Klee and the American Collector
At DCist, we have danced all around the Paul Klee show, Klee and America, at the Phillips Collection. Our classical music man Charles discussed Klee and Gunther Schuller, and we tempted you with the show here, here, and here. It’s finally time to turn a critical eye on Klee’s work itself.
Paul Klee could be one of history’s most schizophrenic painters. When he shows up, one might say, sober for work, does his aesthetic stretches, and carries his Jekyll palette, his paintings evoke the Kokopelli Chili Company logo (which looks something like this) or some alien hieroglyphics that unfold visually for specific, compelling reasons. But when Klee shows up with his Hyde brush, his work often emerges as dime-a-dozen, surrealist play, even cute and trivial.
But it's the venue here that might be the most interesting component of the show. According to the exhibit wall texts, Klee and America thought little of each other. Klee held no desire to visit America, even as the Nazis denounced his art as degenerate. Americans showed little interest in purchasing Klee’s work, to the extent that only two private American collections boasted his work by the end of the 1920's, the decade when Klee’s work debuted in America. A critic at the New York Herald called him a “strange meteor from Switzerland.” (He fled to Switzerland in 1933, after the Nazis removed him from his teaching post at Düsseldorf Academy.)
So why is Klee on exhibit at an American museum when he fought to remain a European artist? When he never even set foot in America?
In the exhibit catalog, Michael Baumgartner writes of Klee’s “indifference to American culture” in contrast to many of his peers who saw America as “a source of artistic inspiration, a screen on which to project one’s ideal of a free, self-directed life.” But according to Vivian Endicott Barnett, in her essay “From Both Sides of the Atlantic to the Pacific: Klee and America in the Twenties,” America became an optimal visual stomping ground for Klee after the establishment of American “institutions devoted to modern art—beginning with the Societe Anonyme in 1920 and culminating with the founding of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1929.” Barnett accounts for American interest in Klee (and vice versa) by stressing the shifting paradigms of fashionable American arts of the period.
But a show about American interest in Klee’s work hardly belongs in an art museum, if the art work does not have much to say.
Small Picture of a Regatta (1922) (pictured) is indeed a small pen and watercolor painting on paper that depicts sailboats racing in the sea. The palette is largely cool and depressing: blues, browns, and greens. And yet, the sailboat race—with its overlapping boats and the sea that looks solid enough to be dry land—could easily double as a carnival, a futuristic space station, or the mushroom planet from Super Mario Bros. What is important is that the brown-ochre form holds up the big blue triangles and that the triangles fight each other for attention. The painting works because it is so playful and so anti-academic.
In that way, Klee reveals his interest in children’s art, as the gallery “When We Were Young: New Perspectives on the Art of the Child” explores. But (Youth) Actor’s Mask (1924), which occupies the cover of the catalog, is Klee’s version of a Raggedy Ann doll. Klee’s has a green face, with red lines cutting through the face to match the red hair. The mask sports a green and pink striped neck. But on a linear level, the drawing is as tight—and decidedly un-childlike—as the Regatta is bold, naïve, and playful.
There are, then, two bodies of Klee’s work in the show, and to put it in terms of the curatorial gimmick, there is the body of work that American collectors were right to ignore and the one that deserved their utmost attention. By displaying both together, the Phillips opts for historical curating, where an arrangement that responds to formal aesthetics would have served the viewer far better. The viewer is forced to engage the exhibit like a parental lock on the television: covering eyes from the obscene while trying to attentively grasp the good, embedded within it.