the visual signs that constitute Poem in Pictorial Script have their own character. To isolate distinguishing features, it is useful to review some of Klee’s previous experiments with the figurative language of poetry in visual form. The full panoply of his poetic language is on display in Tree Nursery. The most accessible poetic symbol is the omnipresent Sema sign, which establishes an analogy between a tree and the word “sign.” More complex and therefore more resistant to deciphering are the syntactic units that juxtapose botanical images and geometric forms in extended metaphorical hybrids of iconic and nonrepresentational signs. In Park N Klee crafted a particularly elegant visual simile in pairing a tree form with an uppercase N. The poetic language of Growth Is Stirring likewise depends on a perceived oscillation between figurative and alphabetic signs, which assume an additional level of symbolic content when viewed in the context of Klee’s frequent invocation of the tree as a theoretical simile. There is a noticeable change in Poem in Pictorial Script, where the only immediately recognizable iconic form is a disembodied human head, and Klee’s signature and title comprise the only alphabetic writing.61 The text of the poem itself consists of nonrepresentational signs. If they are interpreted as visual substitutes for letters or syllabic units, Klee’s Poem in Pictorial Script could exemplify a type of poetic object that Jorge Luis Borges characterized as those “famous poems made up of one enormous word.”62 Given Klee’s interest in the history of writing, his signs could also be the modern equivalents of logograms or ideograms. It is left to the viewer to determine whether the signs function as letters, words, objects, or ideas. Regardless of how they communicate meaning, there are no readily apparent analogies between signs and letters, and any relationship of resemblance between signs and objects in the external world is so tenuous as to be negligible. Klee’s pictorial signs thus take the form of abstract visual metaphors rather than similes. Despite differences of medium and sign types, the composition of the poetic text is not unlike Growth Is Stirring. A case can also be made for compositional models that reflect Klee’s investigation of ancient writing systems. For example, the spatial distribution of signs and their semantic relationships are distantly hieroglyphic, although the segmented compositional units could just as well have been derived from cuneiform.63 Among Klee’s many sources of information about the history of writing

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were illustrated periodicals, which provided readers with a mix of contemporary art criticism and learned studies of ancient art and archaeology by credentialed academics. I cite the Cahiers d’art as a typical example because Klee would have been familiar with an art journal that marketed his own works in feature articles, reviews, and advertisements for exhibitions and publications. Beginning with the first issue, which was published in 1926, and continuing throughout the thirties, the Cahiers d’art offered a veritable smorgasbord of pictorial writing systems, including Easter Island ideographs and North African petrographs. Occasionally special issues were devoted to the art of specific geographic regions. In 1930 the focus was on prehistoric Africa. Several articles in this issue are illustrated with drawings and fragments of stone objects from neolithic and paleolithic cultures.64 Here, as elsewhere in the Cahiers d’art, objects are shown in rectangular frames, photographed from above, with illustrative drawings grouped in the same way. Klee was not the only contemporary artist who seems to have adopted the manner in which scholars presented the visual documentation of their research. Like Klee’s Poem in Pictorial Script, Kandinsky’s Each for Itself (Chacun pour soi, 1934) distributes abstract shapes in a framed horizontal format in much the same way that arrowheads and other stone fragments are laid out on the pages of the Cahiers d’art.65 Two years after Kandinsky’s Each for Itself was reproduced in the magazine, a special issue was published to coincide with an exhibition of surrealist objects on view in the Charles Ratton Gallery from 22 to 29 May 1936.66 Paging through this issue devoted to the object, even the casual reader would have paused to examine the box of found objects collected by Max Ernst and Salvador Dalí’s odd assortment of objects carefully assembled on a tray. These and numerous other illustrations provide ample evidence that the surrealists paid as close attention as did Klee and Kandinsky to the way fragments of ancient cultures were arranged for visual presentation. Almost as provocative as the photographs is Breton’s article entitled “Crisis of the Object” (“Crise de l’objet”). By “object” Breton did not mean a small, three-dimensional construction. In a lecture delivered at a conference held in Prague in March 1935, he emphasized that he was using the word in its broadest sense, giving as examples “oneiric object(s), object(s) with symbolic functions, real and virtual object(s), mobile and mute object(s), phantom object(s), found object(s), etc.” (“objet onirique, objet à fonctionnement symbolique, objet réel et virtuel, objet mobile et muet, objet fantôme, objet trouvé, etc.”).67 His essay on the crisis of the object is both a defense of the importance of experimentation in art and science and a catalogue of the ways that the surrealists had fomented a “complete revolution of the object” (“une révolution totale de l’objet”).68 He began his list with the strategy of reclassifying a found object by attaching a new label and adding a signature, ending with the possibility of

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creating an object from scratch by bringing together disparate, arbitrarily chosen elements.69 Whatever the strategy, the ultimate goal was to give objects a new identity. Breton concluded his essay with a general observation and a word of caution. He noted with approval that all the objects produced by the surrealists for the 1936 exhibition were the result of a thought process that moved from the abstract to the concrete. By contrast, he cited a certain segment of contemporary art — which he identified parenthetically as “abstractivisme” — that “insisted obstinately on moving in the opposite direction” (“s’obstine à prendre le sens inverse”).70 In the Prague lecture he had attempted to distance surrealism from “works of an ‘abstractivist’ tendency in Holland and Switzerland” (“des oeuvres de tendance ‘abstractiviste’ ”).71 According to Breton, those artists who persisted in pursuing the tendency toward abstraction risked having their works outclassed (“définitivement surclassées”) by the surrealist objects reproduced in the 1936 issue of the Cahiers d’art.72 Klee seems to have taken that warning as a challenge. When he responded to Breton’s challenge, Klee apparently returned to the source. In the 1937 volume of the Cahiers d’art R. Vaufrey published a two-part article entitled “L’Âge de l’art rupestre Nord-Afrique.”73 Like other scholarly studies, this exhaustive survey of rock art in North Africa is amply illustrated, in this case with photographs of petrographs that are either in situ on rock surfaces or on stone fragments that are numbered and laid out in orderly rows. Here is art that evolved from a concrete material structure to an abstract sign system. The irony of this unintentional rebuttal of Breton’s repudiation of abstraction does not seem to have been lost on Klee. His Poem in Pictorial Script retains the format, syntax, and shapes of African rock art, but it is by no means a copy of any one of the photographs that illustrate Vaufrey’s article.74 Needing little prompting to heed Breton’s exhortation to pursue experimentation,75 Klee applied the first strategy outlined in Breton’s essay, which is to say that he delineated the African petrographs in a different medium, reclassified them, and signed the transformation as his own work. The transformed object is rendered in a kind of pictorial writing that is clearly based on a petrographic script but would not be recognizable as a poem were it not identified as such. One possible explanation as to why Klee revived the verse structure of Growth Is Stirring and labeled his drawing a poem lies in the significance that the surrealists accorded poetry. Although there are as many definitions of “poésie” and “poétique” as there are surrealist theorists and critics, there was general consensus that poetry — visual as well as verbal — is the preeminent form of artistic expression.76 Not surprisingly, Breton’s own response to what he perceived as the crisis of the object took the form of the “object poem” (“poème-objet”), which sought to bring together the resources of poetry and the visual arts in order to tap their potential for reciprocity.77 Klee’s objective was essentially the same,

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and he achieved it in Poem in Pictorial Script. Conceptually similar to Breton’s “object poem,” it is readable not as conventional poetry but rather as an ironic visual riposte to Breton’s skepticism concerning the future of abstraction. Poem in Pictorial Script is just one of well over a thousand drawings Klee turned out in 1939, the year before his death. Since this work represents only one of many experimental approaches to making art that characterized the last years of Klee’s productive life, there is no reason to view it as typical of his late work. Nor does it represent a terminal point in the evolution of his pictorial language. The diverse works analyzed in this chapter convincingly demonstrate that Klee’s sign language did not evolve in a linear, cumulative fashion. Moreover, even as he developed a doubly coded poetic language, Klee the poet/painter never definitively relinquished the written word. He was recording poems in a pocket diary as late as 1934, and in 1935 he inserted fragments of free verse into Album Leaf. This was followed by a hiatus of two years (1936–37) during which his production was exclusively visual. In 1938 he resumed his previous practice of incorporating verbal poetry in visual spaces, composing Beginning of a Poem, Alphabet AIOEK (fig. 14) and Alphabet WE. The next year he again shifted between two language systems, inscribing textual fragments in the pictorial setting of Eternity for Little People before reverting to the visual abstractions of Poem in Pictorial Script. Since Klee’s poetic output — whether verbal, visual, or a synthesis of the two — rarely developed in predictable ways, it is conceivable that he might have found a way to turn the “abstractivist” vocabulary of Poem in Pictorial Script into his own version of the concrete poetry that proliferated in the later twentieth century.

Notes 1

Spiller, ed., The Nature of Nature, 83 (Spiller, ed., Paul Klee: Unendliche Naturgeschichte, 83). This passage is included with manuscript material from 1923. 2

Dee Reynolds, Symbolist Aesthetics and Early Abstract Art: Sites of Imaginary Space (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995), xii; hereafter cited as Symbolist Aesthetics.

3

Reynolds, Symbolist Aesthetics, 40, 199, 226.

4

For a summary of the literature on Tree Nursery, see Sabine Fischer’s entry (#159) in The Eye of Duncan Phillips: A Collection in the Making, ed. Erika D. Passantino (Washington, DC: Phillips Collection and Yale UP, 1999), 285. 5 Bridgwater, Poet of Expressionist Berlin, 167–96. This aspect of Heym’s poetry appealed to other contemporary artists besides Klee, most notably Kirchner, who produced forty-seven original woodcuts to illustrate a special edition of Umbra Vitae, which is often singled out as a particularly fine example of a livre d’artiste

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dating from the early twentieth century. See Georg Heym and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Umbra Vitae (Munich: Kurt Wolff, 1924). 6

Bridgwater, Poet of Expressionist Berlin, 182–83.

7

Bridgwater, Poet of Expressionist Berlin, 182.

8

Bridgwater, Poet of Expressionist Berlin, 200. See also Georg Heym, Lyrik, vol. 1 of Dichtungen und Schriften, ed. Karl Ludwig (Munich: H. Ellermann, 1960), 163; hereafter cited as Lyrik. The translation is mine. 9

Heym, Lyrik, 129.

10

Quoted in Bridgwater, Poet of Expressionist Berlin, 182.

11

Bridgwater, Poet of Expressionist Berlin, 197.

12

On Klee and van Gogh, see Franciscono, Klee, 102–4, 107–11. On Klee’s reference to Hodler, see Tagebücher #904, autumn 1911, 320 (Diaries, 265). 13 Heym, Lyrik, 163; the English translation is found in Bridgwater, Poet of Expressionist Berlin, 200. 14 Jean M. Chick, Form as Expression: A Study of the Lyric Poetry Written between 1910 and 1915 by Lasker-Schüler, Stramm, Stadler, Benn, and Heym, Studies in Modern German Literature, no. 10 (New York: Peter Lang, 1988), 59. 15 For photographs of some of Klee’s tools, see Nathalie Bäschlin, Béatrice Ilg, and Patrizia Zeppetella, “Paul Klee’s Painting Equipment: Working Processes and Picture Surfaces,” in Paul Klee Rediscovered: Works from the Bürgi Collection, ed. Stefan Frey and Josef Helfenstein (London: Merrell / Bern: Kunstmuseum, 2000), 183–97; hereafter cited as Paul Klee Rediscovered. 16

Tagebücher #902, autumn 1911, 319 (Diaries, 264).

17

For a reproduction of Shoots, see Catalogue raisonné, 7:434.

18

For a survey of cuneiform writing, see C. B. F. Walker, Cuneiform, Reading the Past (Berkeley: U of California P, 1987). 19

For a discussion of the derivation of the sign types in Tree Nursery, see my book Klee’s Pictorial Writing, 187–89.

20

Reynolds, Symbolist Aesthetics, 53.

21

Spiller, ed., The Thinking Eye, 152 (Spiller, ed., Paul Klee: Das bildnerische Denken, 152). 22 Spiller, ed., The Thinking Eye, 228 (Spiller, ed., Paul Klee: Das bildnerische Denken, 228). 23 Spiller, ed., The Thinking Eye, 220, 235 (Spiller, ed., Paul Klee: Das bildnerische Denken, 220, 235). 24

Jean Laude has also noted that there is a greater degree of abstraction in the lower bands; see “Paul Klee: Lettres, ‘écritures,’ signes,” in Écritures / Systèmes idéographiques et pratiques expressives, Actes du colloque international de l’Université Paris VII, ed. Anne-Marie Christin and Pierre Amiet (Paris: Le Sycomore, 1982), 383. 25

For reproductions, see Catalogue raisonné: Abstract Script, 6:159; Report on Events at Dui, 6:197.

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26

See Max Morise, “Les Yeux enchantés,” La Révolution surréaliste, no. 1 (1 December 1924): 26–27; for the Desnos drawing and text, see page 28.

27 André Breton, “Genèse et perspective artistiques du surréalisme” (1941), in Le Surréalisme et la peinture (New York: Brentano’s, 1945), 93. 28

“Genèse et perspective artistiques du surréalisme,” 90.

29

In Gedichte, 122, the verbal text is printed as follows: “Jatzt [sic] ist der Winter / drüber weggeschritten // Das war einmal / ein Gemüsegarten // dann ist es doch gesagt.” On Klee’s facility with mirror writing, see F. Klee, ed., Klee, 50. 30 René Magritte, “Les Mots et les images,” La Révolution surréaliste, no. 12 (15 December 1929): 33. A copy of this issue of La Révolution surréaliste is in the Klee library. 31 This terminology is discussed by Dana Gioia; see “The Magical Value of Manuscripts,” in the catalogue, The Hand of the Poet: Poems and Papers in Manuscript (New York: Rizzoli, 1997), 5. 32

Glaesemer, Handzeichnungen, 2:242.

33

See La Révolution surréaliste, nos. 9–10 (1 October 1927): 8–44.

34

For a color reproduction of Seventeen, Mad (also translated as Seventeen, Astray), see the Catalogue raisonné, 4:80. 35 For an analysis of Kandinsky’s poems (and reproductions of the woodblock prints), see Elizabeth Napier’s introduction and the illustrations in Sounds. 36

For an extensive discussion of this book, see Renée Riese Hubert, Surrealism and the Book (Berkeley: U of California P, 1988), 34–46.

37

See Hubert, Surrealism and the Book, 97–108. For other examples of surrealist book projects combining words and images, see Surrealismus, 1919–1944, ed. Werner Spies (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2002), the catalogue that accompanied an exhibition at the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf. It is interesting to note that although Klee’s works were included in the first exhibition of surrealist art, they were absent from this one. 38 These exercises are contained in the “Pädagogischer Nachlass” 15/MAN16/ 242–50, which is housed in the collection of the Zentrum Paul Klee. For reproductions of other pages from the “Pädagogischer Nachlass” and related drawings and paintings, see Paul Klee — Die Kunst des Sichtbarmachens: Materialien zu Klees Unterricht am Bauhaus, ed. Michael Baumgartner (Bern: Benteli, 2000), the catalogue that accompanied an exhibition at the Seedamm Kulturzentrum, Pfäffikon. 39

See J. J. G. Alexander, The Decorated Letter (New York: Braziller, 1978), 21.

40

See Massin, Letter and Image, trans. Caroline Hillier and Vivienne Menkes (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1970), 87. 41 These uncatalogued exercises involving ornamental initials are in the Zentrum Paul Klee. In chapter 3 I cite specific examples pertaining to Park Near Lu. 42 Briefe, vol. 2, 14 October 1917, 882. This proposed project is discussed in chapter 1. 43

See Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt,

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Brace & World, 1968), 223. On Klee and the “auratic” in another context, see Charles W. Haxthausen, “Zwischen Darstellung und Parodie: Klees ‘auratische’ Bilder,” in Bätschmann and Helfenstein, eds., Paul Klee: Kunst und Karriere, 9–26. See also Anger, Klee and the Decorative, 167–70. 44

On Klee’s involvement with book illustration, see Vogel, Zwischen Wort und Bild, 146–48; see also my book Klee’s Pictorial Writing, 37–41. 45 See Temkin, “Klee and the Avant-Garde,” 28. For a facsimile of Klee’s letter of 21 April 1928 responding to Eluard’s request, see Berggruen & Co., L’Univers de Klee (Paris: Berggruen, 1955). 46 For an extensive assessment of Klee’s financial situation at this time, see Stefan Frey, “Rolf Bürgi’s Commitment to Paul and Lily Klee and the Creation of the Paul Klee Foundation,” in Frey and Helfenstein, eds., Paul Klee Rediscovered, 200–202. For Frey’s detailed chronology and exhibition history of the last decade of Klee’s life, see Frey, “Chronologische Biographie (1933–1941),” 111–32. For information about the dealers who represented Klee in America during the thirties, see Lanchner, “Klee in America,” 99–101. 47 See Pierre Assouline, An Artful Life: A Biography of D. H. Kahnweiler, 1884–1979, trans. Charles Ruas (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990), 234–36. 48 Karl Weule, Vom Kerbstock zum Alphabet: Urformen der Schrift (Stuttgart: Kosmos, 1915). On Klee’s use of this volume, see James Smith Pierce, “Pictographs, Ideograms, and Alphabets in the Work of Paul Klee,” Journal of Typographic Research 1 (July 1967): 220, 233. 49 This work has been the focus of numerous studies and has served as the theme of an entire exhibition. See Christiane Dessauer-Reiners, Das Rhythmische bei Paul Klee: Eine Studie zum genetischen Bildverfahren (Worms, Germany: Wernersche Verlagsgesellschaft, 1996), 171, 183–86, 195–99. See also Paul Klee — Wachstum regt sich: Klees Zwiesprache mit der Natur (Munich: Prestel, 1990), which is the catalogue that accompanied the exhibition held in Saarbrücken at the SaarlandMuseum and in Karlsruhe at the Prinz-Max-Palais. 50

Rudolf von Larisch, Beispiele künstlerischer Schrift, 2 vols. (Vienna: Anton Schroll, 1900–1902), vol. 1: plate xxvii by Alfred Roller; vol. 2: plate xxvi by Rich. Riemerschmid.

51

Victor Hugo, “Sur la route d’Aix-les-Bains,” in Voyages et excursions, vol. 6, pt. 2, of Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Librairie Ollendorff, 1910), 215. The translation of this passage is taken from Massin, Letter and Image, 87.

52

Klee, “On Modern Art,” 76 (Spiller, ed., Paul Klee: Das bildnerische Denken, 82).

53

For contrasts between a manuscript or scribal culture and modern print culture, see Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1962), 74–97. 54

On the origins of crossword puzzles, see Roger Millington, Crossword Puzzles: Their History and Their Cult (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 1975), 29–38. Although it is constructed with graphic notations rather than letters, the diagram illustrated in fig. 31 (top) is structurally similar to the SATOR square.

55 On German crossword puzzles, see the essay “Kleine Geschichte eines milden Wahns — Kreuzworträtsel,” in Udo Pini’s book Kreuzwort für Intelligenz

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(Hamburg: Hanseatische Edition, 1984), 21–29. I am indebted to Will Shortz, crossword puzzle editor of the the New York Times and puzzle master at National Public Radio, for this reference and a copy of the essay. 56

See Gedichte, 120; see also chapter 1.

57

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Schicksal der Druckschrift,” Naturwissenschaftliche Schriften, vol. 13 of Goethes Werke (Hamburg: Christian Wegner, 1960), 107. 58

Although neither “Schicksal der Druckschrift” nor Growth Is Stirring is mentioned, other aspects of Goethe’s influence on Klee are explored by Richard Hoppe-Sailer in “Genesis und Prozess: Elemente der Goethe-Rezeption bei Carl Gustav Carus, Paul Klee und Joseph Beuys,” in Goethe und die Verzeitlichung der Natur, ed. Peter Matussek (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1998), 276–300. 59 As reported in the the New York Times (Holland Cotter, “The Gentle Art of Those Who Preserve Art,” 17 October 1994, sec. C), conservators have discovered that the underlying texts can be read with infrared reflectography. 60

For a reproduction of Signs on Rocks, see Catalogue raisonné, 7:444.

61

Dörte Zbikowski has noted that Klee brought together linguistic signs with what looks like a child’s drawing; see Geheimnisvolle Zeichen: Fremde Schriften in der Malerei des 20. Jahrhunderts (Göttingen: Cuvillier, 1996), 131. While not specifically addressing Poem in Pictorial Script, other scholars have written extensively about the character of the visual vocabulary used in Klee’s late drawings. See, e.g., Charles W. Haxthausen, “Zur ‘Bildsprache’ des Spätwerkes,” in Das Schaffen im Todesjahr, 27–36, and Regine Prange, “Das utopische Kalligramm: Klees ‘Zeichen’ und der Surrealismus,” in Paul Klee: Kunst und Karriere, 204–25. 62 Jorge Luis Borges, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” (1940), in Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings, ed. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby (New York: New Directions, 1964), 9. 63 Sadao Wada reproduced Poem in Pictorial Script next to hieroglyphic inscriptions Klee could have seen when he visited Karnak and Luxor in December 1928; see Paul Klee and His Travels (Tokyo: Nantenshi Gallery, 1980), 131–33. See also: W. V. Davies, Egyptian Hieroglyphs, Reading the Past (Berkeley: U of California P, 1987); and Walker, Cuneiform. It is equally possible that Klee based the compositional divisions on one or more of his own earlier works; likely candidates would be Creative Handwritten (Schöpferisch Handschriftlich, 1914/194) and Pictographic Tablet (Bilderschrift Tafel, 1924/44). 64 See, especially, Henri Breuil, “L’Afrique préhistorique,” Cahiers d’art 5 (1930): 449–83. 65

For a reproduction of the Kandinsky work, see Cahiers d’art 9 (1934): 151.

66

See Cahiers d’art 11 (1936): 3–68.

67

André Breton, “Situation surréaliste de l’objet, situation de l’objet surréaliste” (1935), in Manifestes du Surréalisme (Paris: Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 1962), 307. The essay is hereafter cited as “Situation surréaliste de l’objet”; the volume is hereafter cited as Manifestes. This essay is placed in the broader context of surrealist theory by Kim Grant in Surrealism and the Visual Arts: Theory and Reception (New York: Cambridge UP, 2005), 347–49.

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68

André Breton, “Crise de l’objet,” Cahiers d’art 11 (1936): 24.

69

Breton, “Crise de l’objet,” 24.

70

Breton, “Crise de l’objet,” 26.

71

Breton, “Situation surréaliste de l’objet,” 308.

72

Breton, “Crise de l’objet,” 26.

73

R. Vaufrey, “L’Âge de l’art rupestre Nord-Afrique,” Cahiers d’art 12 (1937): 63–77, 181–92. 74

Klee was not alone in appropriating the vocabulary of rock art. On Miró’s use of petroglyphs and petrographs, see Sidra Stich, Joan Miró: The Development of a Sign Language (St. Louis, MO: Washington University Gallery of Art, 1980). 75

Breton, “Crise de l’objet,” 22.

76

See, e.g., Breton, “Situation surréaliste de l’objet,” 314; see also the index in Grant, Surrealism and the Visual Arts, 402. 77

See Breton, “Du Poème-Objet,” in Le Surréalisme et la peinture, 178–80. According to the introduction, Breton composed his first “poème-objet” in 1929. Orban, however, dates the first to 1935; see The Culture of Fragments, 110.

Conclusion: Klee and Concrete Poetry Klee’s secure niche in the history of modernism is based not on his poetry but rather on his reputation as a major figure in the history of modern painting. Given his singular status as an artist, it is not surprising that his work as a painter does not fit neatly into the traditional movements and categories featured in most historical surveys of modern art. As an alternative, less conventional frame of reference by which to contextualize his work, I have focused on Klee’s experiments with the language and structural forms of poetry. Unlike Arp, Grosz, and other poet/painters of his generation, Klee apparently made no effort to publish or otherwise establish himself as a practicing poet. Presumably he harbored no illusions about the originality of his early poetry. Once he set his sights on making a name for himself as a visual artist, he channeled his activity as a poet into the production of pictorial images, drawing on his command of traditional poetics and his knowledge of experimental contemporary poetry to establish a place for himself within the cross-disciplinary matrix of modernisms. He knew who the other innovators were, and there is every reason to believe that their work served as a standard by which to measure his own achievement and as models to internalize but not imitate. Comparing his pictorial poetry to other forms of contemporary visual poetry reveals the extent to which Klee assimilated and reinvented modernist experimentation. Klee might very well have agreed with Miró, who claimed to make no distinction between painting and poetry. Nevertheless, Klee would probably have stopped short of concurring with Miró’s assessment of the relationship between his painting and his poetry: “I have sometimes illustrated my canvases with poetic phrases and vice versa” (“Il m’arrive d’illustrer mes toiles de phrases poétiques et vice-versa”).1 Klee would have avoided the verb “illustrate” in favor of language calculated to reinforce the disclaimer of distinctions. Although Miró’s verbal and visual poetry often coexist in a unified spatial structure, there is always a clear distinction between words and images. By contrast, Klee’s works introduce an element of intentional ambiguity at the level of language as well as process. This is the language of his poems in pictorial script. As a poetic genre, a poem in pictorial script can be construed as yet another modernist variant of classical and Renaissance pattern poetry. Given that Klee’s poems in pictorial script either incorporate fragments of handwritten text or otherwise retain vestiges of his handwriting, they can be compared to Apollinaire’s poem “The Bouquet” (“Le Bouquet”).2 They are nevertheless significantly

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different from this calligramme or the shaped poems by Schwitters in that the compositional arrangements do not bear a mimetic relationship to any named object. Even when composing in a verbal space, Klee avoided not only compositions with iconic visual shapes but also the stylish layouts and verbal plays perfected by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Michel Leiris, and other masters of typographic poetry.3 At least some of Klee’s poems in pictorial script are modifications of the compositional structure that links Apollinaire’s conversation poems, such as “The Windows,” to the poem composed of fragments cut from newspapers, reset, and printed in Breton’s 1924 manifesto of surrealism.4 Klee, however, applied the technique of excerpting and reintegrating not only to the construction of his poetic compositions but also to the compilation of his poetic vocabulary, which draws on many different sign systems. The result is a lexicon of signs that is as abstruse as Henri Michaux’s 1927 alphabet or the graphic language Max Ernst invented for his Maximiliana (1964) and Écritures (1970).5 Klee’s pictorial signs differ from those of either Michaux or Ernst in that they are not as homogeneous in appearance. In this respect his visual poetry anticipates the innovations of groups and solo practitioners active in the years during and following the Second World War. In 1942 Isidore Isou issued his “Manifesto of Lettrist Poetry” (“Le Manifeste de la poésie lettriste”), in which he boldly called for the destruction of words and advocated the priority of the letter. Isou and other practicing lettrists elaborated on their goals in “Poetic and Musical Principles of the Lettrist Movement” (“Principes poétiques et musicaux du mouvement lettriste”). When it came to realizing their stated intentions, some of the lettrist poets used letters in conventional and unconventional combinations, whereas others created a variable form of notation that was initially called metagraphy (“métagraphie”) and then hypergraphy (“hypergraphie”).6 As early as 1918 in Inscription (Inschrift, 1918/ 207), Klee had anticipated one of the lettrists’ goals, namely, to create an architecture of letter-rhythms (“de créer une architecture de rythmes lettriques”).7 Klee’s graphic “architecture” took the form of a grid with letters, which he again used in Alphabet AIOEK (fig. 14). Although the sign language Klee developed in the thirties is comparable to Isou’s doubly coded poetic language — it similarly commingles figuration with some readable letters and a graphic script that defies legibility — the compositional formats of his poems in pictorial script are less confined and the signs are less densely concentrated.8 Just before he entered a sanatorium in OrselinaLocarno and, shortly thereafter, the hospital in Muralto-Locarno where he died, Klee was painting variants of the signs in his drawings onto strips of burlap. These experiments with distinctly painterly marks may have developed in the direction taken by another self-professed lettrist, Havana-born Roberto Altmann, who combined the stains and drips of postwar abstract

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expressionism with legible texts, which metamorphose into glyphs that appear to have both visual and linguistic properties. The Noigandres group offers yet another international perspective on experimental poetry in the postwar years. Named for the poetry magazine they founded, the Noigandres poets include Augusto de Campos, Décio Pignatari, and Haroldo de Campos. Their theories were initially formulated in an essay published in 1956 on the occasion of the first national exhibition of concrete poetry, sculpture, and painting, held at the Museum of Modern Art in São Paulo, and were subsequently synthesized in 1958 as the “Pilot Plan for Concrete Poetry” (“Plano-piloto para poesia concreta”). The term “concrete poetry” had been used previously by other artists, including the Swiss sculptor Max Bill. Like the name they appropriated, the ideas of the Noigandres group had precedents in the statements and works of artists they acknowledged as forerunners, Apollinaire and the dadaists among them. What they accomplished in their “pilot plan” was to lay out a set of principles that could be interpreted and applied in any number of ways. The concept that gives coherence to their loosely organized paragraphs of sentence fragments is structure, which is a common denominator of Klee’s theories and works as well. In the first paragraph of their plan the authors pinpoint the awareness of graphic space as a structural agent of concrete poetry (“poesia concreta começa por tomar conhecimento do espaço gráfico como agente estrutural”).9 Klee’s concept of pictorial writing demonstrates just such an awareness. The challenge, as he saw it, is “to project something of rather long linear extension onto a modest area limited on all sides” (“Die Aufgabe besteht in der Übertragung eines ziemlich länglichen Vorganges auf eine gedrungene Fläche von allseitiger Begrenztheit”).10 Although he noted that music and poetry accomplish this through temporal sequencing (“Eine zeitliche Kunst wie die Musik oder die Dichtung würde dies ohne jedes Kopfzerbrechen auf dem natürlichsten Weg, eben dem zeitlichen lösen können”), he illustrated how visual artists could avoid the limitation that the Noigandres group would refer to as “mere linear-temporistical development” (“desenvolvimento meramente temporístico-linear”).11 For Klee, as for the Noigandres poets, a dynamic tension between visual and/or verbal signs in space-time defines a structure that engenders meaning. The Noigandres group coined the term “structure-content” (“estrutura-conteúdo”) to convey the idea that a concrete poem does not interpret or communicate outside referents, whether they be other texts or feelings.12 Although my interpretations of Klee’s poems in pictorial script clearly violate this condition of concrete poetry, I have left open the possibility that they might exist independently of any external or intertextual references. To this extent, I acknowledge that Klee’s visual poetry “remains in the magnetic field of perennial relativeness” (“permanece no campo magnético do relativo perene”), which is where the Noigandres group placed concrete poetry.13

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Like Klee, other visual poets worked outside the parameters of a group manifesto or affiliation. Some made statements or used phrases that Klee might have uttered. Dom Sylvester Houédard, like Klee, recognized parallels between nonfigurative painting and poetry, yet his “typestracts,” which were all composed on a typewriter, are unlike Klee’s insistently handcrafted visual poems.14 Hans Staudacher’s “manuscript-pictures” are conceptually similar to Klee’s Growth Is Stirring and Poem in Pictorial Script, yet they are altogether different in the use of materials more common to Schwitters’s collages.15 Although Klee experimented freely with materials and techniques, he did so primarily with the traditional media of the visual arts. Consequently he is usually placed in the company of midcentury artists rather than poets. Much has been written about his legacy to subsequent generations of modern artists, particularly the gestural painters among the abstract expressionists.16 By contrast, relatively little attention has been paid to the larger question of how the second generation of modernists and the postmodernists have interpreted the relationship between modernist abstraction and Bill’s concept of “concrete art” (“konkrete Kunst”), which is applicable to the visual arts as well as poetry.17 As early as 1936 Bill called for concrete art to be created independently of either experiential nature or the transformative process of abstraction. It is interesting to consider whether Klee might have explored this possibility using a visual vocabulary stripped of the vestiges of reference implicit in Poem in Pictorial Script. If so, his visual poetry would certainly have looked altogether different from the “visual poems” (“visuelle Gedichte”) of Klaus Peter Dencker or the “visual texts” (“visuelle Texte”) of Helmut Zenker.18 In her anthology of international concrete poetry, Mary Ellen Solt observes that the visual poem in the mid-twentieth century was a “new product in a world flooded with new products . . . a word design in a designed world.”19 Klee’s inventive use of newspaper confirms his interest in graphic design as a site of reference and comparison in the production of drawings and paintings. However, based on the kinds of visual poetry he had produced by 1940, it seems unlikely that he would have narrowed his vocabulary of visual abstractions to the signs available to a typesetter, as Zenker did in his “ballade,” which is composed of question marks and exclamation points. Conversely, Klee might well have been tempted to adapt Zenker’s neatly laid out ballad quatrains to his own version of “visual texts.”20 As models for the structural rhythms of such texts, he might have returned to the diagrams illustrated in fig. 31. Klee seems never to have used a typewriter, let alone a computer, so it is perhaps far-fetched even to suggest analogies between the reductive, encoded language of his pictorial script and the digitally programmed codes of combinatorial or programming-code poetry. His poems in pictorial script are differently encoded and are not reducible to the logic of digital codes, yet they do share self-reflexivity in common with the kind of

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digital poetry that is readable as both program source code and output.21 Although these speculative analogies are beyond the scope of this study, they ignite flashes of insight into the direction Klee’s visual poetry might have taken had he lived another twenty years and the influence he might have had on poetry of the late twentieth century.

Notes 1 Rowell, ed. Miró: Selected Writings, 151. For illustrations of Miró’s “paintingpoems,” see Jacques Dupin and Ariane Lelong-Mainaud, comp., Joan Miró: Catalogue raisonné, vol. 1, Paintings, 1908–1930 (Paris: Daniel Lelong, Successió Miró, 1999), 124–27, 151, 195–97. 2

Apollinaire’s poem “Le Bouquet” is discussed at length by Willard Bohn in Apollinaire, Visual Poetry, and Art Criticism (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 1993), 180–85. 3

For an in-depth study of typographic poetry, see Drucker, The Visible Word.

4

Breton, “Manifeste du surréalisme” (1924), in Manifestes, 57–59.

5

On Klee, Michaux, and Ernst, see Temkin, “Klee and the Avant-Garde,” 27–28.

6

See Jean-Paul Curtay, La Poésie lettriste (Paris: Seghers, 1974), 101.

7

See “Principes poétiques et musicaux du mouvement lettriste,” in Curtay, La Poésie lettriste, 307. For an illustration of Inscription, see Catalogue raisonné, 2:526. 8 For essays on lettrist hypergraphy, see Isidore Isou, Le Lettrisme et l’hypergraphie dans la peinture et la sculpture contemporaines (Paris: J. Grassin, 1961). 9 Augusto de Campos, Décio Pignatari, and Haroldo de Campos, “Plano-piloto para poesia concreta,” in Concrete Poetry: A World View, ed. Mary Ellen Solt (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1969), 70–71; hereafter cited as Concrete Poetry. The original text, published in Noigandres 4, is reprinted in this volume together with a translation by the authors. 10

Spiller, ed., The Nature of Nature, 83 (Spiller, ed., Paul Klee: Unendliche Naturgeschichte, 83). 11 Spiller, ed., The Nature of Nature, 83 (Spiller, ed., Paul Klee: Unendliche Naturgeschichte, 83). See also “Plano-piloto” in Solt, Concrete Poetry, 70–71. 12

“Plano-piloto,” 71–72.

13

“Plano-piloto,” 71–72.

14

For a statement by Houédard about his “typestracts,” see Institute of Contemporary Arts, Between Poetry and Painting, 53.

15

For a statement by Staudacher about his “manuscript-pictures,” see Institute of Contemporary Arts, Between Poetry and Painting, 81. 16 17

See, e.g., Lanchner, “Klee in America,” 83–111.

Bill’s definition of “konkrete Kunst” first appeared in the catalogue of the exhibition Zeitprobleme in der Schweizer Malerei und Plastik (Zurich: Kunsthaus,

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1936). It was subsequently revised in 1949 and appeared in the catalogue Zürcher Konkrete Kunst. It is reprinted in Max Bill: Oeuvres, 1928–1969 (Paris: Centre National d’Art Contemporain, 1969), 61. 18 Examples of both Klee’s and Dencker’s poetry are included in Klaus Peter Dencker, ed., volume Poetische Sprachspiele: Vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2002), 179–80, 184, 276–77. 19

Solt, Concrete Poetry, 60.

20

See Helmut Zenker, Spottbuch: Geschichten, Gedichte, visuelle Texte, Artikel, Beleidigungen, Lieder, Satiren u. a. (1967–1990) (Vienna: Cabal, 1990), 106. 21

For information about this kind of poetry, see the essay by Florian Cramer entitled “Program Code Poetry” at the following Web site: http://www.netzliteratur. net/cramer/programm.htm.

Appendix: What Counts as Poetry? The first edition of Klee’s collected poetry was published in 1960 by Arche Verlag, Zurich. A majority of the poems published in this edition was gleaned from Klee’s Tagebücher, although in many cases there is doubt as to whether the diary entries were intended as poems. The 1960 edition has been reissued four times (1980, 1996, and 2001 by Arche; 1991 by Luchterhand Literaturverlag, Frankfurt), with mostly minor variations in format, layout, and illustrations. The only major changes occurred in the 1980 edition, which added a section entitled “Weitere Gedichte und Fragmente in chronologischer Ordnung,” and in the 1996 edition, which changed the format of the index and the listing of original sources. Translations of Klee’s poetry into English, French, Italian, Spanish, and other languages have been based on the material contained in the first and subsequent Arche editions. Inevitably, therefore, the editors and translators have included selections that may or may not have been written as poems. Cases in point are found in available English translations, including: Some Poems, translated by Anselm Hollo (Lowestoft, Suffolk: Scorpion Press, 1962), and the anthology entitled Three Painter-Poets — Arp, Schwitters, Klee: Selected Poems, translated by Harriett Watts (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1974). Klee’s poetic production is represented differently in Germanlanguage anthologies, beginning with Carola Giedion-Welcker’s Anthologie der Abseitigen: Poètes à l’Écart, first issued in 1946 (Bern: Benteli), and again in 1965 (Zurich: Arche). These volumes include only poems Klee recorded in the notebook of “Geduchte.” A more recent thematic anthology entitled Poetische Sprachspiele: vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2002), edited by Klaus Peter Dencker, includes selections of later poetry from Klee’s pocket diaries and a reproduction of the 1938 alphabet poem Beginning of a Poem. In the absence of a definitive critical edition of his poems, the Klee scholar is faced with the exacting task of collating material contained in two sources: the 2001 Arche edition of the Gedichte (currently out of print), and Marianne Vogel’s 1992 publication Zwischen Wort und Bild: Das schriftliche Werk Paul Klees und die Rolle der Sprache in seinem Denken und in seiner Kunst. Vogel accounts for 66 manuscripts in private hands and in the collection of the Zentrum Paul Klee. Of this number, 48 are included in the 2001 edition of Gedichte, although the formal arrangements of the original texts are not consistently retained. By contrast, the

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alphabetic index of the 2001 edition lists titles or first lines of 148 poems, as well as selected picture titles. Since Vogel counts only poems that exist in manuscript form, she provides the nucleus of any definitive list of Klee’s poems. Her compilation includes: • •

•

• •

•

•

• •

one poem dating from 1895, published in Gedichte (2001), 105; sixteen poems written between the fall of 1898 and December 1901, in unpublished correspondence with Hans Bloesch, now in a private Swiss collection; two of these are similar to variants Klee included in his Tagebücher (#s 77, 82, as indicated below); three poems composed between the summers of 1899 and 1900; two are variants of poems listed above, and all three are published in the Tagebücher (#s77, 82, 111) and in Gedichte (2001), 18, 20, 22–23; two poems from mid-1900 in a letter dated 2 September 1900 to Lily Stumpf and published in Gedichte (2001), 107–8; one poem jotted down sometime between 1913 and 1914 in Klee’s personal copy of Georg Büchner’s Danton’s Death and published in Gedichte (2001), 16; twenty-nine poems, a third of which are no more than couplets, probably recorded in the notebook of “Geduchte” between 1922 and 1926 and published in Gedichte (2001), 7–12; four poems, whose dates are unknown, written on loose sheets and interleaved in the back of the notebook of “Geduchte,” published in Gedichte (2001), 13–16, with free interpretations of Klee’s original layouts; one poem of unknown provenance, published in Gedichte (2001), 95; nine short texts interspersed throughout four pocket diaries dating from 1928–29 and 1933–34, seven of which are published in Gedichte (2001), 16, 115, 118, 120–21.

The considerably expanded body of poetry published in the Arche editions of Gedichte includes excerpts from Klee’s diaries, in many cases with changes in layout and punctuation. Although Vogel concedes that some of Klee’s diary entries may have been conceived as poems, she cautiously adds the caveat that the line separating poetry and prose is often so thin as to be imperceptible.1 Close scrutiny of the critical edition of the Tagebücher, which scrupulously retains Klee’s indentations, breaks, and punctuation, confirms that relatively few of the poetic passages excerpted from the Tagebücher have the stylistic and typographic features common to Klee’s other poems. Of the nineteen excerpts to which Vogel grants the possibility of poetic status, twelve can be identified as poems through some combination of language, stanzaic structure, and rhyming (#s 61/second half, 138, 167, 384, 444, 462, 466/first half, 550/last section, 846, 945, 948, 1081A); five could possibly be considered poetic fragments or prose poems (#s 295, 436, 480/first paragraph, 837, 934), while one (#935)

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193

seems questionable due to the lack of internal evidence of poetic structure or content. Not included in this account is entry #940, which is a variant of one of the poems recorded in the notebook of “Geduchte.”2 Included in neither the 2001 edition of Gedichte nor Vogel’s list are the lines of doggerel verse in diary entry #67, which are in the humorous vein of other short prose poems in the Tagebücher: Die Musik ist für mich wie eine verscherzte Geliebte. Ruhm als Maler?? Schriftsteller, moderner Lyriker? Schlechter Witz. So bin ich beruflos, und bummle.

Music for me is a love bewitched, Fame as a painter?? Writer, modern poet? Bad joke. So I have no calling and loaf.3

Other diary entries published in the 2001 edition of Gedichte as poems can be characterized as aesthetic pronouncements (#s 862, 932, 943), aphorisms (#s 935–38), introspective musings (#725), dream imagery (#s 748, 762, 946), or retrospection (#804). In more than one instance passages from several diary entries were pieced together and presented as single poems (e.g., #s 84–88, #s 760–61). A significant exception to the majority of diary entries in the 2001 edition of Gedichte are the twentyseven sets of line endings that Klee deliberately chose to include in his diaries as evidence of his activity as a poet. Whereas the line endings are stretched horizontally across the pages of the Tagebücher, separated by a system of single and double slashes, they are vertically aligned in the collected Gedichte. This spatial distribution creates visual structures that bear a striking resemblance to Stramm’s columnar chains of words and word pairs. A first step in establishing a critical edition of Klee’s poetry would be to identify these line endings as such and restore the formats preserved in the critical edition of the Tagebücher. Finally, the 2001 edition of Gedichte incorporates some of the texts that Klee wrote into his paintings and drawings. It is difficult to justify all of these as poems, whereas other poetic texts that survive in visual settings are inexplicably missing. Although the list below is not complete, all the texts are justifiably poems or poem fragments and are discussed as such in this book: • • • •

• •

Woe Is Me in the Gale Wind, 1912/131 and Fall, 1912/130 Emilie, 1917/48 Once Emerged from the Gray of the Night, 1918/17 Memorial Sheet (of Gersthofen), 1918/196 [recorded in the notebook of “Geduchte” and included in Vogel’s list of manuscripts; not double-counted in my calculations below] Éhatévauih (1925/124) Album Leaf, 1935/6

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Beginning of a Poem, 1938/189 Alphabet WE, 1938/226 Alphabet AIOEK, 1938/227 Eternity for Little People, 1939/30

So what counts as poetry? A conservative working list would be restricted to the sixty-six manuscripts documented by Vogel (sixty-four poems plus two variants), the nine additional poems inscribed in drawings or paintings, and diary entries #61/second half, 67, 138, 167, 384, 444, 462, 466/first half, 550/last section, 846, 945, 948, 1081A, and the line endings contained in diary entries #184, 286, 292, 296, 306, 316, 325, 330, 343. A more generous assessment would include diary entries #295, 436, 480/first paragraph, 837, 934. This working list would not, however, constitute a definitive checklist for a critical edition of Klee’s poetry. Questions remain even about the entries in the notebook of “Geduchte.” One example suffices to illustrate the problems faced by the editor who undertakes the task of establishing a definitive body of Klee’s poetry. Page 11 of the notebook of “Geduchte” begins with the following lines: 1915 Mein Stern ging auf tief unter meinen Füssen.

1915 My star rose far beneath my feet.

wo haust im Winter mein Fuchs? wo schläft meine Schlange?

where does my fox dwell in winter? where does my serpent sleep?4

⭈

⭈

The bullet indicating a break between the two couplets in Klee’s manuscript is eliminated in published versions of these verses. Although the four lines are counted as two separate poems in Vogel’s inventory, they are printed as a single poem in the Arche editions of the Gedichte. Moreover, in the 2001 edition of Gedichte, this poem is listed in the index under the title “1915.”5 In addition to determining whether the verses constitute two poems, fragments of two poems, or a single poem, the editor must decide whether “1915” is a title or a chronological indicator.

Notes 1

Vogel, Zwischen Wort und Bild, 15–18.

2

Gedichte, 11.

3

Tagebücher #67, 33 (Diaries, 26).

4

Gedichte, 10; there recorded without the period after “Füssen” and the bullet separating the two couplets. 5

Gedichte, 138.

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Werckmeister, O. K. “Klees Zeichnung ‘Vor dem Tempel. 1932.155.’ ” In Paul Klee im Rheinland, edited by Uta Gerlach-Laxner and Frank Günter Zehnder, 241–51. Cologne: DuMont / Bonn: Rheinisches Landesmuseum, 2003. ———. The Making of Paul Klee’s Career, 1914–1920. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989. ———. “Ob ich je eine Pallas hervorbringe?!” / “Will I Ever Bring Forth a Pallas?!” In Paul Klee: In der Maske des Mythos, ed. Pamela Kort, 136–59. Cologne: DuMont, 1999. White, Erdmute Wenzel. The Magic Bishop: Hugo Ball, Dada Poet. Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1998. Willett, John. Caspar Neher, Brecht’s Designer. London: Methuen, 1986. Wingler, Hans M. The Bauhaus: Weimar, Dessau, Berlin, Chicago. Edited by Joseph Stein, translated by Wolfgang Jabs and Basil Gilbert. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969. ———. Das Bauhaus, 1919–1933: Weimar, Dessau, Berlin. Bramsche: Gebr. Rasch, 1962. Worringer, Wilhelm. Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style. Translated by Michael Bullock. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1997. Wyman, Sarah. “The Poem in the Painting: Roman Jakobson and the Pictorial Language of Paul Klee.” Word & Image 20 (2004): 138–54. Zahn, Leopold. Paul Klee: Leben — Werk — Geist. Potsdam: G. Kiepenheuer, 1920. Zbikowski, Dörte. Geheimnisvolle Zeichen: Fremde Schriften in der Malerei des 20. Jahrhunderts. Göttingen: Cuvillier, 1996. Zenker, Helmut. Spottbuch: Geschichten, Gedichte, visuelle Texte, Artikel, Beleidigungen, Lieder, Satiren u. a. (1967–1990). Vienna: Cabal, 1990.

Index abstract expressionism. See expressionism abstraction, 4–5, 7, 38, 44, 55, 67, 69, 72, 76, 95, 97, 100, 103, 106, 114, 125, 128–29, 133–37, 146–47, 155–56, 161–63, 165, 168, 172, 174–76, 178–79, 180 n. 24, 188; and modern art, 7–8, 51, 66, 76, 93, 124, 188; pictorial, 8, 10, 66, 69, 100, 114, 134–35, 176; visual, 10, 41, 53, 57, 68, 81, 112, 156, 163–65, 168–70, 173, 179, 188. See also Klee, Paul, creative work acrostic. See poetry allegory, 83, 94, 98–99, 136 alliteration. See poetry allusion, 27, 56, 71, 75–76, 86, 98, 140, 142 Altmann, Roberto, 186 anagram. See poetry Anger, Jenny, 119 n. 53, 149 nn. 13, 21 animal imagery, 25, 84–85, 87 aphorism, 13, 32, 71, 76, 193 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 41, 104; as critic, 7, 66, 69, 95, 100; as poet, 2, 79, 104 Apollinaire, Guillaume, works by: Bestiary or Parade of Orpheus (Le Bestiaire ou, Cortège d’Orphée), 82–83, 85–87; Calligrammes, 79; “Die moderne Malerei” (“La Peinture moderne”), 7–8, 104; “It’s Raining” (“Il Pleut”), 41, 61 n. 72; “Ocean-Letter” (“Lettre-Océan”), 41, 61 n. 71; “The Bouquet” (“Le Bouquet”), 185–86; “The Octopus”

(“Le Poulpe”), 83; “The Windows” (“Les Fenêtres”), 104–5 Aragon, Louis, 3 architectural imagery, 69, 76–79, 101–2, 104–6, 125, 127–28, 130, 133–34, 140, 143, 146 Aristotle, 6, 89 n. 27 Arp, Hans (Jean), 3–4, 29, 185 Arp, Hans (Jean), works by: “Second Hand” (“Sekundenzeiger”), 29–30; The Cloud Pump (Die Wolkenpumpe), 4 artist’s book (livre d’artiste), 82–83, 165, 169–70, 179–80 n. 5 assonance. See poetry automatism, 154–55, 163–64 avant-garde, 2, 41, 125, 136, 147 Balázs, Béla, 141–42 Ball, Hugo, 29, 53–55, 64 n. 99, 99; as author of Flight out of Time (Die Flucht aus der Zeit), 110 ballad form. See poetry Bartók, Béla, 141, 151 n. 48; as composer of Bluebeard’s Castle, 140–43, 147 Baudelaire, Charles, 7 Bauhaus, 5–6, 8, 11, 22, 47, 53, 77, 81, 106, 122, 124, 126–29, 133–34, 137, 146, 154 Bauschatz, Paul, 13, 18 n. 55, 61n. 57 Becher, Johannes R., 14 n. 9, 99 Benjamin, Walter, 169 Benn, Gottfried, 2–3, 14 n. 9; as author of The Morgue and Other Poems (Morgue, und andere Gedichte), 36

214




INDEX

bestiary, 82–83, 85–86, 155 Bill, Max, 187–88, 189–90 n. 17 Blake, William, 48, 50; as author and illustrator of Songs of Innocence and of Experience, 48–49 Blechen, Carl, 94; as painter of Gallows Hill under Storm Clouds (Galgenberg bei Gewitterstimmung), 97–98 Bloesch, Hans, 18 n. 54, 22, 57, 192 Bonfand, Alain, 63 n. 95 Borges, Jorge Luis, 176 bouts-rimés. See poetry Brecht, Bertolt, 143–48; and epic opera, 143–44, 147–48 Brecht, Bertolt, works by: Manual of Piety (Die Hauspostille), 143; The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny), 143–48; The Threepenny Opera (Die Dreigroschenoper), 144–45 Breton, André, 3, 100, 163, 177–79, 184 n. 77, 186 Bridgwater, Patrick, 67, 88 n. 10, 157–58 Bruegel, Pieter, 98 Büchner, Georg, as author of Danton’s Death (Dantons Tod), 26–27, 192 Cahiers d’art, 11, 165, 177–78 calligramme. See poetry calligraphy, 50, 53, 164, 172 Campos, Augusto and Haroldo de, 187 caricature, 25, 70 Carrà, Carlo, 125 Carus, Carl Gustav, 94–95 Chagall, Marc, 125 Chappell, Fred, 59 n. 37, 60 nn. 38, 40, 63 n. 93 Chaves, Jonathan, 50, 63 n. 91 Chick, Jean, 158 Citroen, Karel, 64 n. 105

Cocteau, Jean, 56 collage, 38, 42, 104–5, 111 concrete poetry. See poetry conversation poem, 104, 186 couplet. See poetry Court de Gébelin, Antoine, as author of Histoire naturelle de la parole, 100 Cramer, Florian, 190 n. 21 crossword puzzles, 173 cubism, 42, 52, 63 n. 95, 77, 87, 111, 124–25, 174 cubists. See cubism dada, 2–3, 29–30, 53–55, 63 n. 98, 78, 85, 126, 149 n. 17, 174, 187 dadaists. See dada Dahl, Johann Christian, 94 Dahlhaus, Carl, 141 Dalí, Salvador, 177 Dante Alighieri, 82 Darwin, Charles, 86 Debussy, Claude, 144 Debussy, Claude, works by: La Cathédrale engloutie, 76; Pelléas et Mélisande, 137–39, 151 n. 46 Delacroix, Eugène, 7 Delaunay, Robert, 100, 102, 104–5, 117 nn. 33, 35, 125, 155; as author of “La Lumière” (“Über das Licht”), 3, 7, 34, 101, 104; Window paintings, 101–2, 104 Delaunay, Sonia, 104 Dencker, Klaus Peter, 188, 191 Der Blaue Reiter (movement), 5 Der Blaue Reiter (periodical), 7 Der Sturm, 2–3, 5, 7, 11, 27, 34–35, 66, 104, 125–26 Desnos, Robert, 163 Diderot, Denis, 6–7 Die Aktion, 11, 66, 68, 131 Die Alpen, 114, 120 n. 79 Die Brücke, 103 Dix, Otto, 145 dual practitioners, 4, 9, 13, 34, 37

INDEX

Duchamp, Marcel, 111 Dufy, Raoul, 83, 86, 92 n. 56 Eichendorff, Joseph von, 31, 120 n. 79 Eichendorff, Joseph von, works by: “Evening” (“Der Abend”), 31; “Night Magic” (“Nachtzauber”), 114 ellipse. See poetry Eluard, Paul, 3, 169 epic. See poetry epigram. See poetry Ernst, Max, 143, 151 n. 55, 177, 186 experimental poetry. See poetry expressionism, 27–28, 34–35, 45, 154; abstract, 186–87, 188; German, 2–3, 34–37, 40, 68, 157 exquisite corpses, 164–65 Feininger, Lyonel, 133; as maker of Cathedral, 77–78, 90 n. 42, 133 Fernow, Karl Ludwig, 94 Feuerbach, Anselm, 115 n. 11 First World War, 66–67, 170 Flechtheim, Alfred, 145, 170 fragment, 1, 20, 30–32, 35, 42, 44, 69, 74–75, 80, 82, 86, 105, 112, 164, 166, 171–74, 177, 179, 186–87, 192–93 Franciscono, Marcel, 87 n. 2 free verse. See poetry Frey, Stefan, 58 n. 16, 182 n. 46 Friedrich, Caspar David, 94, 98–99, 116 n. 11; as painter of Cross in the Mountains (Das Kreuz im Gebirge), 94 futurism, 13, 38, 129 futurists. See futurism Garnett, Richard, 48 Geelhaar, Christian, 57 n. 2, 108 George, Stefan, 23, 58 n. 14 German expressionism. See expressionism




215

German Romanticism. See Romanticism Giedion-Welcker, Carola, 20, 146, 191 Glaesemer, Jürgen, 22, 58 n. 11, 149 n. 21 Gluck, Christoph Willibald, 106 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 22, 58 n. 10, 98; and the “Urpflanze,” 74, 89 n. 26 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, works by: Italian Journey (Italienische Reise), 89 n. 26; “The Fate of Handwriting” (“Schicksal der Handschrift”), 174; “The Fate of Printing” (“Schicksal der Druckschrift”), 174 Gogh, Vincent van, 157–58, 180 n. 12 Goltz, Hans, 125–26 Goya, Francisco de, 88 n. 10 grid, 46–47, 49–50, 55, 123–25, 128, 134, 140, 172, 186 Grohmann, Will, 106, 108, 124 Gropius, Walter, 77, 91 n. 43, 122, 127–28, 149 n. 18 Grosz, George, 9, 34, 145, 185 Grosz, George, works by: “Berlin 1917,” 75; “From the Songs” (“Aus den Gesängen”), 34; John, the Woman Killer (John, Der Frauenmörder), 74–75 Haftmann, Werner, 106 handwriting. See writing Hardenberg, Friedrich von. See Novalis Haring, Keith, 13 Hausenstein, Wilhelm, 9, 17 n. 48, 65–66, 87 n. 3 Hausmann, Raoul, 53 Heilmann, Hans, 50, 63 n. 89 Heine, Heinrich, 22, 58 n. 11, 98; as author of Book of Songs (Buch der Lieder), 23 Helmholtz, Hermann von, 47

216




INDEX

Henry, Sara Lynn, 81, 91 n. 51 Hesse, Hermann, 9, 102–3, 118 n. 37 Hesse, Hermann, works by: Poems of the Painter (Gedichte des Malers), 103; The Journey to the East (Die Morgenlandfahrt), 103 Heym, Georg, 157, 161, 179–80 n. 5 Heym, Georg, works by: “The War” (“Der Krieg”), 67–68; “Winter” (“Der Winter”), 157–58, 161 Hildebrand, Adolf von, 95 Hindemith, Paul, 143 Hitler, Adolf, 146 Hodler, Ferdinand, 157–58 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 22, 58 n. 10 Hollo, Anselm, 191 Homer, 71 Hopfengart, Christine, 18 n. 48 Horace, 73, 93 Horace, works by: Ars Poetica, 2, 6, 10, 71–72; Satires, 88 n. 16 Houédard, Dom Sylvester, 188, 189 n. 14 Hubert, Renée Riese, 13 Huelsenbeck, Richard, 3, 53, 64 n. 98 Hugo, Victor, 172 Hutcheon, Linda, 98–99 hypogram. See poetry illustration, 4, 41, 45, 69, 72, 80–82, 86, 99, 164, 185; book, 48–49, 82–83, 165, 167–69. See also artist’s book imitation, 6–8, 10, 66, 95, 98, 146 irony, 2, 23, 34, 36, 52, 99, 113, 128 Isou, Isidore, 186 Jakobson, Roman, 12–13, 18 n. 53 Janco, Marcel, 3 Janschka, Fritz, 59 n. 31, 62 n. 78, 117 n. 28, 118 n. 39 Jollos, Waldemar, 3 Jordan, Jim, 63 n. 95

Kahlo, Frida, 152 n. 56 Kahnweiler, Daniel-Henry, 170 Kandinsky, Wassily, 4–5, 116 n. 17, 125–26, 155 Kandinsky, Wassily, works by: Each for Itself (Chacun pour soi), 177; “On the Problem of Form” (“Über die Formfrage”), 7; On the Spiritual in Art (Über das Geistige in der Kunst), 95; Sounds (Klänge), 4, 165, 181 n. 35 Kersten, Wolfgang, 39, 57 n. 3, 60 n. 47, 117 n. 36 Khlebnikov, Velimir, 56, 129 Kirchner, Ernst Ludwig, 150 n. 32, 179–80 n. 5 Klee, Felix, 20, 62 n. 75, 151 n. 46, 151 n. 48 Klee, Lily, 3, 11, 20, 45, 112–13, 120 n. 77, 131–32, 140 Klee, Paul, biography: affinity for poetry of Morgenstern, 23–29, 42, 59 n. 21, 85, 99 editing of Diaries, 4, 20, 31–32, 37–39, 52 exhibitions, 3, 145, 169, 181 n. 37 exile from Germany, 82, 113, 170 gallery affiliations, 3, 27, 34, 145, 170 as musician, 1, 134–35 relationships to: Arp, 4; Bloesch, 18 n. 54, 22, 57, 192; Delaunay, 3, 34, 101–2; Kandinsky, 4–5; Marc, 34, 66, 75–76; Miró, 5–6, 185; Rilke, 107–8; Schwitters, 5, 55, 78–79, 125–30 studies, 1, 22, 31, 81, 93, 112, 169 teaching: at the Bauhaus, 5–6, 8, 11, 22, 47, 53, 77–78, 81, 86, 106, 122, 126, 129, 133–34, 137, 146, 154; at the Düsseldorf Academy, 6, 8 travels, 67–68, 96–98, 101, 103, 113, 122, 125, 183 n. 63

INDEX

wartime experiences, 45, 52, 66, 70–71, 75, 100, 107, 131–33 years in: Bern, 1, 11, 23, 82; Munich, 1, 5, 23, 48, 93, 107, 114, 126, 135 Klee, Paul, creative work: composing by cutting and editing, 11, 31–32, 35, 38–39, 42, 57 n. 2, 75, 105, 124–25, 148 n. 10, 186 developing a pictorial script, 2, 10, 57, 100, 148, 154–58, 160–62, 165, 170–76, 178–79, 186 imagery: animals, 25, 35–36, 87, 194; architectural, 76–77, 102, 106, 125, 128, 130, 133–34, 140, 143, 146, 154; arrows, 72, 137, 145–47; birds, 33, 60 n. 47, 73; celestial, 25, 33, 74, 194; creation, 72–76; flight, 40, 76, 81–82; landscape, 32–33, 45, 65, 73–75, 81, 93, 95–100, 102–6, 108–10, 112–15, 146, 157, 161–62, 168, 172; trees, 112, 160–61, 172, 176; war, 66–70; windows, 100–102, 105–6, 125 line endings, 30–32, 35, 39, 52, 57, 61 n. 57, 193 pedagogical notes, 24, 55, 123, 128, 154, 168 play, 2, 11, 23, 27, 29, 31, 43, 126, 135, 137 poems placed in: pictorial settings, 11, 20–21, 39–57, 66, 155, 163–64, 170, 175–76, 179, 193–94; textual spaces, 11, 20–29, 32–36, 85, 155, 179, 192, 194 processes, creative and technical, 4–5, 32, 48, 52, 72, 74, 86–87, 100, 109–12, 125, 129–30, 133, 139, 147–48, 159, 170–72, 175–76, 185, 188 titles, 2, 12, 20, 32, 34, 52–53, 72, 84, 86, 106, 112, 138,




217

160, 163, 168–69, 173, 176, 192 use of: abstraction, 5, 8, 44, 51, 53, 55, 57, 66–69, 72, 74, 76, 81, 97, 106, 114, 124–25, 128–29, 133–37, 146, 156, 161–65, 168–70, 172–76, 178–79, 180 n. 24; color, 42–43, 45–48, 50, 74, 78, 98, 105, 108, 112–14, 129–30, 133, 140, 142, 146, 158–59, 161; grids, 46–47, 49–50, 55, 124–25, 134, 140, 172, 186; letters in visual images, 10, 33, 41–42, 53–55, 99–100, 112, 125, 168, 170–71, 173, 186; linear patterns, 69, 106–7, 109–10, 124, 133–34, 137, 147; musical analogies, 106, 123, 129, 134–39, 146–48, 158, 187; newspaper, 111–13, 171–74, 188; poetic devices in visual images, 9–11, 41, 44, 46, 49, 52, 56, 67, 69, 80–81, 100, 105, 108–10, 114, 125, 128, 134, 158–59, 161, 165–66, 173–74, 176, 179, 185–86 Klee, Paul, poems by: “1/1000,” 28–29 “Alle alle hatt ich gern” (“All, I loved all of it”), 33 “Als verstummte Nachtigall” (“As a silenced nightingale”), 33, 60 n. 47 “Der Wolf spricht” (“The wolf speaks”), 35–36, 61 n. 58, 129 “Die Ewigkeit,” (“Eternity”), 92 n. 71 “Die Musik ist für mich” (“Music is for me”), 193 “Du still allein” (“Thee, calm and alone”), 51–52 “Einst dem Grau der Nacht enttaucht” (“Once emerged from the gray of night”), 45–47, 50, 154, 169

218




INDEX

Klee, Paul, poems by (continued): “Einst werd ich liegen im Nirgend” (“Someday I’ll lie nowhere”), 25 “Elephantastisch” (“Elephantastic”), 85–87 “Emilie,” 43 “Esel” (“Donkey”), 25 “Es war mal was” (“It once was such”), 28 “(helft bauen)” [“(help build)”], 32, 105 “Herr Abel und Verwandte” (“Abel and His Brothers”), 30, 173 “In einem Zimmer gefangen” (“Caught in a room”), 41 “In später Stunde sitze ich” (“The hour grows late, I sit alone”), 21–22 “Mein Stern ging auf” (“My star rose”), 194 “Motto,” 26–27, 59 n. 25 “Nun hat dich genommen der Tod” (“Now Death has taken thee”), 22–23 “Rach [sic] und Degen” (“Shoof and rowers”), 28, 59 n. 27 “Was artet einsam und allein?” (“What thrives alone, just let it be?”), 33 “Weh mir unter dem Sturmwind” (“Woe is me in the gale wind”), 40, 82 “weil ich ging” (“as I walked”), 35 “Weil ich kam erschlossen sich Blüten” (“Because I came, blossoms opened”), 32–33, 35, 60 n. 47, 76 “wo haust im Winter mein Fuchs?” (“where does my fox dwell in winter?”), 194 “Zurufe” (“Cheers”), 34 Klee, Paul, visual images by: A 1 Lower Stockhornsee (Unterer Stockhornsee), 103–4

A 2 Upper Stockhornsee (Oberer Stockhornsee), 103–4 A Garden for Orpheus, 106–10, 118 n. 51 ab ovo, 2, 10, 71–74, 76, 88 n. 16, 89 nn. 22, 23 Abstract Script (Abstracte Schrift), 163–64, 180 n. 25 Aged Phoenix, 86 Album Leaf (Albumblatt), 162–67, 169–70, 179, 193 Alphabet I, 111, 120 n. 68, 172, 174–75 Alphabet II, 111, 120 n. 68, 172, 175 Alphabet AIOEK, 54–57, 155, 170, 179, 186, 194 Alphabet WE, 55–57, 64 n. 104, 179, 194 Als ich Rekrut war (see When I Was a Recruit) An Angel Serves a Small Breakfast, 25 Anfang eines Gedichtes (see Beginning of a Poem) Ansicht der schwer bedrohten Stadt Pinz (see View of the Severely Threatened City of Pinz) Ansicht eines Berg-Heiligtums (see View of a Mountain Sanctuary) Ausschreitende Figur (see Striding Figure) B. (Delicate Landscape) [B. (zarte Landschaft)], 81, 91 n. 49 Beginning of a Poem, 55–56, 64 n. 104, 179, 194 Bericht über Vorgänge in Dui (see Report on Events at Dui) Betroffene Stadt (see Stricken City) Betroffener Ort (see Stricken Place) Blick auf einen Platz (see View onto a Square) Blumenmythos (see Flower Myth) C for Schwitters (C für Schwitters), 126 Cathedral, 76–82, 130

INDEX

Cathedrals, 130, 132–34, 140, 146, 154 Classical Garden, 106, 118 n. 50 Composition with Windows, 102, 117 n. 35, 118 n. 36 Curtain, 124, 149 n. 13 D. Krieg schreitet üb. e. Ortschaft (see The War Strides over a Village) Death for the Idea, 62 n. 79, 88 n. 9 Der Inferner Park (see The Infernal Park) Der Künstler (Dichtermaler) (see The Artist [Poet/Painter]) Der Luftballon (see The Balloon) Der Tod für die Idee (see Death for the Idea) Der Zeichner am Fenster (see The Draughtsman at the Window) Diagrams illustrating structural rhythms, 123–24, 173, 188 Die Gehängten (see The Hanged Ones) Dogmatic Composition (Dogmatische Komposition), 90 n. 38 E, 41 Éhatévauih, 53–55, 164, 193 Ein Garten für Orpheus (see A Garden for Orpheus) Ein Genius serviert e. kl. Frühstück (see An Angel Serves a Small Breakfast) Einst dem Grau der Nacht enttaucht (see Once Emerged from the Gray of Night) Emilie, 42–46, 51, 193 Eternity for Little People (Ewigkeit für kleine Leute), 86, 92 n. 7, 179, 194 Fall, 40–42, 193 Felsentempel (see Rock Cut Temple) Fenster im Garten (see Window in the Garden) Fenster u. Palmen (see Window and Palms)




219

Fensterausblick (see View from a Window) Fensteraussicht der elterlichen Wohnung in Bern (see View from a Window of My Parents’ Home in Bern) Flower Myth, 73–76, 89 nn. 24, 26, 125 Gallows Humor (Galgenhumor), 99, 117 n. 26 Gate in the Garden, 110, 119 n. 64 Gedenkblatt (an Gersthofen) (see Memorial Sheet [of Gersthofen]) Gedicht in Bilderschrift (see Poem in Pictorial Script) Gepflegter Waldweg, Waldegg b. Bern (see Well Tended Forest Path, Waldegg near Bern) Glockentönin Bim (see Lady Bell-Tone Bim) Greiser Phönix (see Aged Phoenix) Growth Is Stirring, 170–76, 178, 188 Houses on the Outskirts (Häuser an der Peripherie), 96, 116 n. 19 Inscription (Inschrift), 186, 189 n. 7 Inscription in Clouds (Inschrift in Wolken), 54, 64 n. 99 Insula Dulcamara, 111–12, 120 n. 68 Inventions, 65, 86, 88 n. 8 Junge Pflanzung (see Tree Nursery) Karge Worte des Sparsamen (see Scanty Words of the Thrifty Man) Kathedrale (see Cathedral) Kathedralen (see Cathedrals) Klassischer Garten (see Classical Garden) Komposition mit Fenstern (see Composition with Windows) Lady Bell-Tone Bim, 24, 26 Landscape with Gallows (Landschaft m. d. Galgen), 96–100, 112, 159, 170

220




INDEX

Klee, Paul, visual images by (continued): Long Hair and Soulful (Langes Haar und Seelisches), 137–39 Memorial Sheet (of Gersthofen), 51–52, 193 Mit d. Luft Ballon (see With the Balloon) Mural, 125–30, 133, 140, 146, 154, 161 Once Emerged from the Gray of Night, 44–51, 55, 62 n. 75, 124, 154, 193 Opus One, 86, 88 n. 8 (see also Inventions) ORCHS, as Relative (ORCHS als Anverwandter), 84, 86–87 Ovidian (Ovidisch), 86 Palace (Palast), 140–43, 146, 152 n. 56, 159 Park N, 167–70, 176 Park Near Lu (Park bei Lu), 110–14, 170, 181 n. 41 Persian Nightingales (Persische Nachtigallen), 33, 60 n. 47 Poem in Pictorial Script, 175–79, 183 nn. 61, 63, 188 Red Balloon, 81, 91 n. 49 Red Church and White Panel, 96, 116 n. 19 Red Urchs, 91 n. 55 Reflecting Window, 102, 118 n. 36 Report on Events at Dui, 163, 180 n. 25 Rhythm of the Windows (Rhythmus der Fenster), 102, 105, 118 n. 36 River Spirit, 135–37 Rock Cut Temple, 110, 119 n. 64 Rote Kirche u. weisse Tafel (see Red Church and White Panel) Roter Ballon (see Red Balloon) Roturchs (see Red Urchs) Ruins of Oi (Ruinen von Oi), 106, 118 n. 50 Scanty Words of the Thrifty Man, 92 n. 56

Schösslinge (see Shoots) Script-Architectural (SchriftArchitectonisch), 149 n. 19 Seventeen Mad, 165, 181 n. 34 Shoots, 160, 180 n. 17 Siebzehn irr (see Seventeen Mad) Signs on Rocks, 176, 183 n. 60 Sketches illustrating structural rhythms, 24 Spiegelndes Fenster (see Reflecting Window) Strasse unter Bäumen (see TreeLined Street, Georgenschweige) Stricken City, 143–48, 153 n. 68 Stricken Place, 145–46, 152 nn. 62, 63 Striding Figure, 110 Stromgeist (see River Spirit) Structural I, 128, 149 n. 20 Structural II, 128, 149 n. 20 Structural Composition (Structurale Komposition), 128, 149 n. 20 Sturz (see Fall) Temple of Bj. (Tempel von Bj.), 106, 118 n. 50 The Artist (Poet/Painter), 1–2 The Balloon, 81, 91 n. 49 The Draughtsman at the Window, 101, 118 n. 36 The Hanged Ones, 99, 117 n. 26 The Infernal Park, 82, 91 n. 55, 108 The War Strides over a Village, 67 Tor im Garten (see Gate in the Garden) Tree Nursery, 156–62, 170, 175–76, 179 n. 4, 180 n. 19 Tree-Lined Street, Georgenschweige, 96, 116 n. 19 URCHS drawings, 83–84, 86–87, 91 n. 55, 92 nn. 61,69 View from a Window, 102–6, 117 n. 36, 125 View from a Window of My Parents’ Home in Bern, 5, 15 n. 22

INDEX

View of a Mountain Sanctuary, 106, 118 n. 50 View of the Severely Threatened City of Pinz, 68–70, 145, 152 n. 63 View onto a Square, 101, 118 n. 36 Vigilant Angel (Wachsamer Engel), 25 Vorhang (see Curtain) Wachstum regt sich (see Growth Is Stirring) Wandbild (see Mural) Well Tended Forest Path, Waldegg near Bern, 96, 116 n. 19 When I Was a Recruit, 70 Window and Palms, 101–2, 118 n. 36 Window in the Garden, 102, 118 n. 36 With the Balloon, 81, 91 n. 49 Woe Is Me in the Gale Wind, 40–42, 82, 193 Zeichen auf Felsen (see Signs on Rocks) Klee, Paul, writings by: “Creative Credo” (“Schöpferische Konfession”), 8, 17 n. 43, 76, 100, 115 Diaries (Tagebücher), 1–2, 4, 9, 11, 20, 22–23, 30–31, 35, 37–39, 48, 52, 57 n. 2, 65, 69, 71–72, 74, 81, 130–32, 160, 191–93 Gedichte, 20–21, 35, 191–94 notebook of “Geduchte,” 2, 11, 20, 25, 28, 32–35, 39, 44, 48, 57 n. 3, 58 n. 17, 191, 193–94 “On Modern Art” (“Über die moderne Kunst”), 81, 172 Pedagogical Sketchbook (Pädagogisches Skizzenbuch), 137 Kleist, Heinrich von, 94 Klemm, Wilhelm, 68–69 Klimt, Gustav, 96 Klinger, Friedrich Maximilian, 27 Knirr, Heinrich, 87 n. 2, 93–94




221

Kokoschka, Oskar, 126 Kruchonykh, Alexei, 129 Kubin, Alfred, 88 n. 10 La Révolution surréaliste, 3, 155, 163–65 Lamorisse, Albert, 81 Lanchner, Carolyn, 182 n. 46 landscape imagery, 32–33, 73–76, 95–115, 146, 148, 157–58, 161–62, 168, 172 Larisch, Rudolf von, 154, 171 Lasker-Schüler, Else, 9, 33–34 Lasker-Schüler, Else, works by: “But Your Brows Are a Storm” (“Aber deine Brauen sind Unwetter”), 33; “Flight from the World” (“Weltflucht”), 41 Leafstedt, Carl, 151 n. 50 Lee, Rensselaer, 6, 18 n. 50 Leiris, Michel, 186 Leonardo da Vinci, 101, 117 n. 33 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 10, 17 n. 45, 37; as author of Laocoön (Laokoon), 6–8 lettrists, 186 Lichtenstein, Alfred, 3, 69–70 Liebermann, Max, 115 n. 11 Luprecht, Mark, 92 n. 62 lyric poetry. See poetry Macke, August, 75, 103 Maeterlinck, Maurice, 137–38 Magritte, René, 100, 164 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 41 manuscripts, 20–21, 34, 36, 38, 42, 48, 82, 155, 164, 168–69, 172, 175, 188, 191–92; illuminated, 45, 48–49, 165, 168 Marc, Franz, 34, 59 n. 26, 66, 75–76 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 38, 186 Menzel, Adolph, 115 n. 11 metaphor, 8, 33, 42, 69, 72–74, 81, 83, 86–87, 100, 110, 129, 148, 174, 176

222




INDEX

meter. See poetry metonym, 81, 101 Michaux, Henri, 186 Michelet, Jules, 74 Miró, Joan, 4–6, 111, 184 n. 74, 185; lithographs for The Lizard with the Golden Feathers (Le Lézard aux plumes d’or), 165–67 modernism, 2, 4, 9–10, 13, 30, 32, 41, 45, 50–52, 54, 57, 66, 72–73, 76, 79, 82, 93, 95, 97–98, 100, 110–11, 115, 124, 154–55, 157, 161, 163, 165, 169, 173–75, 185, 188 modernists. See modernism Moilliet, Louis, 3, 103, 118 n. 37 Molzahn, Johannes, 125 Mondrian, Piet, 155 Montgolfier, Jacques-Étienne and Joseph-Michel, 80–82, 91 n. 48 Morgenstern, Christian, 23, 28–29, 42, 85, 99 Morgenstern, Christian, works by: “Bim, Bam, Bum,” 24, 27; “Das grosse Lalula,” 29; “Fish’s Night Song” (“Fisches Nachtgesang”), 24–25; Gallows Songs (Galgenlieder), 23, 25, 59 n. 21, 99; “Jingle of the Gallows Brothers” (“Bundeslied der Galgenbrüder), 46; “Korf’s Clock” (“Die Korfsche Uhr”), 30; “Nein!,” 26, 59 n. 21; “New Creations Proposed to Mother Nature” (“Neue Bildungen, der Natur vorgeschlagen”), 85; “Noon News” (“Die Mittagzeitung), 24; Palma Kunkel, 23; Palmström, 23; “Scholastic Conundrum” (“Spitzfindiges”), 26; “The Does’ Prayer” (“Das Gebet”), 29; “The Moon” (“Der Mond”), 99–100; “The Snail’s Monologue” (“Gespräch einer Hausschnecke

mit sich selbst”), 28; “The Stone Ox” (“Der Steinochs”), 85; “The Two Donkeys” (“Die beiden Esel”), 25 Morise, Max, 163 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 135 Muche, Georg, 128, 149 n. 19 musical notation, 129, 135–37, 146 mythology, 71, 85–87, 108, 136 narrative, 72, 85, 135–36, 146, 148, 156, 168 Neher, Caspar, 143–45, 147 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 75, 90 n. 30; as author of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Also Sprach Zarathustra), 36, 61 n. 59 Noigandres poets, 187 nonsense verse. See poetry Novalis, as author of Heinrich von Ofterdingen, 74 object poem, 178–79, 184 n. 77 Okuda, Osamu, 39, 60 n. 47, 120 n. 69 opera, 106, 124, 135–45, 146–48 Orban, Clara, 13, 184 n. 77 Ovid, 74; as author of the Metamorphoses, 85–87, 92 n. 69 palimpsest, 110–14 parallelism, 40, 109, 157 parody, 31, 52, 98–99, 117 n. 27 pattern poetry. See poetry Pechstein, Max, 103 Péret, Benjamin, 165 Picasso, Pablo, 83–84 Piccard, Auguste, 80 pictographs, 99–100, 106, 124–25, 129, 133, 143, 156, 160 Pignatari, Décio, 187 poem-painting, 45, 50–51, 63 n. 91 poet/painter, 1–2, 4, 9, 11, 13, 33–34, 50, 185 poetic painting, 6–8, 65–66, 95, 97, 100, 104

INDEX

poetry: categories of: epic, 2; lyric, 23, 28, 37, 98, 113–14 devices of: acrostic, 56, 173; alliteration, 43, 78, 158; anagram, 56–57; assonance, 43, 46, 80; ellipse, 35, 42, 103, 109, 132; figures, 12, 27, 32–33, 72, 76, 80, 82, 86–87, 108–9, 139, 148, 172; hypogram, 56–57; meter, 23, 30, 36, 46, 123, 125, 128–29, 134; rhyme, 21, 23, 26, 28–32, 35–36, 43, 46, 52, 70, 80, 85, 99, 103, 109, 141, 161, 173, 192; rhythm, 32, 36, 44, 46, 50, 69, 106, 109, 125, 127, 134; stanza, 28, 33, 36, 38, 42, 49, 56, 67–69, 85, 109, 123, 134, 158, 161, 165; syntax, 29, 37, 52, 63 n. 93, 79, 104, 109–10, 132, 148, 161, 172–73, 176 forms of: ballad, 21, 99, 128, 188; epigram, 30–32, 39, 57; sonnet, 23, 109; sonnet sequence, 107–8 linear structures of: couplet, 32, 35, 103, 192; quatrain, 21, 52, 128, 157, 161, 165, 188 types of: bouts-rimés, 31, 60 n. 39; calligramme, 41, 61 n. 72, 79, 186; concrete poetry, 4, 179, 185, 187–88; experimental poetry, 2, 5, 11, 30, 35, 127, 150 n. 26, 173, 185, 187; free verse, 22, 40; nonsense verse, 42, 51; pattern poetry, 41, 185; programming-code poetry, 188–89, 190 n. 21; prose poetry, 41, 192–93; puzzle poetry, 56, 64 n. 106; shaped poetry, 2, 29, 41, 79, 134, 186 (see also pattern poetry); sound poetry, 2, 29, 53–55, 63 n. 98, 78, 149 n. 17; typographic




223

poetry, 186, 189 n. 3; visual poetry, 5, 155, 167, 173–75, 178–79, 185–86, 188–89 Pound, Ezra, 99, 117 n. 27 programming-code poetry. See poetry prose poetry. See poetry puzzle poetry. See poetry quatrain. See poetry Rainer, Arnulf, 111 Ramdohr, Friedrich, 94, 98 Redon, Odilon, 81 Reger, Max, 120 n. 79; as composer of A Romantic Suite (Eine romantische Suite), 113–14 Renaissance: art, 9, 13, 84, 110; poetry, 185; theory, 6, 74 Reynolds, Dee, 155, 161 rhyme. See poetry rhythm, 22, 106, 123–25, 128–30, 134–35, 142–43, 146–47, 155, 157, 160–62, 164–66, 168–69, 174, 188. See also poetry Rilke, Rainer Maria, 107, 119 nn. 56, 57 Rilke, Rainer Maria, works by: Book of Images (Buch der Bilder), 107; Duino Elegies (Duineser Elegien), 108; New Poetry (Neue Gedichte), 76, 108; Sonnets to Orpheus (Die Sonette an Orpheus), 107–9; The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge), 107 Rivera, Diego, 152 n. 56 Romanticism, 23, 81, 95, 97, 103, 108, 113–14, 121 n. 81, 141, 157–58; German, 27, 31, 40, 61 n. 67, 93–95, 98–99, 115 n. 5 Roskill, Mark, 149 n. 15 Runge, Philipp Otto, 99 satire, 52, 65, 69 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 56

224




INDEX

Scheffer, Ary, 7 Schelling, Friedrich von, 93–94 Schiller, Friedrich von, 27 Schlegel, Friedrich von, 1 Schmidt-Rottluff, Karl, 103 Schoenberg, Arnold, 141 Schwitters, Kurt, 4–5, 53, 125, 129, 149 n. 15, 188; as artist, 77, 91 n. 43, 111, 125, 188; as critic, 5, 126; as poet, 2, 18 n. 55, 29–30, 149 n. 17, 186 Schwitters, Kurt, works by; “Cigars [elementary]” (“Cigarren [elementar]”), 29; “Doof,” 79; Merz, 126; “Merzbau,” 126; “Rain” (“Regen”), 61 n. 72; “Register [elementary]” (“Register [elementar]”), 55; “Simultaneous Poem” (“Simultangedicht / kaa gee dee”), 78–79; “Typographic Visual Poem” (“Gesetztes Bildgedicht”), 55; “Wall” (“Wand”), 127–30 Sema group, 159, 161–62, 176 Severini, Gino, 125 shaped poetry. See poetry Shortz, Will, 183 n. 55 simile, 6, 108, 172, 176 simultaneity, 54, 79, 101, 104–5, 129, 155 Solt, Mary Ellen, 188 sonnet form. See poetry sonnet sequence. See poetry sound poetry. See poetry space: graphic, 163, 166, 187; pictorial, 10, 79, 97, 109–10, 137, 158, 161–65, 171; textual, 11, 21, 50, 79, 159, 161–62, 165; and time, 8, 37, 41, 105–6, 110, 129, 137, 155, 159, 161, 187; typographic, 100, 171, 174–75 Spiller, Jürg, 15 n. 19, 62 n. 82 Stadler, Ernst, 131–32; as author of “On Crossing the Rhine Bridge at Cologne by Night” (“Fahrt ueber

die Coelner Rheinbruecke bei Nacht”), 131, 134 stanzas. See poetry Staudacher, Hans, 188, 189 n. 15 Stramm, August, 3, 29, 35, 37, 52, 60 n. 57, 193 Strauss, Richard, 141 structure, 29–30, 56, 113, 122, 129, 137, 141–42; architectonic, 11, 122–23, 128, 134; architectural, 52, 128, 154; compositional, 66, 148, 154, 156, 164–65, 173, 186; formal, 40, 115, 134, 139, 156; linear, 11, 37, 44, 46, 109, 114, 125, 133, 135, 154, 156, 159, 161, 172; pictorial, 142, 154, 161–62, 168; poetic, 36, 44, 49, 167, 178, 193; rhythmic, 22, 44, 114, 155, 161; spatial, 37, 68, 80, 98, 161, 185; stanzaic, 37, 46, 109, 192; typographic, 29, 37, 128; visual, 43–44, 46, 49, 193 Stuck, Franz von, 87 n. 2 Stumpf, Lily, 6, 57 n. 2, 58 n. 11, 65, 122, 192. See also Klee, Lily Sturm Gallery, 3, 27, 104, 125 Sturm und Drang, 27–28, 59 n. 22 surrealism, 2–4, 13, 14 n. 14, 154–55, 163–65, 177–78, 181 n. 37, 186 surrealists. See surrealism Swiss Moderne Bund, 3 syntax. See poetry Tanguy, Yves, 165 Tatar, Maria, 74, 90 n. 38 Temkin, Ann, 14 nn. 13, 14, 149 n. 15 tone poem, 114 Trakl, Georg, 62 n. 79; as author of “Music at Mirabell” (“Musik im Mirabell”), 46 typography, 24, 41, 128–29, 165 Tzara, Tristan, 3

INDEX

ut pictura poesis, 6–7, 10, 16 n. 31, 50–51, 72, 93, 136 Vaufrey, R., 178 Vaughan, William, 98 Verdi, Richard, 88 n. 16, 118 nn. 37, 38 Villon, François, 99; as author of The Testament (Le Testament), 56, 99 Vischer, Friedrich Theodor and Robert, 94 Vishny, Michele, 13 n. 1, 90 n. 33, 120 n. 77 visual poetry. See poetry Vogel, Marianne, 13, 14 n. 8, 18 n. 54, 20, 57 n. 3, 59 n. 32, 61 nn. 59, 67, 191–94 Wada, Sadao, 183 n. 63 Wagner, Richard, 135–38, 143, 150 n. 39 Wagner, Richard, works by: The Rhinegold (Das Rheingold), 135–37; The Ring of the Nibelung (Der Ring des Nibelungen), 135–36 Walden, Herwarth, 3, 27, 33–34, 59 n. 26, 125 war imagery, 66–70 Watts, Harriett, 13, 191




225

Weill, Kurt, 143–48 Weill, Kurt, works by: The Pledge (Die Bürgschaft), 144; The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny), 143–48; The Threepenny Opera (Die Dreigroschenoper), 144–45 Weimar Germany, 36, 143, 146 Werckmeister, O. K., 52, 57 n. 2, 58 n. 14, 90 n. 29, 92 n. 69 Weule, Karl, 170 White, Erdmute Wenzel, 64 n. 99 Wolfsohn, John, 157–58 word painting, 32, 45, 50–51, 68, 154, 157, 174 word pairs, 26–27, 31, 193 word square, 123, 173 wordplay, 5, 26, 28–29, 31, 43, 60 n. 53, 85, 103, 126, 173 Worringer, Wilhelm, 95, 116 nn. 16, 17 writing, 154, 156, 159, 162–66, 170–74, 176–77; handwriting, 41–42, 45–46, 48–49, 110, 163–64, 166, 168, 185; history of, 154, 159–60, 176–77 Zahn, Leopold, 9, 17 n. 48, 65–66, 87 n. 3, 88 n. 8, 93, 122 Zenker, Helmut, 188