mooresk1323738x: January 2014

Drawing Seminar December 5^th 2013

SCRIPT IN GREEN TO BE READ>>>>NOT ON SLIDES

Drawing Seminar December 5^th 2013

Introduction to Seminar

Paul Klee (1879 – 1940)

This presentation is based around the 1925 book

Initial Plan for a Section of the Theoretical Instruction at the German Bauhaus

Pedagogical Sketchbook

Paul Klee: (lived at an important time in history, he was born into an unstable Europe, Germany specifically, lived through the Great War and worked through the Weimar Republic through to the end of the Second World War.

Many people believed both world wars were as a result of over-materialism and of artistic over-indulgence, thus Klee lived through the Euro-centric development of many important twentieth century art movements and he was interested in most of them.

Klee was a child of two musicians and an exceptional violinist and musician. He was a great fan of literature and academically minded.

Expressionism: modernist, German, subjective perspective, avant-garde, pre WWI

Cubism: modernist, European, object depicted from multiple viewpoints, Cezanne inspired, pre WWI

Surrealism: unconscious expression, Paris based, early 1920s, grew from anti-art Dada, “thought in the absence of all control exercised by reason” Breton 1924, post WWI

Orientalism: France, western interpretation of Middle East, Arabic societies viewed as inferior to Western

Futurism: Italy, post WWI, preoccupations: speed, tech, youth, violence, cars, and planes; associated with Fascism in 1920s (violence) but soon classified as Degenerate. Art (art from a confusion of a psychologically instable character)

German during WWI (declared Swiss 4 days posthumously as he tried to dissociate himself from Nazi ideals for his entire life)

His Contemporaries: Kirchner and Kokoschka Expressionist (German/ Austrian) (bright coloured portraits and splodgy landscapes)

Braque and Picasso Cubism (French) (cubist, simultaneous views)

Why was Klee different from his contemporaries? They were STATIC and he was DYNAMIC. MUSIC, PAINTING AND DRAWING meant Klee’s works were COMPOSITIONS rather than images; he even used musical motifs in some of his later works.

We can construct from Klee’s legacy of over 9000 works of art, not just his life story but the timelines of early twentieth century art. He embraced multiple styles of work:

Oil, watercolour, ink, pastel, etching, canvas, burlap, muslin, linen, gauze, card, foil, fabric, newsprint and wallpaper.

Born 1879

In 1905 he developed a new technique: Verre Eglomise ( scratching on a blackened glass panel with a needle)

Conscripted in WWI but continued drawing he managed to attain a desk job and his drawings were very DIARISTIC

(Taught at Bauhaus 1921 to 1931 House of Construction) founded by architect Walter Gropius) at the end of WWI as Germany and Europe sought a new direction

Colleague of Kandinsky

In 1923 Klee said “For the artist, communication with nature remains the most essential condition. The artist is human; himself nature; part of the nature within natural space”.

As a teacher Klee tried to renew his student’s perspectives from the Renaissance towards FUNDAMENTALS OF OPTICAL AND STRUCTRAL ORDER (Sibyl Moholy-Nagy wife of one of Klee’s colleagues).

Toward his students Klee believed that human intuition would make obvious what to draw after sufficient observation. This is now difficult to read without believing Klee to be incredibly pretentious.

Klee stated the art student must be “child of this earth; yet also child of the Universe; issue of a star among stars”. He had spent his entire life in the art world at this point and so might be forgiven for his confusion.

Met Picasso in 1930’s of whom he had been a great admirer

In 1936 Klee’s career was altered beyond recognition and his drawing became of utmost importance.

Aged 57, Klee was diagnosed with SCLERODERMA an auto-immune condition which was only diagnosed after his death. This caused fibrosis of the skin and internal organs, leading to heart strain, renal failure, respiratory and digestive problems and general weakness.

The Psychiatric conditions associated with this condition include anxiety, depression and OCD, (PubMed.gov, Angelopoulos et al 2001). This is interesting as Klee had always been interested in and inspired by outsider art and specifically the art of the mentally ill.

At this time Klee’s output changed dramatically.

From the fine lines and descriptive, naturalistic style of Klee as a seventeen year old boy (see his drawing MY ROOM), to the still fine-lined, but no-longer naturalistic style of the twenty five year old Klee (see Tale a la Hoffman), through his Bauhausian years as an academic drawer (struggling to confine his naturalistic, symbolic and intuitive mind into being a teacher) to the time of his death in 1940 Klee was drawing crude, stick figures in a heavy line (see Death and Fire).

The Metropolitan Museum of Art states that Late Paul Klee became a rapid drawer, using heavy lines, using broader forms, aware he had little time left to work.

Gunther Wolf writing in The Lancet (vol 353 issue 9163 May 1999) studied Klee’s work in the last year of his life with respect to his illness.

In his final year of life Klee produced more than 1000 works, most of which were drawings

Wolf determines these are mostly preoccupied with fate and illness.

His most well-known series from 1940 was entitled SCHARFES WORT (harsh words)

In the last two years of his life Klee drew over eighty Angel drawings. Very simple pencil drawings, line drawings on paper pasted onto card. The only ones introducing colour were a few involving chalk.

The Museum Folkwang (Essen,Germany) which has a collection of over 100 Klee drawings curates some of Klee’s uglier Angel drawings as reflections on his own appearance as the Scleroderma altered it very rapidly.

Klee is fascinating as someone who, putting aside his COLOUR THEORY (the unification of drawing and the realm of colour) can be biographically viewed in terms of his drawing alone.

Drawing was symbolic for Klee (a fading line might symbolise mystery, reflections may symbolise relationships or dialogues).

Recognisable forms (a face, a hand, a house) may have been shorthand to convey universal meanings to the viewers of his drawings so they could be understood amongst the “more complex structure of lines” Klee.

He was a scientifically minded artist. He described his own art as a Devotion to Small Things. He was not EMPIRICAL in his research. He believed that observation alone was sufficient to distil that which he wanted to represent, he tried no measurements or experimentation that I am aware of and so not actually scientific.

Marcel Duchamp stated that at first glance, Klee’s work appears childlike but it later becomes apparent how mature it truly is. He was “an artist’s artist” as the cliché goes.

SUMMARY of the Pedagogical Sketchbook

Part 1) Proportionate Line and Structure

Dot into line
Line walks, goes around itself, creates spaces and then leaves them empty or fills them in. According to Sibyl Moholy-Nagy this is like the rhythm Klee explores as a musician)
Structural Proportion, like Euclid’s Golden Section

from Wikipedia

or the 2/olden triangle or the 2/3 rule used to create ligaments and tendons, water currents and plant fibres for example and may now soon be superseded by the phenomenon of Fractals

Part 2) Dimension and Balance

· An object has to be rendered by a LINE!

This is subjective to the human eye, it is interpreted by man. Optical illusions are included in this, for example perspective or a horizon. The eye and brain working together prefer non-symmetrical balance like Euclid’s geometry.

Part 3) Gravitational Curve

· Observation and Intuition combined

· Motion can be projected using what Klee termed Spiritual Dynamism

This area of Klee’s work is very hard for me to interpret. He believes in a Gravitational Pull due to eye/brain interaction. This is either very high drawing theory or else it is so subjective that Klee has failed to explain it adequately. A further possibility is that the understanding of Neuroscience to which Klee was alluding had not yet been investigated at his time of writing to the same extent to which it has been today and so, as modern, educated people, we have moved beyond his intuitive understanding.

Part 4) Kinetic and Chromatic Energy

Plato’s EIDOS – the inner essence of an object is distinct from the apparent outer form
Aristotle’s ENTELECHY – a ‘form-giving-cause’, the reason that an idea has a manifest physical configuration or shape

Examples here include drawing a moving object as it is in a moment of reality i.e. frozen, or to give it a sense of movement by exaggeration of the dimensions.

Chromatic and Thermodynamic Field (again beyond my comprehension. It involves the stirring of the dot from the static to the dynamic. Klee views motion as unending but it is not clear as to whether or not he was aware of the concept of Absolute Zero as described by Lord Kelvin regarding the temperature or energy state at which there is no movement on the atomic scale. Absolute Zero is 0Kelvin or -273oC. How this physically affects the movement of light upon an atom is in the realms of the study of Quantum physics, with photons being sub-atomic particles, and it is difficult to see how this affects the theory of drawing.

Conclusion

Klee was a thorough pupil of drawing.

His Pedagogical Sketchbook remains relevant today even if theoretical understandings have moved on somewhat since it was written.

Klee’s life can be described by his drawing practice.

Klee may have worked in many media but drawing under-pinned them all and is the discipline to which he returned. That is why he is the artist whose drawing style I find so fascinating and I hope you have enjoyed this seminar.