Few twentieth-century artists generate such division in critical opinion as Swiss artist Paul Klee (1879-1940). During the 1950s, when pressing the cause of Jackson Pollock, critic Clement Greenberg dismissed Klee as a "respectable bourgeois." In 1987, Hilton Kramer, editor and critic for the New Criterion, deplored the "Sad Case of Paul Klee" as "an aesthetic eclipse." Klee's misfortune, like that of John Singer Sargent, was to be an artist of subtlety and wit in an age of revolutionary transition.
The retrospective of Klee's work currently on view at the Cleveland Museum was organized by Carolyn Lanchner, curator of the department of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and Jurgen Glaesemer, curator of the Paul Klee Foundation of Bern, Switzerland.
The exhibition contains some three hundred paintings, watercolors, prints, and drawings selected from over nine thousand works Klee created during his lifetime. The organizers included many of the artist's works from the 1930s rather than concentrating on the protean pieces created during the decade following the end of World War I. The presence of Twittering Machine (1922), Eros (1923), and Possessed Girl (1924), only whets our appetite for the works that have been omitted from this retrospective - The Vessels of Aphrodite (1921), Faces of Flowers (1922), Dying Plants (1922), The Seafarer (1922), Hanging Fruits (1922), and Actor's Mask (1924).
In an attempt to emphasize Klee's considerable influence on contemporary modern art, the organizers have slighted the visionary works of his earlier periods. Consequently, the exhibition is dominated in size and number by such bold abstracts from the late 1930s as Polyphony, Legend of the Nile, Harbor with Sailboats, Fire Source, Insula Dulcamara, Capriccio in February, and Landscape with Two Who Are Lost.
These paintings were created when Klee was seriously ill and a refugee from Nazi Germany. By placing the artist's work in this historical context, the organizers inadvertently set Klee up for the unjustified critical response provoked when the show opened in February at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
The aesthetic and expressive subtlety of the early works were a reflection of Klee's detached outlook. "I would never take sides so wildly." Klee remarked about the public reaction to the Russian Revolution of 1905. "It is more like me to watch with a silent smile, even if everything were blowing up. In the end I belong to those people who die with a joke on their lips."
The Inner Voice
The absorption of a variety of modernist styles ranging from Cubism to Dadaism and Surrealism did not diffuse the inner voice that guided Klee throughout much of his career. Hilton Kramer has written that the retrospective "only confirms an impression of an artist whose work has suffered some kind of aesthetic eclipse, and who is therefore in need of some kind of external support - call it historical context - to make him interesting."
This is hardly the case. The delicacy of Klee's art suffers only if muscular painting, a style currently in favor with critics since the advent of Jackson Pollock, remains the aesthetic
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