The key to Paul Klee’s wonderfully shaped energy is not ironic detachment, as the title of the Centre Pompidou’s current retrospective suggests, but rather the playful and idyllic emotion he transmits through masterly line and dusty color. There is certainly antagonistic intellectual wit in his brand of romantic spirituality, but I see more tenderness than detachment.
Klee, also an astute theoretician, shunned most artistic dogmas in favor of the greatest possible independence. In that sense, his particular authenticity as an artist is closer in spirit to Franz Kafka than to Honoré Daumier. In L’Ironie à l’Oeuvre (“Irony at Work”), I found Klee’s graphic work essentially solitary, even while within Expressionist, Cubist, and Surrealist traditions of visual innovation. His work is as solitary and singular in the modern art canon as Kafka’s is in modern literature.
The full breadth of that singularity is on view here, with about 230 works on loan from the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern and a slew of complimentary loans. The exhibition is divided into seven thematic and chronological sections that highlight each stage in Klee’s artistic development, from his early caricatures, through Cubism, Dada, and Surrealism, on to the Bauhaus, Picasso, and Naziism.
The first wall of the exhibition showcases very impressive early etchings. “Der Held mit dem Flügel, Le Héros à l’aile” (1905), and others like it, are majestic, German-inspired visual delicacies, recalling the precise and delicate line of Albert Durer, on one end of the timeline, and Hans Bellmer on the other. Klee practiced a light-touch graphic irony that was inspired by the philosopher Friedrich von Schlegel. Schlegel held that: “All must be playful, and all must be serious, frank, and deeply hidden.” To follow that decree, I submit, would not lead an artist to an ironic or satirical approach, contrary to the suggestion of this exhibition’s title. Looking tells me that Klee was more interested in intricate forms of non-work; in the critical pleasure found in play.