New Left Review I/41, January-February 1967

M. P.

‘On Modern Art’

Paul Klee: On Modern Art. Faber 7s. 6d.

This essay, written for a lecture in 1924 but not published until 1945, is from Klee’s Bauhaus years (1921—31). It continues the theoretical examination of the basic elements of his pictorial art begun in his ‘Creative Confession’ (1920). He analyses the dimensions of a picture—line, formality, colour—showing how is each there is a wide range of possibility for variation. A picture, like a piece of music, is ‘a phenomenon of many simultaneous dimensions’. He emphasizes the importance of integrating these in the whole composition, and, in common with other Bauhaus artists, stresses balance and formal design. The analysis of elements and the achievement of pictorial equilibrium leads him away from naturalistic representation. But for Klee, abstract form is not an end in itself. Particular linear and formal combinations suggest movement or stability, agitation or calm, flight, hovering, falling, and so on. His graphic invention continually throws up rudimentary shapes—bird, flower, man—not imitated from nature but rediscovered through the intrinsic process of composition. His work is a search for universal images, like ideograms: ‘One must go from type to prototype’.

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