Klee
The Mind and Work of Paul Klee. By Werner Haftmann. (Faber and Faber, £1 10s.) IT is fourteen years since Klee died. Since then the Kunsthistorisch bulldozer has set itself with gathering momentum to pulverise, analyse and docket his work, to strip the man as bare as his own enigmatic personality might permit, and put him properly to rest among the great. Herr Cirohmann, who knew him well (his first article on Klee appeared thirty years ago), has surely brought the process to at least a temporary halt. His is likely to remain the standard work for some time to come—a volume of over 400 pages (with many hundreds of cross-references), with 473 repro- ductions (no fewer than forty of them in colour) which were first discussed with Klee himself and are here chronologically cata- logued, with sections covering the artist's life, work and teaching, a couple of indices and a very full bibliography. This will seem to some an awe-inspiringly cumbersome machine with which to snare one whom Nolde once called a `butterfly hovering in the stellar orbit.' But in our world it had to come, and could not have taken more authoritative form.
Klee was a very withdrawn man, almost a mystic, but no one has ever doubted but that he was also a very good man, of sweet disposition and almost superhuman integrity. To his students at the Bauhaus he was known as `the Heavenly Father.' In all his nearly 9,000 works (genius is almost always prolific), there is nothing„ save perhaps in his earliest etchings, which is coarse, or cruel, or ugly, or sour. Yet the infinite variety of his technique is matched only by the wealth of references in his work to every aspect of the known world. Elements from different levels—time, space, appearances, natural forces, sounds—were dissolved in Klee's eye, his imagination, or his unconscious memory, to be reborn as untranslatable visual poems, rich with half-defined allusions, or as microcosmic pictorial scores, to be read by the inner eye as a musical score is by the inner ear. He attempted systematically to attune himself to the laws of the cosmos as his intuition apprehended them, so that the act of creation might he repeated within himself, and his, images grow with that inner necessity that forms a crystal in nature.
This is fruitful ground for exploration and speculation of a kind beloved in Germany, and it is covered very fully in both these books. Inevitably, there is overlapping. Klee's life was not event- ful; the potent influences of music, poetry, and the orient upon his
art are discussed; the parallels with Goethe are drawn; his humour and his delight in things are made clear. I think it would be fair to say that neither volume changes our view of Klee in any way, though both amplify in some measure our understanding of the man and his work. Herr Haftmann in the smaller (fifty-seven reproductions, three of them in colour) begins, 'A house full of cats and music—such was the home of the painter Paul Klee,' and the artist's 'pictorial thinking' forms as it were the very medium through which his life is presented. Herr Grohmann begins, With or without reason, posterity often seizes upon the life of a'great painter and turns it into a romance,' struggles man- fully to reduce the whole massive cruvre to a system of classifiable groups (almost impossible and of questionable value since all his life Klee was using a multitude of different idioms simultaneously), and is particularly valuable for cleaning up a number of small but long-standing errors of fact, and of course for his illustrations.
Both books are marred by some small typographical and pro- duction errors. In Haftmann, for example, one plate is printed sideways and the tone values of another have been neatly trans- posed by thoughtless filtering in the photography. In Grohmann there are one or two irritating internal discrepancies in the titles and—in my copy—one of the otherwise excellent colour-plates is out of register. In general, however, this is a very handsome book, well designed and well printed.
51. II. MIDD1 ETON
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