N ARTIST: PAUL KLEE

MAY 10, 2006. Here is another backgrounder for my ongoing telephone-workshop, THE TRANSFORMATIONS. Click on the link above for details, and to sign up. You can still get in on the next two live sessions, and you'll get access to mp3 files of all three sessions. The response has been very large, and continues.

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I have posted this article before, and I've made changes to it several times, to increase the scope and reveal more about this artist.

I post it now to give an example of transformation in action. Paul Klee was one of those great spirits who transmuted everything he came in contact with---effortlessly. He didn't have to think about doing it. It was in his bones, his blood, his heart, his mind, his psyche: the act of transformation.

The poet e.e. cummings once wrote (I'm paraphrasing), there's a great universe next door; let's go. Klee went, every day of his life. He was not committed to one particular alternative. He invented them by the truckload. This, as opposed to organized religion, which invents ONE cosmic mural and tries to back everybody into a corner with it.

Klee never focused on developing a trademark style. He saw that as a limiter, a defection from the real joy of painting. He was a man who had many desires, recognized that fact, and manifested all of them.

He is one of those artists who, for me, changes radically, depending on what day of the week it is. On Mondays, I love him. On Tuesdays, he bores me completely. On Wednesdays, I admire him at a distance.

I have to say I know of no other artist who brings off such a diverse body of work with his degree of aplomb and ease. He exudes the sense of: "give me a small room, a pad of paper, a few colors, and close the door behind you."

That he was one of the giants who achieved a 20th-century revolution in art is not in dispute. He appeared to accomplish this from a position of already having arrived before he started. Yet, everything he did was by way of improvisation.

Critics downplay this last fact, because for them it amounts to cheating. Spontaneity is only permitted when there are many signs and stories of struggle. Klee avoided becoming enmeshed in struggle by working on a number of paintings at once. When he was finished for the moment with one, he moved to another, and so on, and kept revisiting the incomplete works and adding to them until he was satisfied.

He also committed the sin of being happy. His state of mind is clear from turning the pages in any book of his reproductions. However, you will also come across paintings that are very dark and strange, and once you are sucked into his basic domain of invented archetypes and (un)balancing acts, you will find yourself holding your breath now and then, wanting to move on away from ominous turnings of the screw.

Klee was what I would call a sane man. He knew how to begin, he knew how to end. He knew that the next painting was more important than the last. He didn't need self-pity, and he didn't care for outlandish praise.

Above all, a singular style was not his goal. He wasn't trying to be recognized for certain traits. He had found gold, and he kept mining. He realized that imagination is an infinitely forked river, and he needed no propulsive agenda to drive him forward. One, two, three strokes on a blank canvas and he was able to invent what could come next. Could was never should or must. It was all open, his spaces.

One of the great creative lives was lived by Klee.

He was not trying to solve a problem. Nor, as some have said, was he asking questions in his paintings.

Each small painting was a world unto itself.

Klee did not set out to do variations on themes in successive pictures.

He usually worked on five or six pictures at once, in order to retain that sense of spontaneity.

He never titled a painting until it was finished. Then he looked at it and thought up a name, which was sometimes laid on as a description, and sometimes given as a statement about what the picture was not.

Even Picasso, who reserved most praise for his own fabulous self as a matter of principle, once visited Klee in his studio and acknowledged the genius of another man. Through clenched teeth, no doubt.

For Klee, the blank canvas signaled the delicious unknown. He was very comfortably nowhere at that moment, and then as he painted, he was in a successive series of somewheres.

Kandinsky and Klee mark a point of demarcation for painting. It was not enough to alter the so-called real world. You could actually create a new world in every picture. A different new world. There were as many as you wanted to dream up.

Klee did not give credence to having a finished idea in his mind before starting a work. He was not transferring a picture in his mind to the canvas. He was inventing/discovering as he went along. In this, he was happy.

He was not trying to compete with engineering. He wasn’t running a factory where the plans for a highly complex object had to be laid out meticulously before construction got off the ground.

He could be very precise, and he could be imprecise. A world does not have to be precise.

Some say his work was too easy. It was too celebrative. It didn’t present some final vision. It lacked maturity. The emotions were too simple.

All these judgments are off the mark. They represent estimates of what Klee was not. What he was was marvelously direct. Is Mars too dry? Is Mercury too hot?

Do androids dream, as Phil Dick asked, of electric sheep? Do ants dream of balloons? Why not? And if so, why not paint that?

Paul Klee. 1879-1940. There is a little (out-of-print) book titled Klee, with a long, fascinating essay by Marcel Marnat. Publisher: Leon Amiel (1974). Many plates.

Several paintings I recommend: The Red Fish (1925); Head with Blue Tones (1933); 17IRR (1923).

I believe Klee was saying this: Here are several thousand worlds I just invented. Approach them with a free mind and heart. Glance at them from several different angles. Jump into their liquids, stand on their flat surfaces, lean from their precarious platforms. Serve them to yourself as appetizers or main courses. Let them pass through your digestive tract. Make faces to match their faces. Remove their masks; then you may find deeper shades or you may find nothing. Ponder how you invest your imagination in mine, and go away with a spark of self-recognition, not of the worlds themselves, but of what you have, what you can do, what you can invent. Our whole planet is a mask, and we can, if we change and evolve, take great delight in dreaming up new spaces and times.

JON RAPPOPORT www.nomorefakenews.com


A NOTE FROM A WORKSHOP ATTENDEE

MAY 10, 2006. The first session of my workshop, THE TRANSFORMATIONS, took place on Monday night, May 8. You can still sign up and get in on the two remaining live phone calls, and you will receive all three calls as mp3 files.
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Here is a brief email from a workshop attendee. This man also took my last workshop, Mind Control, Mind Freedom, and has been doing the manifestation exercises for about a month:

"I am the most pleased with the streamlined effect these exercises are having on my life. A whole lot of dispersed energy is coming into focus and is now being funneled into my manifestation work.

"Because of this, every day is a voyage. I'm planning several important projects, and I can see how I'll execute them.

"At the same time, these projects (which I've been trying to get off the ground for several years) are taking on a quality of excitement I haven't felt in ages. It's not dry work. It's alive.

"I never thought of myself as an artist, but now I'm feeling that quality. I'm designing my future, and the design has power behind it. I didn't think this was possible.

"The whole thing is like a change in the weather, and I'm bringing that about.

"From this new perspective, I can see some of my past wrangles and procrastinations drying up and blowing away in the wind. They don't matter. They were all based on me not knowing how to manifest what I want. They were substitutes.

"Theoretically I knew that the process of getting to a goal could be at least as exciting as finally arriving, but now I'm experiencing that first-hand. Dreams I didn't even know I had are coming true.

"A long time ago, I read a book called The Importance of Living, by Lin Yutang. I believe you once mentioned it in an article you wrote. He says that the object of travel is to get lost. That always stuck with me for some reason. Recently, I realized why. It wasn't the getting lost part. It was the sense of adventure that statement implied. I feel that adventure as I do the manifestation exercises. I feel so far from the routine I used to be attached to. It's like discovering another world."

JON RAPPOPORT www.nomorefakenews.com