And snail sketched in pencil between two imposing beetles straight out of a zoology textbook. That was the first thing a Paul Klee (1879-1940) span and a half, the creature spent four years of nothing, he drew with his left hand. Or, at least, the first relevant enough to win, instead of a parental slap on the wrist for smudging a precious print, a little corner in posterity and a piece of wall in the Miró Foundation in Barcelona.
It is not, whichever way you look at it, a masterpiece, but it helps to understand what it is and, above all, what is proposed by the exhibition that can be seen in the Sert building on Montjuïc until February 12. “Klee was fascinated by the exploration of natural phenomena and the laws that governed them,” notes the director of the Miró Foundation, Marko Daniel. Hence, from that first snail to Goethe’s color theories, passing through incandescent geometries and landscapes, ‘Paul Klee and the Secrets of Nature’ approaches the German-Swiss artist through his link with the natural environment. «The exhibition was born as a blank sheet of paper and had to grow like a plant. It is between a forest, because it is very dense, and a cabinet of curiosities”, summarizes the curator of the exhibition, Martina Millà.
Paul Klee, free verse of the European and humanist avant-gardes with a view to expressionism, captured here as a phenomenon of nature in 200 pieces, most of them from the Paul Klee Center in Bern, and portrayed in triplicate -as «artist, person with sensitivity and teacher», summarizes Daniel- through four key vital moments: the formative years; the first World War; teaching in the Bauhaus; and exile and illness. Approach, middle and end of a creator who, as Millà points out, became an artist “through the observation of nature”.
A lifetime of natural influence
The exhibition covers the entire production of Klee, from his first botanical studies to the paintings he made with his fingers in his last days, and brings together more than 200 pieces including drawings, paintings, documents and various objects. Above these lines, a visitor photographs one of the oil paintings in the exhibition. Below, ‘Winter Comes’, from 1939, one of his last works; and a botanical study from 1892.
There are, to confirm it, his first works, a mixture of landscapes, dissected animals and botanical studies, of roses, butterflies, eagle skeletons and majestic toucans, on which Klee planted the rails of his career. The naturalistic drawing and the readings of Goethe They accompanied the young Klee in his early years which, the exhibition highlights, “prompted him to unravel the even more complex inherent order of the natural world.”
war evasion
With the outbreak of the First World War, nature became a refuge and escape for Klee: called to the front and stranded on an air base, he began to experiment with geometric shapes and color scales. Those were the years of Munich expressionism, yes, but also of the pictorial explosion and the blinding light that he discovered in Tunisia. «The color possesses me. The color and I are one thing », he wrote down his trip to North Africa. In the room, arranged like a color wheel, abstract and incandescent landscapes and variable geometries in red, green and yellow take shape.
The most recognizable Klee, minutes before entering the Bauhaus and surrendering to «nature as a teacher of teachers». “To her students, Klee explains the morphogenesis of living organisms as a model to understand the underlying forces in all forms,” emphasizes the curator. And that, of course, while she signs the writing ‘Paths for the study of nature’, she continues to paint increasingly abstract landscapes, at times almost cubist, and breaks nature down into migratory fish, hot-cold rocks and recently released moons . In the center of the room, an aquarium replicates the one the artist had in his studio and which, according to Millà, allowed him to teach his students the movement of fish or the effect of water on shapes.
‘Paul Klee and the secrets of nature’, Marko Daniel points out, occasionally interrupts its monographic character to make room for works by Gabriele Münter, Emma Kunz and Maruja Mallo, female artists related to or contemporary with the artist. “It’s like a reunion with his friends,” celebrates Millà. Less cheerful, however, is the outcome of the show, with Klee purged by Nazism and exiled in his native Switzerland, where he spent the last years of his life until he died in 1940, a victim of scleroderma, a degenerative disease. . In the end, the curator stands out, loses skill but gains freedom: she paints with her fingers and in a hurry, knowing that the end is near and blowing up any border. “Fuse object and artistic subject”, ditch Millà.