Paul Klee
 Tisch mit Gaben, 1933
(Table with Gifts) Pastel on paper mounted on board, 41.3 x 28 cm
Among the various ways in which the formulation of abstract art was defined in the years before the First World War, Paul Klee (Münchenbuchsee, Switzerland, 1879 – Muralto, Switzerland, 1940) and his work stand out. Born into a family devoted to music, as a youth he performed in local groups and at the same time showed an early vocation for drawing. The hybridisation that he achieved between the languages of music and art, seeking analogies and synaesthesia between the organising principles of the two practices (harmony, rhythm, order, composition, form, colour), is one of the main contributions that he made to the languages of abstraction. His writings on the theory of colour belong to the German Romantic tradition, following in the footsteps of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Philipp Otto Runge. Throughout his career there was feedback between his facets of artist and teacher; he taught at the Bauhaus, first in Weimar and then in Dessau (1920–1930), and at the Kunstakademie (Academy of Art) in Düsseldorf (1930–1933). His many texts and notebooks and the lectures and classes that he gave at the Bauhaus, mainly on colour theory, most of which were written down and published, made him a pioneer in the teaching of art.
After studying at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste (Academy of Fine Art) in Munich (1901–1902), he began working as an illustrator for various periodicals and magazines. In 1912 he joined the artistic adventure of Der Blaue Reiter, together with Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc, with whom he exhibited in Munich. During a visit to Paris that year he met Robert Delaunay and became interested in his idea of “simultaneity through colour”, and this was an anticipation of his journey to Tunis and North Africa in 1914. There, all the interplay and variations in luminous intensity of colour were revealed to him as the essence of nature and art. Klee did not move on to total abstraction, but in his work he began to give less attention to drawing, and in watercolour and pastel he found two techniques with which he could explore the possibilities of colour, chiaroscuro and transparency.
In Tisch mit Gaben there are aspects that are characteristic of Paul Klee’s style, and it also gives a very personal impression of the context in which it was made. In April 1933, after the National Socialist Party came to power, Klee was dismissed from the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf and in November he emigrated to Berne. A few years later he was labelled as a degenerate artist, more than a hundred of his works were confiscated, and he was included in the travelling exhibition of degenerate art in 1937. The events of 1933 made a strong impact on him, as can be seen in the many drawings that he made with themes that were a mixture of irritation, irony and parody, indicating the state of social and cultural repression that was being established in Germany.
In that tragic setting, in terms of pictorial language this painting exemplifies the demand for reduction that Klee sought in artistic activity. He had succeeded in emancipating himself from the imitation of nature after extracting its basic laws and applying them strictly in terms of colour and composition. Here he concentrates on a table that he represents simply and schematically. He focuses attention on the plane of the table, on which he has placed various simple shapes with which he creates a somewhat sombre range of colours, in which we see the use of complementary pairs and secondary mixtures (blue and orange, purple, pink, brown), as he maintained in his essays on picture composition and in his class lectures. In terms of technique, coming back to the modulation of colours, the use of pastel allows him to obtain an interplay of transparency and veiling to create an effect of space. This is a device that he had explored in his paintings on glass and that he developed further in the Bauhaus, where he organised workshops to teach painting on glass.
The idea of a table seen against a background with a faint suggestion of a floor and part of a window – devices that define the picture space – could be compared thematically with Picasso’s still lifes, which Klee saw in the first solo exhibition that Picasso had at the Kunsthaus in Zurich, in the autumn of 1932. In that selective exhibition there were many works from the artist’s studio and his personal collection that had never previously been shown. The following year, when Klee went to France, he met Picasso and signed an exclusive contract with Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, who became his dealer and representative.
References
Angela Lampe (ed.): Paul Klee: l’ironie à l’oeuvre, Éditions du Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2016.
Paul Klee. Maestro de la Bauhaus. Fundación Juan March, Madrid, 2013.
Alain Bonfand: L’ombre de la nuit. La mélancolie et l’angoisse dans les oeuvres de Mario Sironi et Paul Klee entre 1933 et 1940. Éditions de la Différence,Paris, 2005.
Pamela Kort (ed.): Paul Klee: 1933. Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich, 2003