Art: Art-for-My-Sake

In 1902, when the late Paul Klee was 23 and a promising Swiss painter, he decided to start all over again. “I want to be as though newborn,” he wrote in his journal, “knowing nothing about Europe….” Part of his new birth was to unlearn all the techniques he had acquired for making “acceptable” pictures.

Klee, wanting to paint like children, knew that children paint not to make beautiful pictures, but simply for the fun of picturing what they feel—art-for-my-sake. For grownups who have little childhood left in them, Klee’s work, like children’s, is something pretty hard to understand.

Last week an exhibition of Klee’s calculated naivetés opened in London’s Tate Gallery. In Manhattan, a new portfolio appeared (The Prints of Paul Klee; Curt Valentin, $15). Its 40 etchings and lithographs proved 40 times over that Klee, no matter how hard he tried, was no child. Some of the pictures had the bright, immediate privacy of peep shows, some were suffused with an insane glee; but all showed a controlled hand whose simplicity was as artful as a Hans Andersen fairy tale.

Head of Menace was about the last of his academic pictures. (Wrote he: “The finish is sufficiently gloomy. . . .”) His Blowing out a Candle had a more elusive humor—the blower is blown out along with the candle. His miserly Old Man Figuring seems to be plucking out sums like a harpist. Sometimes his stuff looks like-matchstick people that a U.S. Indian might have scratched on a rock. His Witch with a Comb would be an innocuous little old woman—in spite of her shoe-button eyes—except that her hands are arrows pointing straight down to the ground as if to say “I could kill you!”

When Klee died near Locarno, in 1940, some oldsters remembered the little boy who used to see faces in the veins of his grandfather’s marble-top table. His students remembered how he used to lecture at Germany’s famed Bauhaus, sitting hunched over, with his back to the class. His friends remembered him stumbling silently along a beach, staring at the convolutions of a sea shell in his fist.