Paul Klee, Little Cosmos

By JOHN RUSSELL
Published: June 18, 1993

The exhibition of 77 paintings, drawings and prints by Paul Klee at the Guggenheim Museum SoHo has a magical presence. Though minute in relation to Klee's complete output of more than 9,000 works, it has a particular point of view and a specific provenance. For this and other reasons, it is irresistible but slanted (or the other way around).

The same could, of course, be said of every other Klee exhibition. His work speaks to us on a one-to-one, confidential basis. This is heightened by the fact that very often his pictures are so small that only one person at a time can stand in front of them. Our Klee is the only Klee, we think, and we don't like to have anyone else mess with him.

To be precise, everything in the present show comes from the Guggenheim's own holdings. Even before World War II, Solomon R. Guggenheim was buying very good Klees (above all, the wonderfully named "Dance, You Monster, to My Soft Song!" of 1922). The principal ingredient in the museum's holdings is, however, the 121 works that were acquired in 1947 from the estate of Karl Nierendorf.


Nierendorf had consistently championed Klee in this country after arriving here as a refugee from Germany in 1937 and setting up as a dealer in New York. By my count, more than 50 of the 77 works in the show are Nierendorf material and may be taken to represent his taste (or at any rate his stock). Insofar as he had a specific view of Paul Klee, it was one that stressed Klee's mastery of the drawn line that does not so much work in unison with color as take it on board as a cooperative lieutenant.

This was the Klee who began life as a master of monochrome and a printmaker who excelled with the precise, needled procedures that recur in earlier German printmaking. At the age of only 24, in 1903, Klee produced what is by now a classic statement about human behavior. The title says it all: "Two Gentlemen Bowing to One Another, Each Supposing the Other to Be in a Higher Position."

Klee knew perfectly well that he was very good at presenting the human comedy quite straight, on paper, and in textures that looked like iron-gray on gray. He could have done it forever, but his ambitions lay elsewhere. In fact, it embarrassed him that in 1911, when he first saw the work of the pioneer French colorist Robert Delaunay at the first Blue Rider group show in Munich, Germany, he was still locked into the dense, impacted, illustrational idiom of the etching called "Little Cosmos" (1914) at the Guggenheim.

As it happens, "Little Cosmos" lives up to its name and secretes within its few square inches an astonishing number of tiny and congested forms. But Klee wanted to be done with all that, and in 1912 he went to see Delaunay in Paris and saw his new work. From that experience he moved into oil on canvas and produced the "Flower Bed" of 1913, which is one of the quiet, slow, luxurious glories of the Guggenheim show.

What he did was to take each stalk, each leaf and each blossom in the flower bed, spread them out flat on the canvas and let the light have its way with them. There was no description, and no point at which the blue sky came in and the flowers responded to it. There was simply a rich, unhurrying and voluptuous expansion, with one form opening itself to another.

Klee did not concentrate on oil colors thereafter. Nor did he abandon the human comedy in favor of a liberated nature. But he did have, just round the corner, one more decisive experience. This was his journey to North Africa, in 1914, with two other painters, Auguste Macke and Louis Moilliet. It was in North Africa that light and color and well-chosen detail came together and fused in his work. It is a serious shortcoming of the Guggenheim show that nothing in it relates to this journey.

The show does, however, excel with works that are basically drawings by a genius who knew how to condense his perceptions. In opera, for instance, he adored the German repertory. His "Singer of Comic Opera" (1923) will give untold delight to anyone who knows what provincial opera houses were like at that time, and how hard the singers worked, and how they often fell short of the best but still kept their courage.

There are also a number of weighty key works that came into the collection more recently. Two at least of these were acquired during Thomas M. Messer's directorship. "In the Current Six Thresholds" (1929) and "New Harmony" (1936) are major paintings that subtly readjust the balance of a show that at times sells Klee a little short in terms of versatility.

There is also a masterpiece of 1919 called "Jumping Jack" that was bequeathed to the museum in 1991 by Hilde Thannhauser, the widow of Justin K. Thannhauser, one of the museum's greatest benefactors. Like the glorious "Fruitfulness" of 1937, this shows Klee at his ripest and most forthright, with line and color working together as one.

When Klee's Jack jumps high, we feel the spring of his feet and legs in our very bones. Looking at "Fruitfulness," we feel that the vegetable forms of nature have broken free of their roots in the earth and gone tumbling around on their own, wearing the colors of high summer as if they would never fade away and die.

Klee always had that gift for the portrayal of physical energy. Already in 1921 the "Runner at the Goal," which is in the present show, had precisely the dionysiac drive with which the first runner to breast the tape seems to throw all fatigue aside. The figure of No. 1 that bursts out all over his forehead is the very emblem of success on the track. This is his moment, and when we look closely at him, it is our moment, too.

It could be said against the show that the almost unbelievable outpouring of work that marked the last years of Klee's life -- 1,253 items in 1939 alone, for instance -- is very thinly covered. It should, however, be remembered that until the end of World War II these works, where known at all, were out of reach.

Klee in those years was a dying man, ousted from Germany and not yet given back his citizenship in Switzerland, the country of his birth. More than almost any other artist of his time, he knew how to allude in coded but legible form to the horrors of war and the systematized inhumanity of the Nazis. No one, in that context, was ever better or subtler than he.

But if late Klee is a whole other subject, and one not examined here in any depth, the show as a whole is an ornament to our summer.

The Paul Klee exhibition, made possible by a grant from the Swiss Bank Corporation, remains at the Guggenheim Museum SoHo, Broadway at Prince Street, through Sept. 19.