Paul Klee's Perspectives

NOTES

• This paper is developed from a lecture: ‘Paul Klee: Poetry and Precision’, delivered at the Australian National Gallery, 14 April 1986 and at the Art Gallery of Queensland, 21 May 1986 in conjunction with the exhibition from the Metropolitan Museum, New York: Modern Masters.
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• For Renaissance perspective see, John White, The Birth and Rebirth of Pictorial Space, Faber, London 1967 and, with attention to the Weltanschauung of Renaissance schemes, Samuel Y. Edgerton Jr., The Renaissance Rediscovery of Perspective, Harper and Row, New York 1975.
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• Cf. Fritz Novotny, Cézanne und das Ende der wissenschaftlichen Perspektive (first published 1937), Vienna 1970.
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• Beiträge zur bildernischen Formlehre—Faksimilierte Ausgabe des Originalmanuskripts, ed. Jürgen Glaesemer, Schwabe, Basel/Stuttgart 1979, p. 26 (hereafter Beitráge). Translated in Paul Klee, The Thinking Eye, ed. Jürg Spiller, tr. Ralph Mannheim, Lund Humphries, London 1961, pp. 149ff (hereafter The Thinking Eye). The chronology of the teachings is not observed in The Thinking Eye, nor are the original diagrams given the same status or integration.
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• Cf. A. Murray, ‘“Strange and subtle perspective”… Van Gogh, the Hague School and Dutch landscape tradition’, Art History, 3, December 1980, pp. 410–424, and Patrick A. Hagan, Space-Perception and the Philosophy of Science, University of California, Berkeley/Los Angeles 1983, pp. 114ff.
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• The Thinking Eye, op. cit., p. 149.
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• Die Zwitschermaschine, Museum of Modern Art, New York; Der Seiltänzer, Paul-Klee Stiftung, Kunstmuseum, Bern. Cf. Maurice L. Shapiro, ‘Klee's Twittering Machine’, Art Bulletin, 50, 1968, p. 68. ‘The Twittering Machine is a death trap whose victims if they twitter do so in a sardonic sense’.
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• ‘Mozart took refuge (without neglecting his inferno!) on the joyous side’, The Diaries of Paul Klee 1898–1918, ed. with tr. Felix Klee, University of California, Berkeley and Los Angeles 1964, entry 950.
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• See my Paul Klee: Figures and Faces, Thames & Hudson, London 1978.
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• Henri Bergson, Laughter, An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, tr. C. Brereton and F. Rothwell, Macmillan, London 1921, p. 29.
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• The rhetoric of the ‘new architecture’ is encapsulated in Walter Gropius, Neue Arbeiten der Bauhaus Werkstátten, (Bauhausbücher, vol. 7), Munich 1925, The New Architecture and the Bauhaus, tr. P. Morton Schand, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge 1965.
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• Beiträ;ge, pp. 14ff; The Thinking Eye, pp. 133ff.
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• Spiller notes in Klee's library: J. Vonderlinn, Parallelperspektive, rechtwinklige und schiefwinklige Axonemetrie, Göschen 1914; G. Wolff, Mathematik und Malerei, Leipzig 1925; Walter Lietzmann, Mathematik und Bildende Kunst, Breslau 1931. See also The Thinking Eye, p. 141. On Ernst Mach in relation to Klee, see the valuable article by Marianne L. Teuber, ‘Zwei frühe Quellen zu Paul Klees Theorie der Form, Eine Dokumentation’, Paul Klee Das Frühwerk 1883–1922, Stádtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich n.d., pp. 261ff.
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• See the magisterial presentation by Linda Dalyrmple Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art, Princeton University Press, New Jersey 1983 (which does not mention Paul Klee).
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• For a convenient anthology of the ‘Ironists’, see German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism, the Romantic Ironists and Goethe, ed. K. Wheeler, Cambridge University Press, 1985. That Klee was an ironist in an idealist Bauhaus milieu might be confirmed by comparison with Oskar Schlemmer, a close colleague, who was—demonstrably—a latter-day humanist in his teachings and stage presentation which confirmed the physical, mental and metaphysical controls still possible to the human being. Cf. Oskar Schlemmer, Man, teaching notes from the Bauhaus, ed. with tr. H. Kuchling, tr. J. Seligman, Lund Humphries, London 1971.
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• On the sources of Klee's theory of colour see The Thinking Eye, pp. 521–522.
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• Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laokoon: oder über die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie, first published 1766. A recent translation: German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism: Winckelmann, Lessing, Hamann, Herder, Schiller and Goethe, ed. H. B. Nisbet, Cambridge University Press, 1985, pp. 58–134. For (selected) twentieth-century reactions see, Clement Greenberg, ‘Towards a newer Laocoon’, Partisan Review, 7, July-August 1940, pp. 269–310; E. H. Gombrich, ‘The diversity of the arts, the place of Laocoon in the life and work of G. E. Lessing 1729–1781’, Tributes, Phaidon, Oxford 1984, pp. 29–49; W. J. T. Mitchell, ‘Space and Time—Lessing's Laocoon and the politics of genre’, Iconology, Image, Text, Ideology, University of Chicago, 1986, pp. 95–115.
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• Paul Klee, Briefe an du Familie, Bandi, 1893–1906, ed. Felix Klee, DuMont, Cologne 1979, p. 354. See also Paul Klee Schriften Rezensionen und Aufsátze, ed. Christian Geelhaar, DuMont, Cologne 1976, p. 19, for a Lessing ‘aphorism’ drawing attention to Lessing's Book VI which debates the precedence of poetry over the figurative arts.
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• Briefe, ibid., p. 502.
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• The Creative Credo was first published in Tribüne der Kunst und Zeit, ed. K. Edshmid, Berlin 1920, reprinted in The Thinking Eye, pp. 76–79 and, in the original with illustrations of the manuscript in Paul Klee Schriften Rezensionen und Aufsátze, op. cit., pp. 118–122. Compare E. H. Gombrich, ‘The diversity of the Arts, the place of the Laocoon’, op. cit., p. 37: ‘The more one reads the Laocoon, the stronger becomes the impression that it is not so much a book about as against the visual arts…’.
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• Creative Credo, ibid.
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• Beiträge, pp. 14ff; The Thinking Eye, pp. 133ff.
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• The Thinking Eye, ibid., p. 55.
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• ibid., p. 357.
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• ibid., p. 147.
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• Beiträge, pp. 21–22; The Thinking Eye, p. 143, p. 145.
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• Shifting viewpoint diagrams, ibid., pp. 173–175.
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• ibid., p. 195. Klee continues: ‘One cardinal question: ‘How shall I represent movement from here to there? involves a factor of time’.
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• Nodal points in space diagram, ibid., p. 68.
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• Die rä;umliche Erweiterung, is presented in the third lesson, 12 December 1921, Beiträge, p. 27; The Thinking Eye, p. 197.
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• Tangentially relevant—in the spheres of irony and the machine—is the catalogue of a Marcel Duchamp exhibition: Le Macchine Celebi The Bachelor Machines, Alfieri, Venice-Martellago 1974. Les Témoines oculistes is reproduced, p. 97. See also Craig E. Adcock, Marcel Duchamp Notes from the Large Glass, An N-Dimensional Analysis, esp. ch. 4, ‘Un Oeil’, Ann Arbor, Michigan 1983, pp. 87ff.
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• Cf., for example, E. H. Gombrich, ‘Mirror and map: theories of pictorial representation’, The Image and the Eye, Further Studies in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, Phaidon, Oxford 1982, pp. 172–214.
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• Roger Bacon quoted in Massimo Scolari, ‘Elements for a history of axonometry’, The School of Venice, ed. Luciano Semeriani, Architectural Design, 55, 5/6, 1985, p. 75.
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• Massimo Scolari, ibid.
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• The Thinking Eye, p. 49.
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• Michele Vishny, ‘Clocks and their iconographical significance in Paul Klee's work’, Arts Magazine, 51, 1, September 1979, pp. 138–141.
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• See Paul Klee Notebooks Volume 2, The Nature of Nature, ed. Jürg Spiller, tr. Heinz Norden, Lund Humphries, London 1970; Richard Verdi, Klee and Nature, Zwemmer, London 1984.
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• See Andrew Kagan, Paul Klee Art and Music, Cornell University Press, Ithaca 1983; Klee et la Musique, Centre Georges Pompidou, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris 1985.
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• Beiträge, p. 52 and The Thinking Eye, p. 287.
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• Zimmerperspektive mit Einwohnern, 1921, Paul Klee Stiftung, Kunstmuseum, Bern. For related room and perspective studies, see Jürgen Glaesemer, Paul Klee, Die farbigen Werke im Kunstmuseum Bern, Kornfeld, Bern 1976, pp. 151ff.
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• Nichtkomponiertes im Raum, 1929, private collection Bern.
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• ‘Die Perspektive als symbolische Form’, Vorträge der Bibliothek Warburg, 1924–1925. For a recent discussion ofPanofsky's essay and of Albertian perspective, see Joel Snyder, ‘Picturing vision’, The Language of Images, op. cit., pp. 235ff.
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• Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, tr. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson, Basil Blackwell, Oxford 1985, p. 430. See also Heidegger's post-war reflections on buildings-as-dwellings: ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’ (‘Bauen Wohnen Denken’), in Poetry, Language, Thought, Harper and Row, New York 1971, pp. 143–161, and ‘… Poetically man dwells…’(‘… dichterisch wohnet der Mensch’), pp. 213–229.
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