| Artist: | Klee, Paul |
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|---|---|---|
| Title of Work: | Death and Fire | |
| Date of Work: | 1940 | |
| Nationality: | German | |
| Context: | Fantasy | |
| Movement: | The German Bauhaus | |
| Medium: | Oil | |
| Subject: "Death and Fire" was painted during WWII, the last year of the artist's life. The little birdheads in "Twittering Machine" have now become a skull, with a sticklike figure in the background that uncannily foreshadows the way the bomb at war's end would vaporize human figures, leaving a dark shadow on the walls as the only lingering presence or trace of a human life that once was and now is no more. Klee's strength lies precisely in how he reveals our vulnerability in small-scale images that are nonetheless vast and deep in their profundity. Somewhere between the comic and the tragic, his "Death and Fire" expresses how frail and vulnerable human existence is, especially in the war-torn modern world. Style: a line drawing, childlike, but not childish. Klee taps the "primitive" inner child in all of us with a sophisticated wisdom and wit. "The very beginnings of art," he reminds us, "are at home in the nursery." The color burns here with a stained glass intensity and inner illumination. The image has a roughness and crudenss as well as a delicacy; it was painted on burlap. Klee combines the intuitive and the mechanical, the rational and the fantastic in an art that defies stylistic reduction or categorization. There is no "ism" that can encompass his vision; in his journal he writes, "take a walk with a line," which is exactly what he does in limitless variations on the theme. Though he works an intimate scale, his art is capable of addressing both the comical and the tragic. Focus is always on the creative process. "I am not at all graspable in this world, for I live as much with the dead as with the unborn. Somewhat closer to the heart of creation than usual. But not nearly close enough." Context: Klee is a member of the esteemed faculty of the Bauhaus from 1921 to 1931, overlapping with Kandinsky for nine years. Part of the utopian, postwar celebration of a machine aesthetic, the Bauhaus slogan was: "Art and Technology - A New Unity." But the curriculum of the Bauhaus was well-rounded and interdisciplinary: they studied everything from crafts to architecture, sculpture, painting, stage design, typography, music, dance, and eastern philosophies and religions. For the members of the Bauhaus, there was "no essential difference between the artist and craftsman," and technology and spiritual growth were not only compatible, but co-dependent. Teachers were expected to exercise creative flexibility outside their "expertise." Students worked alongside their instructors according to a collaborative group model rather than the traditional academic hierarchy of the "expert" handing down information to the lowly students who dare not question authority. Taking on real-world commissions in design problems, the school became self-sustaining, teaching through creative problem-solving and collaboration. Their art was socially oriented rather than art for art's sake. Klee was a part of this positive, communal approach to the problems of the industrial machine age, but what he offered was an art that focused on the imagination and the creative process as that which makes us most human. "The work of art is above all a process of creation," he reminds us, "it is never experienced as a mere product." Klee fit into the transcendent, visionary side of the Bauhaus philosophy: 'Art does not render the visible," he tells us, "rather, it makes visible." | ||
