‘Paul Klee: On Modern Art’

48 page manuscript book, written out in black Chinese ink with gouache illustrations on Zerkall paper, yellow Zerkall endpapers, bound in black Somerset card with a tan Khadi paper cover. Completed in 2019. Reproduced with permission from Faber & Faber.

I have made several pieces using this text, which forms the last part of a longer essay by Paul Klee, delivered as a lecture at the opening of an exhibition of his work in Jena during 1924. At this time he had already been teaching at the Bauhaus for 4 years, where his art theory was explicitly developed in support of his pedagogic approach.

While the essay attempts to articulate a rational basis for modern art to an audience perhaps unfamiliar with the idiom, it seems to me that Klee is also making a mystical claim that was part of his self-marketing as an artist who has a deeper insight into reality and who is able to see beyond immediate appearance: ‘And anyway, I do not wish to represent the man as he is, but only as he might be.’

It is for this reason I have included at the end of the piece one of my favourite quotations by Klee from Der Ararat of 1920: ‘On this side I cannot be grasped,/For I live as much/With the dead/As with those yet unborn./A little closer to creation than usual/And yet nowhere near close enough.’

I spent nearly 6 months writing out the whole of Klee’s essay, only to break my pen as I approached the final pages with the result that I could no longer match the script. I confess that I could not face starting again so wrote out the final section quickly in order to conclude the project!