Stop and Look: Paul Klee – Battle Scene from the Comic Opera The Seafarer 1923

I’ve been delighted by the work of Paul Klee since I was a schoolboy. You may say that his work is indeed school-boyish, indeed rather childish. He certainly made much of the idea that a painting or drawing can be a very simple, naïve-looking thing. But while I appreciated the apparent simplicity of his work I never mistook that for naivety, or simplicity of intention.

He was in fact both a highly accomplished draughtsman and a keenly analytical thinker on the subject of aesthetics. Some of his very early work would satisfy the most demanding academician. But even at the start, his imagination was bursting the bonds of orthodox pictorial language.

He was born in Switzerland, near Bern, the child of a Swiss mother and a German father, in the cultural context of late nineteenth-century European Symbolism, into which the first revolutionary notions of Modernism would shortly burst. What he derived from these was not so much a particular manner or theory of art – Expressionism, Cubism, Surrealism – but a sense of liberation; a license to draw and paint as he liked. This entailed abandoning academic disciplines, but certainly not an abandonment of intellectual rigour.

His parents were both very musical, his father a professional music teacher, and so music became a crucial component of his thinking. His innate musicality was perhaps the inspiration of his pictorial language, which always tended to the abstract, with a strong reliance on both colour and line. He is famous for having written of “taking a line for a walk”, and many of his pictures are really drawings, often with a comic theme, a caricature head, or an absurd fantasy partly mechanical and partly organic, as in his ‘Twittering machine’ of 1922, which is almost devoid of colour, only a few light washes enhancing a wiry and witty pen line. But they are often, and predominantly, memorable for their colour. Klee was a master colourist, as I think this picture wonderfully shows.

In 1920 he published his Creative Confession, or Credo, in which he pronounced: “Art does not reproduce the visible, but makes visible. By its very nature graphic art readily and justifiably leads one into abstraction. The spectral, fairy-like shapes of the imagination are brought to light and at the same time expressed with great precision.” It is the precision of Klee’s fantasy-world that impresses me particularly. ­­­­In this design for a comic opera, he brings together the precision of music, another medium with the power to concentrate ideas and feelings that otherwise elude us, with that of line and colour. We sense the imperceptible merging of representation with abstraction, the bodying-forth of an idea that is from the beginning a dream, an exploration beyond the immediately real.

Yet the image is not frivolous or vague: it is borne aloft on the wings of a beguiling wit, enhanced by the richness of its colour harmonies, so that a piece of theatrical décor becomes a poem of great suggestive beauty.