"Klee inhabits, really, the closed, cautious world of the modern aesthete, which admits experience only piecemeal. No grand style here, no panormas, but many small and precious objects. Let him be put next to Marianne Moore and Wallace Stevens, and we in America shall have a more correct idea of the place of his art and a truer estimation of its intense but circumscribed power. Also, let the mysticism if not the supernal vision be excluded, and let him be put next to e. e. cummings so that we can take the exact measure of his humor and understand how it unlocks the serious supernal vision. It is no accident that these three American poets are Klee's close contemporaries. They attempt to keep at arm's length what is more or less the same industrial world, and they struggle with a similar provincialism.
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The ambient in which Klee spent most of his life was up-to-date as well as provincial, a region of a [sic] middle-sized cities where spic-and-span modernity sat side by side with the complacently old-fashioned, where the Gothic seeped and eddied around modernistic architecture, Bauhaus posters and electric lights, with a countryside lying close by in which peasant costumes and arts and crafts still could be seen from the windows of the streamlined electrified trains. It was another closed world, closed as only a German 'region' could be, yet not remote
One was forced in upon himself there and induced to cultivated his personal peculiarities. Klee is like somebody out of an E. T. A. Hoffmann story about the small-town Germany of the 18th century: confortable, musical, modest, and fantastic--all these in his work if not his person. He had a Wunderkammer in which he accumulates influences, hints, notions from all over, but first he assimilates them to his domestic interior. Whereas the primitive and exotic that are present in so much of modern art are there for the sake, in part, of their startling effect, in Klee they are made homely and familiar, less strange, less direct and abrupt. Klee is surprising but he is not startling or audacious; his art is eccentric, perhaps, but it is domesticated, and his humor and whimsicality, once we decipher his plastic language, is reassuring rather than unsettling. We are reassured as to the persisting sensuous stability of a very German world in which concepts, more often than not, fail to fit actuality. Klee's real audacity was his modesty, which accepted and accomplished the task of making an easel picture out of almost nothing."
"Klee's color does not have the range or register of his line. It is washed on in tints: light, tender, thin--un-modern. It seldom inheres within definite contours, nor does it become opaque o solid (modern) until the artist's last phase. It does not describe or define any more than his line does; it becomes intense or fades like light itself. Yet such color, in Klee's hands, did succeed in achieving a kind of depth. Not a depth in which represented objects are probable, but a matter of suffusions and breaths of color that create a faraway, ambiguous glow. Against this backdrop, lines peregrinate like melodies against chords. The surface palpitates, signs appear and disappear, yet we cannot tell whether this takes place in fictive depth or on the real surface."
"Putting the gist of his art into narrative and decorative complications rather than architecture, and using color as tint rather than body, Klee takes a relation to the School of Paris somewhat like that of Sienese painting to Florentine in the early Renaissance. He is less realistic than Paris, less physical, that is, but at the same time more literary. Space is flatter and more impervious in Matisse and Picasso. Their pictures move about in actual physical space, occurring with other events and other objects in that space; whereas Klee's inhabit a remoter region which, being nuanced if not constructed like the space of traditional painting, is more emphatically discontinuous with that in which the observer stands. In this sense Klee is less revolutionary than the School of Paris.
Which may be one of the reasons why his influence has been more immediately fruitful than that of any other master who arose in European painting between 1900 and 1925. Of all the artists who put themselves under Picasso's tutelage, hardly one realized himself in anywhere near as short a time as did those who followed Klee (think only of Dubuffet, Brauner, Tobey, Graves). The explanation of this goes, however, beyond the fact of Klee's more traditional use of space--which is so, after all, only by contrast with Picasso's and amounts really to a different emphasis, not a different conception. The style Picasso formed for himself in Cubism is designed to accomodate what I would call a lordly talent. Artists who take this style as a point of departure find it difficult to disembarrass themselves of the personality that goes with this talent. It requires a native largeness and power that are rare. Even Picasso himself has since the late twenties been unable to supply consistently the power his own intentions and their means demand. Klee is an artist of smaller scope whose personality frees rather tahn oppresses or challenges those influenced by him. If the artist's temperament is a modest one, contact with Klee encourages him to release it in sincerity rather than inflate it in imitation. Seeing how much Klee made of relatively little, the aspirant is moved to confess how little he himself has and to make the most of that little.
Picasso asks you to construct more than invent, to build large, substantial edifices--not like Klee, to send up demountable tracery and momentary mists. Picasso asks you to be more aware of your surroundings. This does not mean that Picasso is more 'intellectual' or even more deliberate than Klee; in fact, he works faster and less meditatively. The difference is that he sees the picture as a wall, while Klee sees it as a page; and when painting a wall you have a more conscious sense of the surroundings and of their relation to the picture. Architecture imposes itself then, and with that the monumental and the public."
"As I intimated at the beginning of this article, Klee is not subversive. He is well content to live in a society and culture that he has robbed of all earnestness; in fact, he likes them all the better for that. They become safer, more gemütlich. Far from being a protest against the world as it is, his art is an attempt to make himself more comfortable in it; first he rejects it, then, when it has been rendered harmless by negation, he takes it fondly back. For notice that Klee's irony is never bitter."
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