“The great of the least of the big”
“Paul klee’s exploration of the works exhibited at the Tate Modern”
“”Klee gives the impression of being small and playful in everything he does,” writes Hugo Ball in Flight out of time, ”in kolossens age falls in love, he in the green leaf, a star, a butterfly’s wings …”. Paul Klee has been described as the smallest of modern art’s great masters, whose image-making, imagination is the closest to the child. In the 20th century Germany was seen as his ”small leaves” decorative, but too inconspicuous for the cultural public sphere. In the 30’s was said he as schizophrenic and degenerate.”
“the Exhibition at the Tate Modern want to tone down the magician Klee for the benefit of the systematic explorer of the properties of the image. It is time, and produktionsnyttan, which speak. We live again in ”kolossens era”. It is soft and dreamy, cleared away, so that the strong can grow stronger. It does not mean that there is a contradiction between a work and to dream. As a professor at the Bauhaus, described Klee as a monk, and his works are reminiscent of illuminated manuscripts. It is the caring solicitude for the picture’s entirety is the point, his response to the growing fascism.”
“the Exhibition ranges from 10 century when the Klee was close to the Der Blaue Reiter, to the last years of the exile in his childhood home, Bern. At the nazi seizure of power in 1933, he lost his professorship, and could no longer operate in Germany. Paintings Bewitched-petrified, and the Fear of 1934 testify to the passage of the moods. The year after he suffered a rheumatic illness that limited his job prospects, and led to his death in 1940.”
“A chronological hanging has been made possible by klee’s notebooks, in which each work was given a number which is also recorded in the picture’s lower edge. And what wealth that the exhibition offers! Each watercolor has been loaded with a helhetskraft, which surpasses what the other is capable of in a lifetime. Klee’s smallness is also reflected in the unhampered play with styles. Take Bildarkitektur red yellow blue (1924), which is part of a series of ”constructivist” färgharmonier. Denominations are carefully painted, but the lines wobbling to and fro. The picture becomes absurd, and thus, can be argued, is a true expression of his own situation.”
“Of Klee can be a motive to emerge as a consequence of a particular approach. As the Cloud (1926), where a heaven of sprejad watercolour accommodates a system of finely drawn lines, which depict the stylized movement of a cloud. The subject is a sign of the human capacity to dream, but the image could also be made to demonstrate the relationship between line and space in klee’s pedagogical system, or view on the possibilities of painting’s technical execution. The common denominator is the curiosity of those who want to learn.”
“In the 20th century did Klee use the black blade according to karbonpapprets principle. To the works from this time hear the Angelus Novus (1920), the figurehead of the history of the angel in Walter Benjamin’s parable about progress, disaster. Perhaps there is also an irony of the technical reproduction of these works, which establishes a distance to the image’s immediacy on several levels. Partly by a delay in relation to the original cartoon, partly by the fact that the eyes actually do not have seen it as the hand has drawn.”
“Klee drew a line against the nazi våldsregim, but the power of his images grow out of the joy of the creative impulse. The exhibition can naturally be seen as a concession to the policy that has made Tate to London’s most popular tourist destinations. But by placing the playfulness of the child on the site of the most valuable, offered an actual alternative to the cynicism and the contempt for the weak, which again has taken root in the culture.”
