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Paul Klee and Language

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Claude Cernuschi
Paul Klee and Language
Introduction
A celebrated member of Der Blaue Reiter—an avant-garde group centered in Munich before World War
I—Paul Klee is often associated with its founding, most active members: Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc,
pioneers of a modernist brand of abstraction and practitioners of a mystical, religious form of expressionism.
This association is not altogether surprising. By emphasizing physical process and gestural execution, and
showcasing a fascination with physiognomy, caricature, and non-Western art (as well as the art of children
and the insane1), Klee’s work frequently betrays the telltale signs of this all-too-subjective, all-too-recalcitrant
movement. Expressionism’s cardinal precepts, moreover, are repeatedly given voice in his writings: a cel-
ebration of instinct, a deprecation of the intellect,2 a raising of art to near-divine status,3 and a tendency to
justify formal distortions on the basis of the “higher” truths those very same distortions reveal.4
Even so, Klee is an atypical expressionist.5 Witty and whimsical, his art betrays qualities incompatible
with a movement particular to whose ethos is an uncompromising belief in the extreme urgency and invio-
late earnestness of self-expression. Not that Klee was less committed to his vocation than other members
of the Blaue Reiter; only that key aspects of his production—e.g., his preference for small scale—bespeaks a
more intimate approach to creativity, one unsusceptible to accommodating the grand cataclysmic imagery
favored by Marc and Kandinsky before the Great War. Klee was unconventional, to be sure, yet his “uncon-
ventionality,” as Clement Greenberg remarked, was still that of “an eccentric but respectable bourgeois.”6
Attracted to satirical humor and biting caricature, he was suspicious of, if not hostile toward, some of the
high-minded propensities of his contemporaries. Though not above referencing the mystical, Klee dubbed
himself a “neutral creature” devoid of “passionate humanity.”7 He celebrated the intuitive subjectivity and

1 Paul Klee, The Diaries of Paul Klee, 1898–1919, ed. Felix Klee (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964), #905: “Children
also have artistic ability, and there is wisdom in their having it! The more helpless they are, the more instructive are the examples
they furnish us; and they must be preserved free of corruption from an early age. Parallel phenomena are provided by the works
of the mentally diseased; neither childish behavior nor madness are insulting words here, as they commonly are.”
2 Ibid., #290: “The effect of these works [sculptures at the Lateran Klee witnessed during a trip to Italy], which are after all im-
perfect, cannot be justified on intellectual grounds, and yet I am more receptive to them than to the most highly praised master-
pieces.”
3 Ibid., #155: “I am God. So much of the divine is heaped in me that I cannot die.”
4 Ibid., #136: “Some will not recognize the truthfulness of my mirror. Let them remember that I am not here to reflect the surface (this
can be done with the photographic plate), but must penetrate inside. My mirror probes down to the heart. I write words on the
forehead and around the corners of the mouth. My human faces are truer than real ones.” See also ibid., #677, #681, #1081,
and Will Grohmann, Paul Klee (New York: Henry N. Abrams, 1955), 365, 367, 372.
5 See Jean Laude, “Paul Klee: letters, ‘ecriture,’ signes,” in Écritures: Systèmes idéographiques et pratiques expressives, ed. Anne-
Marie Christin and Pierre Amiet (Paris: Le Sycomore, 1982), 355. See also Charles Werner Haxthausen, Paul Klee: The Forma-
tive Years (New York: Garland, 1981), 365, 430, 431, 475.
6 Clement Greenberg, “Art Chronicle: On Paul Klee (1870–1940),” in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism,
Vol. I: Perceptions and Judgments, 1939–1944, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 67.
7 Klee, Diaries, #1008.

105
 to radical experimentation. Whether a painting should record a
visual scene, spell out a linguistic message, or exercise both op-
106 tions simultaneously was no longer clear.
Modernists were equally bent on highlighting the convention-
ality of language to valorize abstract art. If non-mimetic signs
could systematically combine to communicate abstruse ideas or
subtle states of mind, so, the reasoning went, could abstract paint-
ing and sculpture. On this score, the arbitrariness of language
supplied as persuasive a justification for the new art as the fre-
quently touted analogy between painting and music. Paradoxi-
cally, language also justified abstraction from the opposite per-
spective. If the new poetry fragmented syntax and undermined
the very coherence of words, then illegibility could be flaunted
as a virtue rather than a vice. Rather than stress the capacity of
arbitrary signs to convey meaning, poets unhinged the graphic
marks or sounds of language from their function as communica-
tion. On this account, the purpose of art was not to transfer a
specific, decodable message, but celebrate semantic ambiguity
(the Russian linguist Roman Jakobson aptly dubbed this tendency
“making strange”).
Accordingly, a cursory look at the art of the past century re-
veals, not simply the persistence, but also the diversity, with which
artists engaged the linguistic. In Henry van Velde’s initials, one
sees symbolism’s fascination with script; in Picasso and Braque’s
canvases, cubism’s fascination with fractured words and stencil-
ing techniques; in Marinetti’s Parole in liberta, futurism’s fascina-
Fig. 1: Egon Schiele (1890–1919), Self-Portrait as St. Sebastian (poster tion with phonics; in Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q., Dada’s fascination
for Galerie Arnot), 1914–15. Pen, ink, and gouache on paper, 67 x with irony and wordplay; in Stuart Davis’s Odol, modernism’s
50 cm, Historisches Museum der Stadt Wien, Vienna. fascination with brand name recognition; in Magritte’s linguis-
tic mismatches, surrealism’s fascination with the arbitrariness of
formal liberties of expressionism, readily acknowledging creativ- the sign; in Andy Warhol’s headlines, Pop’s fascination with the
ity’s mysterious dimension,8 but he steered his art in different power of the press; in Roy Lichtenstein’s comics, a fascination
directions, allowing a certain detachment or calculation to tem- with narrative and onomatopoeia; in Joseph Kosuth’s dictionary
per expressionism’s tendency toward emotional overstatement definitions, conceptual art’s fascination with ideas; in Basquiat’s
or affective excess. “Form,” he professed, “and not too much scribbles, postmodernism’s fascination with graffiti; in the Starn
feeling.”9 Twins’ Anne Frank, a fascination with language’s denunciatory
Klee also stands as an atypical expressionist for another rea- power; in Barbara Kruger’s I Shop Therefore I Am, a fascination
son: his art’s engagement with language. If linguistic elements with the dominance of consumerism in contemporary culture.
populate the expressionist landscape—e.g., in the prints of Ernst Such diverse references to language in the art of the last cen-
Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel, Oskar Kokoschka or Egon Schiele tury might well confirm Roland Barthes’s suspicion that, for all that
(fig. 1)—these primarily serve advertising or labeling purposes, is said—even today—about the increasing and pervasive power of
revealing little of the fragmentation of typography and syntax images, we still exist in a culture of writing.10 In parallel, though
discernible in, say, cubism, futurism, constructivism, Dadaism, and language has preoccupied linguists and philosophers from Plato
even surrealism. Hoping to respond meaningfully to the condition onward, its study took on added urgency in the twentieth century:
of modernity, members of these movements renounced subjective
self-expression to undermine semiotic consistency (a notion, ironi- 10 This is not to dismiss language’s appearance in visual art prior to the twen-
cally enough, sometimes erroneously claimed to be indissolubly tieth century. One thinks, for example, of the inclusion of “Approche, ap-
fundamental to, if not determinative of, modernism itself). Ap- proche” in Les très riches heures du Duc de Berry, by the Limbourg brothers,
or of “Ave Maria” in Jan van Eyck’s Ghent altarpiece, written upside down
propriating formal strategies original to popular culture, where so that only God might read it, attest to the power of words, again to cite
linguistic versus representational boundaries—especially in ad- Barthes, to enhance the communicative aspect of visual images, to anchor
meanings that may otherwise be more difficult to construe. Following the
vertising—were rarely respected, they subjected these strategies Renaissance, however, artists generally avoided incorporating lettering in
high art practice, no doubt because the insertion of flat, planar characters
8 See Paul Klee, Notebooks, Volume 2: The Nature of Nature, ed. Jürg Spill- undermined the illusion of three-dimensional space so hardly won though
er, trans. Heinz Norden (New York: George Wittenborn, 1961), 255. modeling, anatomical accuracy, and linear perspective. Predictably, linguis-
9 Letter to Lily Stumpf, Feb. 23, 1903 in Paul Klee, Briefe an die Familie: tic signs reappear in visual art precisely when those very same devices lose
1893–1940, ed. Felix Klee, 2 vols. (Cologne: DuMont, 1979), 1:312. credibility among modernist artists.
from Ferdinand de Saussure and C. S. Pierce, Ludwig Wittgen- however, as Richard Hoppe-Sailer has noted, that “unambiguous
stein and Martin Heidegger, Benjamin Whorf and Edward Sapir, interpretations” may be culled from Klee’s titles, especially when
J. L. Austin and John Searle, Gottlob Frege and Noam Chomsky,
to the recent work of Eve Sweetser, Mark Johnson, George La-
“text and image barely seem to occupy any common ground.”22
Titles were often ascribed and changed after the fact if it suited
107
koff, Terence Deacon, Steven Pinker, and countless others, lan- the artist’s purpose. And Klee had a singular penchant for com-
guage—identified as a unique and defining characteristic of the bining disparate elements. Blessed with a multiplicity of talents,
human species—has proven increasingly central to defining what he played violin at a near-professional level, and seriously con-
is human from what is not. Predictably, the history of art reflects templated a career in poetry, a path whose exercise, he seriously
this fascination: no less than language, art is a uniquely human believed, would not hinder his parallel ambition to become a
form of endeavor. visual artist.23 Even as he gradually decided in favor of painting,
Locating Klee’s place in this frenzy of aesthetic and philo- he allowed interdisciplinary interests to steer his painterly deci-
sophical activity is no easier than defining it in the expression- sions in multifarious ways. He created numerous illustrations of
ist movement. Regarding his everyday working methods and the literary texts, e.g., Voltaire’s Candide (1911–12) (plates 56–57)
theoretical underpinnings of his teaching, Klee resisted system- and Curt Corrinth’s Postdamer Platz, and, even more importantly
ization.11 That said, language played a critical role in his work. To for our purposes, inserted literal writing in the very visual fabric of
cite Marcel Franciscono: Klee’s “basic impulse was graphic,”12 his images, exploring the poetic while simultaneously indulging
or Charles Haxthausen: Klee’s drawings frequently evoke “quali- in the same kind of radical experimentation as other modernists.
ties of handwriting”13 (so much so that the artist’s practice was But linguistic signs take many forms, and the diversity with
to paint, not standing at an easel, but sitting at a large drawing which they appear in Klee’s work belies strict categorization, a
table).14 One may add, with James Smith Pierce, that Klee “liter- task nonetheless greatly facilitated by the impressive scholarly
ally wrote [some of] his pictures,”15 and, with Greenberg, that, work of Marianne Vogel and Kathryn Porter Aichele, to whom
on account of its small scale, his work falls within the dimensional any serious investigator of Klee’s relationship to language owes
orbit of the book.16 Not surprisingly, Klee drew considerable in- a substantial debt.24 Among the key issues both address is wheth-
spiration from satiric periodicals such as Jugend or Simplicissimus er the relationship between word and image in Klee is one of
during his formative years: “I…wanted to produce illustrations for disjunction or reconciliation,25 an especially difficult question to
humor magazines,” the artist later admitted.17 “Only what was answer because, as Aichele admits, Klee’s approach to creativity
forbidden pleased me. Drawing and writing.”18 “precludes the encoding of fixed meaning.”26 As a result, Klee’s
Tagging the drawing/writing combination as “forbidden” inti- work, like that of many artists, has generated multiple, often con-
mates how this merger, tolerated in popular illustration, remained tradictory, readings.27 All the same, this diversity should hardly
unacceptable in high art. Bent on being provocative, on blurring prohibit art historians from identifying distinct tendencies within
boundaries,19 Klee imbued his work with a calligraphic qual- his production, as variegated as that production may be, and so
ity, and, throughout his career, was inordinately sensitive to the long as the requisite disclaimer (i.e., that these tendencies cannot
way language inflects the interpretation of art. “All visual art,” be considered exhaustive) accompanies those identifications. At
he declared, “starts with a title,”20 explaining a life-long habit of the very least, such exercises allow the richness and complexity
inscribing titles underneath his works with clarity and precision, of Klee’s engagement with the linguistic to emerge in sharper
making the inscription an integral component of both the visual relief, the more so because another of Klee’s key ambitions—res-
effect as well as the meaning of his work.21 It does not follow, urrecting the beginnings of art—intersects his engagement with
language in significant ways. To his mind, drawing and writing
11 See Laude, “Paul Klee,” 354. had a common origin, expressed in the most fundamental visual
12 Marcel Franciscono, Paul Klee: His Work and Thought (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1991), 1.
element: the line. “At the dawn of civilization,” he wrote, “when
13 Haxthausen, Paul Klee, 272. writing and drawing were the same thing, [the line] was the ba-
14 Matthias Bärmann, “‘As if it concerned myself,’ Emigration, Illness, and the sic element.”28 The idea is hardly farfetched; in ancient Greek,
Creative Process in Paul Klee’s Last Years,” in Paul Klee: Tod und Feuer;
die Erfüllung im Spätwerk, ed. Matthias Bärman, exh. cat. (Riehen/Basel: Maya, and Old English, the words for writing and painting are
Fondation Beyeler; Wabern/Bern: Benteli, 2003), 13.
15 James Smith Pierce, Paul Klee and Primitive Art (New York: Garland, 1976), 22 Richard Hoppe-Sailer, “Genesis and Garden: The Case of ‘Inferner Park,’”
88. in In Klee’s Enchanted Garden, ed. Michael Baumgartner and Marianne
16 Greenberg, “Paul Klee,” 68. Keller, exh. cat. (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2008), 76.
17 Klee, Diaries, #105. 23 Klee, Diaries, #121.
18 Ibid., #63. 24 See Vogel, Zwischen Wort und Bild, Kathryn Porter Aichele, Paul Klee’s
19 Ann Temkin, “Paul Klee and the Avant-Garde 1912­–1940,” in Paul Klee, Pictorial Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) and
ed. Carolyn Lanchner (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1987), 17. Aichele’s Paul Klee, Poet/Painter (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2006).
20 Letter to Lily Stumpf, Nov. 1, 1903 in Klee, Briefe, 1:359. 25 Aichele, Paul Klee’s Pictorial Writing, 9.
21 In this context, one might also cite the intriguing argument presented by 26 Ibid., 10 and Vogel, Zwischen Wort und Bild, 120–24.
Peter Klaus Schuster, of a relationship between Klee’s use of language and 27 See, for example, Jenny Anger, “How Many Klees Today?,” Canadian Art
emblem books. See “The World as Fragment: Building Blocks of the Klee Review 18 (1992): 102–111, or Stephen H. Watson, Crescent Moon over
Universe,” in The Klee Universe, ed. Dieter Scholz and Christina Thomson the Rational: Philosophical Interpretations of Paul Klee (Stanford: Stanford
(Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2008), 14–23. See also Marianne Vogel, Zwischen University Press, 2009).
Wort und Bild: Das schriftliche Werk Paul Klees und die Rolle der Sprache 28 Paul Klee, Notebooks, Volume 1: The Thinking Eye, ed. Jürg Spiller, trans.
in seinem Denken und in seiner Kunst (Munich: Scaneg Verlag, 1992), 128. Ralph Manheim (New York: George Wittenborn, 1961), 103.
 decipher. To Make Visible (sichtbar machen) (1926; plate 59) is
more subtle, although a human figure still shares the visual field
108 with language: in this case, the words “sichtbar machen” (“to
make visible”). Disparate though visual and verbal elements may
be, they are now connected insofar as a nearly identical figure-
eight outlines both the eyes of the figure and the letter s of “si-
chtbar.” “Making visible” thus refers both to the very title of this
work, and to the function of art in general—not, as in The Bavari-
an Don Giovanni, to the names of individuals. Allowing shapes to
perform double-duty—a proclivity often found in Klee’s engage-
ment with the linguistic—is all the more appropriate here because,
whenever anything is made visible, it is accessible through the
sense of sight, or, to put it differently, through the eye.29 These
differences notwithstanding, The Bavarian Don Giovanni and To
Make Visible still share a common element. Since letters, in Klee’s
own words, eliminate foreshortening and, “force the third dimen-
sion into the flat plane,”30 word and image coexist in a “bookish”
space, perhaps a catalogue for The Bavarian Don Giovanni31
or a primer for To Make Visible. The writing is not inserted in a
conventional, illusionistic or perspectival visual frame but in one
already distorted and flattened to accommodate it. In the pro-
cess, the metaphor of the book—i.e., of a flat but heterogeneous
Fig. 2: Paul Klee (1879–1940), The Bavarian Don Giovanni (Der
field—displaces the governing metaphor for visual art since the
bayrische Don Giovanni), 1919/116. Watercolor and ink on paper,
22.5 x 21.3 cm, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY, Estate of Karl Renaissance: i.e., of a window on the world.
Nierendorf, 48.1172.69. In High and Shining Stands the Moon (Hoch und stralend
steht der Mond) (1916; fig. 3), Klee included a translation of a
one and the same. poem by Wang Seng Yu, and amended some of the words, as
Klee, it seems, was an astute student of the image/language if in a new form of illuminated manuscript: “Hoch” appropriately
relationship. In addition, and more surprisingly, he deployed for- appears to descend the slope of a hill while the o of “Mond”
mal and thematic strategies that anticipate arguments present- (“Moon,” in English) is much brighter than its surrounding letters,
day linguists, neuroscientists, and cognitive psychologists have making it stand out like an astral body.32 This provides a perfect
made about the birth of communication and the way the brain example of what Marianne Vogel calls Klee’s tripartite use of
processes writing. Since this aspect of his artistic production has shapes as letters, pictorial elements, and objective forms.33 In this
yet to be given attention in the art historical literature, it will oc- instance, Klee manufactured visual solutions that correlate to the
cupy a central place in this essay. And though the artist could not specific meanings of the words employed, if only in select ex-
have known, let alone digested, recent advances in linguistics, amples, because words seldom offer the opportunity to have a
cognitive psychology, and neuroscience, it will be the conten- single letter—in this case, the o of “Mond”—or an abstract form—a
tion of this study that, from this select, interdisciplinary perspec- circle—resemble the complete outline of the object to which they
tive, Klee’s subtle and distinctive engagements with the linguistic refer.
reveal a different logic than what emerges from traditional art In another poem Klee chose to “embellish,” Once Risen from
historical accounts, a logic that may mandate adopting a more the Gray of Night (Einst dem Grau der Nacht enttaucht) (1918;
elastic definition of what constitutes the linguistic. fig. 4), a text now attributable to the artist himself, color some-
times enhances, sometimes obscures the letters themselves, mak-
ing the poem difficult to read.34 (This ambiguity perhaps prompt-
Klee’s Use of Language ed Klee to write out the poem, in legible handwriting, and in its
At the outset, it is instructive to review some of the visual/con- entirety, immediately above the “illuminated” version.) The piece
ceptual models to which Klee alluded when inserting writing into thus juxtaposes two possible ways of manipulating language:
his images. Intriguingly, even a penchant for complexity did not one, in which letters are clearly outlined; and another, where
prevent him, on occasion, from employing language in a purely
conventional sense. The Bavarian Don Giovanni (Der bayrische
29 Aichele, Paul Klee’s Pictorial Writing, 15.
Don Giovanni) (1919), a not-so-veiled reference to Leporello’s fa- 30 Klee, Diaries, #425.
mous catalogue aria in Mozart’s opera, simply allows the names 31 Klee apparently kept such a catalogue himself, to remind him of “the great
of the artist’s fictive feminine conquests to float willy-nilly before sexual question” (ibid., #83).
32 Aichele, Paul Klee’s Pictorial Writing, 72.
the picture plane (fig. 2). Here, words refer to specific human 33 Vogel, Zwischen Wort und Bild, 121.
individuals, with no complicated puns or semantic allusions to 34 See Marc Le Bot, Paul Klee (Paris: Maeght, 1992), 88.
 they function as a scaffolding,
to use Jenny Anger’s term,35
within which changing colors
inject variety in the composi-
109
tion. Though color choice is by
no means predictable, Aichele
notes that the grays and blues
in the upper section reflect the
darker imagery of the poem’s
introduction, while certain in-
dividual words, such as “fire,”
are highlighted with orange
and yellow.36 These amend-
ments again demonstrate the
variety with which Klee em-
ployed language, not just from
work to work, but even within
the fabric of individual works
themselves. It is almost as if,
by presenting different pos-
Fig. 3: Paul Klee, High and Shining Stands the Moon (Hoch und stralend steht der Mond), 1916/20. sibilities, the artist invites us to
Watercolor and pen on paper, 14 x 24 cm, private collection.
ponder how or whether these
differences signify. Do colors
communicate effectively on their own, or only as auxiliaries to a
text? Does the application of color enhance or distract from the
interpretation of meaning? Are colors equal, or are some more
communicative than others? Klee may not have come to definitive
answers to these questions himself; instead, he conducted experi-
ments through which they might be asked and visualized.
Even so, just as The Bavarian Don Giovanni and To Make
Visible allude to a catalogue or a primer, respectively, High
and Shining Stands the Moon and Once Risen from the Gray of
Night recall typesetting grids, where letters fit in compartments
arranged along bands and rows, alternating size and font, but
retaining a flat, anti-illusionistic character. (On occasion, Klee
borrowed the age-old convention of enlarging or highlighting the
initial letter of a text, poem, or inscription.) Speaking of grids,
even architecture provided a geometric lattice into which he
inserted linguistic elements, as in City of Cathedrals (Stadt der
Kathedralen) (1927; plate 66). Façades, according to Andrew
Kagan, are “assembled from sign-units—Xs, Os, dashes, and so
forth—[and thus] are closely related to Klee’s numerous script
pictures.”37 They are also related, as André Masson cleverly no-
ticed, to pre-Colombian textiles,38 perhaps Inca quipu knotting
believed to comprise an accounting system or rudimentary al-
phabet (fig. 5). Klee might have been aware of this connection,
given that Anni Albers, the wife of Josef and a great admirer
of Klee, executed numerous woven patterns, one of which was

35 Jenny Anger, Paul Klee and the Decorative in Modern Art (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2004), 86.
36 Aichele, Paul Klee’s Pictorial Writing, 77; see also, Jürgen Glaesmer, Paul
Klee: The Colored Works (Bern: Kunstmuseum Bern, 1979), 47.
Fig. 4: Paul Klee, Once Risen from the Gray of Night (Einst dem Grau 37 Andrew Kagan, “Paul Klee’s ‘Polyphonic Architecture,’” Arts Magazine 54,
der Nacht enttaucht), 1918/17. Watercolor, pen, and pencil on paper; no. 8 (Jan. 1980): 156; see also Vogel, Zwischen Wort und Bild, 127, and
cut, recombined, and bordered with ink, 22.6 x 15.8 cm, Zentrum Paul Aichele, Paul Klee’s Pictorial Writing, 153–55.
Klee, Bern. 38 André Masson, Eulogy of Paul Klee (New York: Curt Valentin, 1950), np.
110

Fig. 5: Inca Quipu, rope, c. 1300–1532, Museo Larco, Lima.

Fig. 7: Paul Klee, Drawing Knotted in the Manner of a Net (Zeichnung

in der Art eines Netzes geknüpft), 1920/98. Pen and black ink on
wove paper, 31.1 x 19.1 cm, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, The
Berggruen Klee Collection, 1984.315.20.

on the upper right.40 Intriguingly, Mark Roskill described Klee’s

Fig. 6: Anni Albers (1899–1994), Open Letter, 1958. Weaving, 58.4 architectural designs as if they were tapestries: “The effect is of
x 59.7 cm, Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Bethany, CT. an ‘architecture’ that devolves, as in a tapestry, from the texturing
and the stratification or overlap of intercalated shapes, close up
revealingly entitled Open Letter (fig. 6). According to Virginia behind the picture plane.”41 Aichele says something similar of
Gardner Troy, Open Letter uses thread as text, as “individual pat- Let It Glow Outside (lass abseits glühn) (1915), where “letters
tern units that, when taken or ‘read’ as a whole, implies content appear to have as much material substance as architectural struc-
and meaning through the arrangement of codified visual informa- tures,” and a “semantic relationship” is established “between the
tion, analogous to the way one reads a paragraph composed of words and the fenestrated building façade.”42
letters, words, and sentences.”39 The same may be said of Klee’s In Ad Marginem (1930), Klee opted for still another ap-
own Drawing Knotted in the Manner of a Net (Zeichnung in der proach: instead of evoking architecture or textiles, he painted a
Art eines Netzes geknüpft) (1920; fig. 7), where the letter B ap- natural scene, distributing vegetal and animal forms at the mar-
pears six times on the upper left, and six times, though reversed, gins of the canvas, thereby explaining the use of the term “mar-
ginem” in the title (fig. 8). Drawn away from the center, where
it conventionally lies, our attention drifts toward multiple visual
39 Virginia Gardner Troy, Anni Albers and Ancient American Textiles: From
Bauhaus to Black Mountains (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2002), 156; see 40 Sabine Rewald, Paul Klee: The Berggruen Klee Collection in the Metropoli-
also Jenny Anger, “Paul Klee, Anni and Josef Albers, and Robert Rauschen- tan Museum of Art (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1988), 114­–15.
berg: Weaving and the Grid at Black Mountain College,” in Klee and 41 Mark Roskill, Klee, Kandinsky, and the Thought of Their Time: A Critical
America, ed. Josef Helfenstein and Elizabeth Hutton Turner (Ostfildern: Perspective (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 83.
Hatje Cantz, 2006), 238–53. 42 Aichele, Paul Klee’s Pictorial Writing, 4.
 111

Fig. 8: Paul Klee, Ad Marginem, 1930/210. Watercolor on varnish-

primed cardboard nailed to a stretcher, 46 x 36 cm, Kunstmuseum
Basel.

focal points at the periphery, undermining the conventions of one- Fig. 9: Paul Klee, Landscape near E (in Bavaria) (Landschaft bei E.
point, perspectival painting. In addition, Klee inserted a number [in Bayern]), 1921/182. Oil and pen on paper, cut, recombined and
bordered with watercolor and pen, 49.8 x 35.2 cm, Zentrum Paul
of isolated letters, r, u, l, and v in the same visual field, combining Klee, Bern.
the visually iconic and the arbitrarily symbolic, just as maps com-
bine the physical contours of territory and their corresponding Perchance, we are provided a walking map or a topographic
verbal labels.43 If Klee were now looking to maps for conceptual equivalent of a verbal itinerary,44 or meant to ponder the differ-
models, he would be capitalizing, not simply on their ability to ence between language and its referents. A long-debated idea
combine word and image, but also on their rotational symme- in the philosophy of language, the latter issue was given literal
try: specifically, the way we can instinctively turn maps around incarnation in conceptual art, when Joseph Kosuth, for one, jux-
to conform to the direction of our itinerary. Along these lines, it taposed real objects with their dictionary definitions. The contrast
is also worth mentioning that placing one cardinal point—e.g., between text and image in Klee’s pieces, though present, is less
north—at the top of maps is no less arbitrary than language is a jarring, primarily because the objects are not literal and the lin-
system of arbitrary signs, since some cultures place south there guistic components incomplete. Yet Klee still invites his audience
instead. By conceptualizing painting as a kind of map, rather to speculate about the potential disconnect between verbal and
than as an image conforming to the consistent and systematic visual information, if only because, as Aichele rightly posits, a
rules of linear perspective, Klee forces us to shift our vantage foreknowledge of the artist’s whereabouts at the time of the paint-
point, not only from the center to the periphery, but side-wise and ing’s execution is necessary to identify the abbreviation. Without
even upside down. that information, our ability to associate the painting with any lo-
Although Ad Marginem references no specific geographical cation, let alone to interpret the meaning of the initial itself, would
landmarks, other paintings do precisely that: e.g., Landscape be severely impeded.
near E (in Bavaria) (Landschaft bei E. [in Bayern]) (1921; fig. 9), If Landscape near E (in Bavaria) employs language referen-
perhaps an allusion to the village of Ebenhausen near Munich. tially, other pieces scatter letters throughout the picture plane,
Here, a letter is firmly embedded in the landscape, no different- ostensibly for their graphic qualities alone. According to Aichele,
ly than footpaths, rock formations, brickwork, or stylized trees. this mode exemplifies a shift in interest among modern artists

43 Ibid., 90. 44 Ibid., 98.

112

Fig. 11: Paul Klee, The Order of High C (Der Orden vom hohen C),
1921/100. Watercolor and pencil on paper bordered with watercolor,
Fig. 10: Paul Klee, Handbill for Comedians (Werbeblatt der Komiker),
32 x 23 cm, location unknown.
1938/42. Gouache and newsprint mounted on light cardboard, 48.6
x 32.1 cm, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, The Berggruen Klee
Collection, 1984.315.57.
tural units provided models for pictorial constructs that conformed
to a visual logic other than resemblance to the external world.”49
from “letter design to theories about the origin and nature of Aichele hits the nail on the head. Read laterally rather than in
language.”45 In this vein, Handbill for Comedians (Werbeblatt depth, letters rarely permit overlap, foreshortening, or perspec-
der Komiker) (1938; fig. 10) recalls ancient writing systems tive. As Klee crafted “scripts” that could be “read” from left to
whose meanings are not readily intelligible because they rely right or right to left, top to bottom or bottom to top, his audience
(like Egyptian hieroglyphs) partly on arbitrary signs, partly on registers these compositional configurations as flat, and peruses
pictographs.46 This combination prompted the philosopher Theo- them sequentially, like a writing system, not like the deep, illusion-
dor Adorno to call Klee’s work “hieroglyphic,” the code for which istic space of Western, post-Renaissance art.
“has been lost, a loss that plays into its content.”47 In Handbill, The same applies to The Order of High C (Der Orden vom ho-
Aichele likewise writes, Klee’s pictorial language ranges “from hen C) (1921; fig. 11), although the frame of reference is now the
denotative pictographs to nonfigurative abstractions.”48 She musical score,50 another sign system organized laterally rather
also mentions that, by the early twentieth century, a consensus than illusionistically, with the letter C evoking the open mouth of a
emerged that hieroglyphs combined phonograms (a verbal unit singer, again playing double-duty, just as eyes in To Make Visible
standing for a sound), logograms (a single symbol representing were denoted by a figure-eight. But instead of referencing the
an entire word without designating its pronunciation), and ab- sense of sight, Klee draws an analogy between sight and sound,
stract signs. Confined in geometric blocks, hieroglyphs, she con- as he did in Child Consecrated to Suffering (W = geweihtes Kind)
tinues, “were read from right to left and top to bottom.” For Klee, (1935; fig. 12), donning a child’s forehead with the letter W,
“these characteristic features of hieroglyphic signs and their struc- pronounced “Weh” in German, the very word for “suffering.” Yet
these two uses of letters are radically different: C functions both
45 Ibid., 114. to denote the opening of the mouth and to connote its arbitrary
46 Vogel, Zwischen Wort und Bild, 131.
47 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minne-
sota Press, 1997), 124. 49 Ibid.
48 Aichele, Paul Klee’s Pictorial Writing, 133. 50 Ibid., 82–85.
 correspond to the pitch of the
musical note. The unpredict-
ability with which Klee com-
bined word and image also
113
jibes with his strategy of substi-
tuting images for words, such
as signing his work with a clo-
ver: “der Klee” in German.51
Sometimes, he used codified
signs out of context, or invent-
ed new signs; his production is
so variegated because he him-
self loved “to reconcile…op-
posites! To express the great
manifold in a single word!”52

Klee,
Reading, and
Fig. 12: Paul Klee, Child Consecrated to Suffering (W = geweihtes Kind), 1935/31. Oil and watercolor on Neuroscience
paper mounted on board, 15.9 x 23.5 cm, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY, Room of Contemporary Even on the basis of this
Art Fund, RCA 1940:12. cursory, incomplete summary,
one can appreciate not only
the formal diversity of, but also the numerous conceptual sources
for Klee’s references to language: books, textiles, maps, typeset-
ting grids, illuminated manuscripts, architectural façades, musi-
cal scores, and non-Western hieroglyphs—just to name the most
obvious. Facing such pluralism, it stands to reason that art histo-
rians, pondering whether the word/image relationships Klee es-
tablished were disjunctive or conciliatory,53 dismiss the possibility
of a single, underlying rationale governing his engagement with
the linguistic. As Ann Temkin put it: “Klee’s signs are as flexible in
meaning as they are in size or shape.”54 This conclusion is widely
endorsed, and remains, in many respects, unassailable. All the
same, this essay will advance the proposition that Klee’s word/
image combinations veer more—though not exclusively—toward
disjunction than reconciliation, and that recent findings in neuro-
science, especially those pertaining to the biological constraints
on reading and writing, introduce new, more discriminatory con-
ceptual tools to support this premise.
From this perspective, Klee not only celebrated a modernist
sense of space; he also relied—unwittingly—on crucial skills hu-
man beings have acquired through evolution. Since writing is a
relatively new invention (the first alphabets are no more than five
thousand years old), natural selection had barely enough time
to engender a particular proficiency for the tasks of reading and
writing. On the other hand, it cannot be gainsaid that human
beings possess such a proficiency: namely, to recognize and
Fig. 13: Paul Klee, Villa R, 1919/153. Oil on cardboard, 26.5 x 22 decipher certain forms, the configurations of which correspond
cm, Kunstmuseum Basel. to the letters of the alphabets they learn.55 Current neuroscien-

meaning in musical notation; W has no comparable analog in 51 Klee, Diaries, #295.

human anatomy, unless it is meant to evoke a frown on the child’s 52 Ibid., #389.
53 Aichele, Paul Klee’s Pictorial Writing, 9.
forehead. Its reference to the sound “Weh” is also more direct, 54 Temkin, “Paul Klee and the Avant-Garde,” 31.
if only because pronouncing the letter C does not necessarily 55 See Stanislas Dehaene, Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of
114

Fig. 15: Paul Klee, The Rhine at Duisburg (der Rhein bei Duisburg),
1937/145. Gypsum, oil, and charcoal on cardboard, 18.4 x 27.3 cm,
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, The Berggruen Klee Collection,
1984.315.56.

specifically, that we re-channeled an ancient, acute sensitivity

to the visual character of our physical environment for the novel
purpose of inventing graphic forms of communication.61 These
relationships were not simply noticed by neuroscientists. Histori-
ans of language have also posited that the letter Y looks like a
stylized tree—a relationship to which Klee often hints, as in Park
near Lu[cerne] (Park bei Lu[zern]) (1938; fig. 14)—and have even
identified an ox’s head on its side as the source of the Greek
letter alpha, α, the origin of our letter A (if placed upside down,
Fig. 14: Paul Klee, Park near Lu[cerne] (Park bei Lu[zern]), 1938/129.
Oil and colored paste on paper and jute fabric, 100 x 70 cm, Zentrum
even our letter A still reveals this figural pedigree). As is well
Paul Klee, Bern. known, Klee owned a copy of Karl Weule’s study of early scripts,
Vom Kerbstock zum Alphabet: Urformen der Schrift (From Incised
tists resolve this conundrum by positing that human beings and Stick to Alphabet: The Original Forms of Writing) that appeared
their hominid ancestors inherited and honed an ability to detect in 1915. James Smith Pierce has already noted that diagrams
topographical landscape features—trees, rivers, rock formations, in the book juxtaposed identifiable, representational shapes and
etc., and the shapes of protective structures or natural shelters— the Chinese characters from which they were extrapolated.62 The
for millions of years.56 It can hardly be coincidental, then, that same may be said of many letters in our own alphabet. M for
letters such as T, Y, J, or L are stylized versions of such features.57 example, was derived from a stylized representation of water or
Quickly recognizable and easy to write, they qualify as ideal waves,63 a point with which Klee was either familiar or intuited,
candidates for inclusion in a writing system. Klee exploited this as may be seen in The Rhine at Duisburg (der Rhein bei Duisburg)
relationship with a vengeance; as Will Grohmann comments: (1937; fig. 15), or even in The Scales of Twilight (Die Waage der
“one cannot be sure whether the ciphers signify mere landscape Dämmerung) (1921; plate 5), where mountain peaks and de-
elements or figures.”58 Marcel Franciscono came to an analo- pressions are designated by means of a hybrid form, something
gous conclusion, writing that, to his mind, Klee reduces “things between an M and a W.
themselves—figures, plants, rocks, the very space—to a single kind But just as Klee gives with one hand, he takes away with the
of being.”59 As far as Villa R (1919; fig. 13) is concerned, Francis- other. He may have recognized that human beings cleverly ap-
cono claims that the R “is as much an object in the landscape as propriated landscape features to invent written language, yet, in
the villa, the hills, or the heavenly signs.”60 view of his proclivity for disjunction, he often frustrates our other
In combining, even confusing, landscape and linguistic ele- proclivity: namely, to discern meaning. Explaining how, though,
ments, Klee revisited a critical aspect of the birth of writing: requires a closer assessment of the reading process, and differ-
entiating that process from other ways of deciphering meaning.
a Human Invention (New York: Viking Press, 2009), 4.
Reading, after all, mandates coordinating a specific number of
56 Ibid., 137ff.
57 Ibid., 121ff. 61 Dehaene, Reading in the Brain, 144ff.
58 See Grohmann, Paul Klee, 335. 62 James Smith Pierce, “Pictographs, Ideograms, and Alphabets in the Work of
59 Franciscono, Paul Klee, 180. Paul Klee,” Journal of Typographic Research 1 (July 1967): 220.
60 Ibid., 184. 63 Ibid., 236.
complex tasks: distinguishing
large numbers of characters
from one another, upper- from
lower-case letters, variations in
115
fonts, and, when scripts are not
printed, widely different and
idiosyncratic forms of hand-
writing. In each case, reading
is contingent upon identifying
what is invariant—i.e., what
remains the same—among
the variety of ways the same
words may be represented.64
If a specific word is unread-
able, we will make educated
guesses depending on the
context, and against our own Fig. 16: Paul Klee, Dynamic Density, in Notebooks, Volume 1: The Thinking Eye, ed. Jürg Spiller, trans. Ralph
set of expectations about what Manheim (New York: George Wittenborn, 1961), 29.
its meaning might be.65 This
inclination even allows us to read misspelled words accurately, predisposed to respond, those predispositions were sharply rein-
and, occasionally, even to overlook the misspelling.66 Outside forced during exposure to the specific alphabets codified in their
conscious awareness, then, our brain continuously entertains and native cultures.
tests multiple alternatives, discarding some, accepting others, un- So much so, that, just as our sensitivity to some configurations
til a reasonable interpretation emerges. The ability to perceive intensifies, our sensitivity to others atrophies. Under cultural condi-
invariance, incidentally, is another trait we have inherited through tioning, we grow highly adept at detecting the minor differences
evolution: an animal unable to detect the same predator or prey between letters in our own writing system, to the detriment of our
under different conditions or from different vantage points will ability to detect those in others.71 Even if letters were originally
have little chance of survival. Accordingly, we are especially extrapolated from topographical landmarks, we register the con-
sensitive to letters such as T, Y, or L precisely because they cor- figurations of our own alphabets in such a localized part of the
respond to salient aspects of the physical environment—in other brain that they are understood as qualitatively different from the
words, aspects that tend to display greater invariance (allegedly, very natural forms from which they were originally adapted. Let-
even macaque monkeys have neurons that fire when looking at ters, in effect, form a world unto themselves and are processed
similar shapes).67 in a different part of the brain than numbers, though their con-
Letters such as T, Y, or L also resemble junctions: environmen- figurations may be remarkably similar (and even interchange-
tal features where different physical planes meet, thus signaling able across different languages).72 With all due respect to Fran-
important landmarks to remember or obstacles to negotiate.68 ciscono, then, letters and landscape structures are not “a single
Apparently, Klee grasped spatial relationships in similar terms; in kind of being.”73 As far as Villa R (fig. 13) is concerned, Rainer
his Notebooks, he illustrated analyses of visual tensions in the up- Crone, attuned to Klee’s penchant for disjunction, seems to be on
down, left-right directions by approximating letters such as H, T, the right track when he states that the R “steps uneasily into the
or L (fig. 16).69 In his Diaries, he likewise remarked that lines func- landscape…the R is of a different order, a different dimension,
tion “as frontiers between areas of different tonalities or colors.”70 than the rest of the scene.”74 When learning another language,
It therefore stands to reason that, as our ancestors invented writ- especially one whose alphabet does not correspond to our own,
ing systems, they appropriated shapes to which they had grown we notice these different “orders” or “dimensions” straightaway:
especially sensitive through evolution. Piggybacking on our in- in effect, we strain to learn and remember new configurations
herent sensitivity to detect topographical junctions in the environ- whose meanings at first escape us, reliving, as it were, the time
ment, they adapted crucial survival skills when inventing a new, when we first learned to read, and re-experience the struggle to
graphic means of communication. And though the configurations differentiate a set of unfamiliar symbols and its corresponding
they devised were ones to which human beings were already sounds.

71 Dehaene, Reading in the Brain, 21ff.

64 Dehaene, Reading in the Brain, 18. 72 Ibid., 56.
65 Ibid., 23. 73 Franciscono, Paul Klee, 180.
66 Ibid., 47. 74 Rainer Crone, “Cosmic Fragments of Meaning: On the Syllables of Paul
67 Ibid., 121. Klee,” in Paul Klee: Legends of the Sign, ed. Rainer Crone and Joseph
68 Ibid., 137ff. Leo Koerner (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 32. Marianne
69 Klee, The Thinking Eye, 29. Vogel seems to concur in Zwischen Wort und Bild, 132, and Aichele in Paul
70 Klee, Diaries, #842. Klee’s Pictorial Writing, 62.
 As is well known, Klee was fascinated with the state of child-
hood. “I begin to execute forms,” he confessed, “as if I knew noth-
116 ing about painting…like a self-taught man, without looking left or
right.”75 He even described himself as a “childish man.”76 To be
sure, claims of this kind—throwing conventions to the wind and
seeing the world with complete naïveté, like a child—were voiced
by so many modern artists as to take on the status of pedestrian
clichés. But in Klee’s case, these statements indicate more than
mere rhetorical posturing or grandstanding. One could make the
argument that the artist frustrates our natural desire to discern
meaning, not so much by reverting to childhood as by forcing
us to revisit the state when reading was not the effortless activity
we take for granted as mature adults, but the slow and arduous
task it is for pre-literate children. Our inability to “read” Handbill
for Comedians (fig. 10) can be attributed, arguably, not just to
our having no frame of reference to decode the “hieroglyphs,”
but also to our inability to contextualize the marks. Some are
figural elements; others are letters; others still appear completely
abstract. As such, they do not form a consistent, interpretable
system. If a surrounding context permits us to decipher misspelled
words, or those scribbled in particularly bad handwriting, Klee’s
piece offers so little contextual assistance that one begins to sus-
pect that it was specifically concocted to frustrate, not facilitate,
interpretation.
This frustration also dispels the mistaken notion that, because
of their pictographic quality, hieroglyphs evince greater transpar-
Fig. 17: Paul Klee, Ad Marginem (upside down), 1930/210.
ency than arbitrary signs. On the contrary, hieroglyphs required
Watercolor on varnish-primed cardboard nailed to a stretcher, 46 x 36
considerable time and effort to decipher, especially those that cm, Kunstmuseum Basel.
designate, not an object or animal, but an idea. In fact, it is pre-
cisely because of their semantic inconsistency and relative opac- letters, pictorial elements, or both.78 To make matters worse, Klee
ity that hieroglyphs have progressively disappeared from most combined such ambiguous shapes with pictographic forms, thus
writing systems (even the Egyptians developed simpler forms of deliberately reversing the historical evolution of writing from hi-
graphic communication for everyday use). In a code where a dif- eroglyphs to alphabets. Resurrecting its antecedent, pictographic
ferent sign represents a different object or idea, the reader—since origins, the artist hints at some secret message to be decoded,
objects or ideas are potentially limitless—must commit hundreds yet, seeking to imbue his art with a sense of mystery, withholds
of signs to memory, making writing and reading accessible only that meaning from the beholder. In effect, Klee injected his own
to those who can devote inordinate amounts of time to study. archaeologically informed insights into his art to evoke the be-
Not surprisingly, the majority of individuals living in cultures em- ginnings of things—specifically, critical aspects of the earliest
ploying hieroglyphic or pictographic scripts are illiterate. On the codified writing systems—but in ways that were deliberately nebu-
other hand, if a limited number of letters were devised—say, some lous (one thinks of Jean Laude’s term “fictive archaeology”79 or
thirty or so—whose combination represent the majority (or even Claude Frontisi’s “pseudo-écriture”80).
all) of the sounds emitted in the spoken language, then the system If we revisit Ad Marginem (fig. 8) with these ideas in mind,
is self-contained, easy to learn, and infinitely expandable. While we readily concede that the individual letters, r, u, v, l, are clearly
inventing his fictive signs, however—we dare not use the term “sys- legible. But given that, contrary to everyday experience, plants
tem”—Klee deliberately resisted this tendency. His signs are un- are sprouting from all four edges of the work, and that, in full
readable, but, as Joseph Leo Koerner puts it, still “recognizable defiance of gravity, a bird walks upside down at the upper bor-
as writing. They cannot be mistaken for ‘mere’ decoration.”77 der of the painting, it may be reasonable to speculate that Klee
Koerner’s observation is sound, but so is Marianne Vogel’s warn- invites his audience to peruse the work from all four possible ori-
ing—that an O, an X, or a V comprise such simple, rudimentary entations.81 (In his Notebooks, he even mentions the possibility
forms that it is impossible to determine whether they are indeed
78 Vogel, Zwischen Wort und Bild, 121.
79 Laude, “Paul Klee,” 384.
75 Klee, Diaries, #425, #429. 80 Claude Frontisi, “Klee pictographe,” in Les Pictographes: L’Esthétique de
76 Ibid., #431. For the contemporary interest in the child, see also Francis- l’icône au XXème siècle, Didier Ottinger et al. (Les Sables d’Olonne: Musée
cono, Paul Klee, 92ff. de l’Abbaye Sainte-Croix, 1992), 64.
77 Koerner, “Paul Klee and the Image of the Book,” in Legends of the Sign, 66. 81 For another example, see Landscape with Yellow Birds (Landschaft mit gel-
 the more.83 It also means that, when orientation is altered, our
detection of invariance is considerably weaker when it comes
to letters than to other features of the environment, probably be-
cause reading was invented so late in our evolutionary history.84
117
Though we recognize natural forms with no difficulty when re-
versed, we need to tilt our necks to read the spines of books,
and, experience great difficulty deciphering texts printed upside
down. Again, we would be in a position not dissimilar to that of
children learning letters for the first time, a position in which Klee
cleverly connives to place us. This interpretation might also jibe
with an argument posited by Andrew Kagan: that Klee’s work
and philosophy were informed by the eighteenth-century musical
theorist Johann Josef Fux’s treatise, Gradus ad Parnassum, from
which one of Klee’s own pieces, Ad Parnassum, was partially
Fig. 18: Joseph Jastrow (1863–1944), Do You See a Duck or a Rabbit,
or Either?, “The Mind’s Eye,” Popular Science Monthly 54 (1899): 312. inspired. Although this is not the place to review Kagan’s con-
tribution, suffice to say that Fux’s ambition was to lay out, for
music theory and composition, a “method similar to that by which
children learn first letters, then syllables, and finally how to read
and write.”85
But as fascinated as Klee was with the learning process, he
ostensibly relished its enhancement less than its undoing. It was
stated earlier that, as we learn to read, we become highly sen-
sitized to the minute distinctions among letters in our alphabet.
Just as importantly, we are equally sensitized to recognize faces,
though both letters and faces are processed in different parts of
the brain.86 For all intents and purposes, faces are one thing, let-
ters another. (In a way this mutual-exclusivity recalls our ability to
see rabbits and ducks [fig. 18], or faces and vases, in the same
image, but not both simultaneously.) Klee, of course, had no ac-
cess to MRI machines, nor could he observe how the brain ab-
sorbs different forms of information in real time. Even so, with no
cognizance of the latest findings in neuroscience, Klee, ever the
rabble-rouser, sought to confuse those very circuits by construct-
ing faces out of letters (fig. 19). To be sure, combining a variety of
disparate elements to form human figures is a common practice in
his overall production—as in To Make Visible (plate 59) and The
Order of High C (fig. 11); but examples such as Death and Fire
(Tod und Feuer) (1940; fig. 20) are especially emblematic of the
Fig. 19: Paul Klee, WI (In Memoriam), 1938/135. Watercolor, artist’s tendency to induce ambiguity by conflating facial features
gouache and plaster on burlap, 52 x 45.5 cm, sold at Christie’s Nov. with linguistic elements. In the main figure, the two eyes, nose,
6, 2008.
and mouth of the face are composed by the letters T, O, D—the
word “Tod,” German for death. Thus, even as faces and letters
of uniting multiple perspectives “into a single median collective are processed in different parts of the brain, and register as fun-
viewpoint.”82) Notice that, in Ad Marginem, plants and animals damentally different entities, Klee collapses both, running afoul
are still easily readable even if located upside down—the celestial of our expectations and, as if by design, undermines our ability to
sphere requires no commentary, of course, because it is perfectly read and decipher. Perhaps he even found such a disconcerting
symmetrical—but letters are completely unreadable at this orien-
tation (fig. 17), foregrounding the arbitrariness of their design all
83 Michel Butor, “Conference on Word and Image” (Berlin, 1989) discussed
in Jeremy Adler, “Paul Klee as ‘Poet-Painter,’” in Art, Word and Image,
ed. John Dixon Hunt, David Lomas, and Michael Corris (London: Reaktion
Books, 2010), 178–79.
ben Vögeln) (1923), which James Smith Pierce connects to sources in folk 84 Dehaene, Reading in the Brain, 18–21.
art (Pierce, Klee and Primitive Art, 14) as well as Klee, The Thinking Eye, 40. 85 Johann Josef Fux, Steps to Parnassus: The Study of Counterpoint, trans. Al-
As early as 1908, moreover, Klee admitted to turning works upside down to fred Mann (New York: Norton, 1943), 17; see Andrew Kagan, “Paul Klee’s
“stress lines as feeling directs” (Felix Klee, ed., Paul Klee: His Life and Work ‘Ad Parnassum’: The Theory and Practice of Eighteenth-Century Polyphony
in Documents [New York: George Braziller, 1962], 14). as Models for Klee’s Art,” Arts Magazine 52, no. 1 (Sept. 1977): 92.
82 Klee, The Thinking Eye, 159. 86 Dehaene, Reading in the Brain, 76–78.
 combination specifically appropriate for a suggestion of mortal-
ity, though this question must remain an open one.
118 Klee even reveled in disjunction while orchestrating disparate
signs to converge into a consistent meaning. In Child Consecrat-
ed to Suffering (fig. 12), we had already mentioned that Klee
devised a scenario where meaning and sound reinforce each
other (since the letter W is pronounced “Weh” in German, the
same sound as the word for “suffering”). But neuroscientists have
discovered that the reception of meaning (the lexical route) and
the reception of sound (the phonic route) are actually quite dis-
similar, again taking different paths toward different areas in the
brain. Proficient readers do not fully pronounce words to under-
stand them—that is inefficient and time consuming; instead, they
take the lexical route and recall meanings instantly. Only when
a word is especially long, complex, and unfamiliar do they de-
celerate their reading and take the phonic route by enunciating
every syllable, almost the way a child reads.87 The lexical route
not only proves more efficient; it also confers a number of ad-
vantages. In English, for example, the letter B is pronounced the
same way as the verb “to be” and the insect “bee.” These words
have the same sound, though completely different meanings—an
ambiguity that is effortlessly registered by adults, but that children Fig. 20: Paul Klee, Death and Fire (Tod und Feuer), 1940/332. Oil
and colored paste on burlap, 46.7 x 44.6 cm, Zentrum Paul Klee,
master only with time. That spelling is so irregular seems illogical, Bern.
even downright frustrating, especially when sound translates so
inconsistently in writing. Yet these incongruities serve a valuable meaning (lexical and phonetic89) just as he required us, in Death
purpose: helping us to identify meanings with greater rapidity. and Fire, to engage two different brain mechanisms (reading lan-
If the letter B, the verb “to be,” and the insect “bee” were all guage and recognizing faces) to interpret the same form.
spelled the same way (i.e., as they are pronounced), greater con- Accordingly, Klee’s employment of letters that evoke sounds
textual information would be required to understand which sense should be clearly differentiated from his invented pictographs
was intended each time we encountered these words. We may that do not. In spite of its ambiguity and simplicity, the W in
commit more spelling mistakes employing a linguistic system with Child Consecrated to Suffering qualifies as an example of “full”
numerous homonyms, but at least meanings are accessible with or “complete” writing: i.e., writing that 1) has a communicative
greater dispatch.88 purpose, 2) consists of graphic marks on a durable surface, and
But even though spelling is considerably more transparent in 3) relates conventional marks to articulate speech.90 Most early
German than in English, were it not for the title, we would experi- versions of writing, as well as the majority of Klee’s pseudo-
ence difficulty interpreting the W in Child Consecrated to Suffer- alphabetic marks, might fulfill at least one of these criteria, but
ing. Klee obviously did not mean the mark on the child’s fore- rarely all three—and would therefore qualify only as “incomplete
head to be read with greater dispatch. To register its meaning, we writing.” Although most art consists of graphic marks on a lasting
need to revert to that more primitive way of reading: namely, by surface created for the purpose of communication, it is undeni-
thinking of the pronunciation of the letter (the phonic route) rather able that, in Child Consecrated to Suffering, the letter W relates
than simply recording its meaning (the lexical one). It remains un- to conventional speech. This condition obviously applies to High
clear, moreover, whether the W should be read only as the word and Shining Stands the Moon and Once Risen from the Gray of
“Weh,” or also as a frown on the child’s face, an abstract form, Night (figs. 3 and 4), since these pieces are “illuminations” of po-
or all of the above. Alternatively, the image might function as a ems written out by the artist in full, but it might also apply to Death
rebus: as when “N ♥ U” means: “I love you,” but no other part and Fire (fig. 20) and to Serpent’s Prey (Schlangenbeute) (1926;
of the piece conforms to this reading. As it is, only the letter W is plate 35). In the latter, the letter S not only imitates the snake’s
meant to be pronounced phonetically. Klee, then, was absolutely sinuous form, as well as the first letter of the animal’s name, but
correct to insist that all visual art begins with a title because, in its its pronunciation also recalls its hissing sound. Note that, unlike
absence, the intended meaning of the W would most likely have the W in Child Consecrated to Suffering, the phonetic connec-
escaped his audience. In which case, the image provides anoth- tion works in numerous languages: e.g., “Schlange” in German,
er example of Klee’s combining two radically different routes to “serpent” in French, “snake” in English, or “serpiente” in Spanish.

89 Ibid., 115.
87 Ibid., 27. 90 Steven Roger Fisher, A History of Writing (London: Reaktion Books, 2005),
88 Ibid., 29ff. 12.
 119

Fig. 23: Phaistos Disk, Minoan Bronze Age (c. 1600 BCE). Fired clay,
15 (diam.) cm, Heraklion Archaeological Museum, Crete.

Serpent’s Prey might thus represent one of those few instances

where letter, sound, meaning, and literal shape all manage to
converge—few, because the word for snake, of course, does not
even begin with an S in all languages using Latin script. Inciden-
Fig. 21: Paul Klee, Flowers in Stone (Blumen in Stein), 1939/638. Oil tally, the Egyptian hieroglyph for snake became transformed
on cardboard, 50 x 39.8 cm, Stiftung Sammlung Bernhard Sprengel,
Hanover. through the Proto-Sinaitic, Phoenician, early Greek, Greek, and
Latin alphabets into our letter N, not S.91

Klee and the History of Writing

Though unacquainted with present-day neuroscience, Klee
was familiar with the history of writing. And, one presumes, with
the multi-directionality of some early scripts, where one line could
read from left to right, the second from right to left, and so on.
This condition clearly pertains to “hieroglyphic” pieces such as
Handbill for Comedians (fig. 10), since, unlike examples of Latin
script, the direction in which the work should be “read” remains
unclear. James Smith Pierce argued, moreover, that Klee appro-
priated the employment of the spiral form in pieces such as, say,
Flowers in Stone (Blumen in Stein) (1939; fig. 21) or the bottom
right corner of Untitled (Still Life) (Ohne Titel [Stillleben]) (1940;
fig. 22) from the “folk practice of inlaying table-tops with con-
trasting woods or marbles of various colors representing knives,
forks, spoons.”92 But Klee may also have known the configuration
of early alphabets found on, say, the Cretan Phaistos Disk of c.
1600 BCE (fig. 23). In his Notebooks, he studied the develop-
ment of movement in multiple directions, and subjected writing,
not just to spiral, but also to mirror reversal,93 as we have already
seen in Drawing Knotted in the Manner of a Net (fig. 7). This
way, he not simply undermined the Western tradition of one-point

Fig. 22: Paul Klee, Untitled (Still Life) (Ohne Titel [Stillleben]), 1940. Oil 91 Ibid., 48.
92 Pierce, Klee and Primitive Art, 20.
on canvas, 100 x 80.5 cm, private collection.
93 Klee, The Thinking Eye, 427; Briefe, 2:1105.
120

Fig. 25: Karl Weule (1864–1926), Comparative Compilation of

Characters, in Vom Kerbstock zum Alphabet (Stuttgart: Kosmos, 1915), 40.

Fig. 26: Paul Klee, Exercise in Capital Letters (Jan. 9, 1922), in The
Thinking Eye, 215.

Fig. 24: Paul Klee, Pastorale (Rhythms) (Pastorale [Rythmen]), not so deft, and for that reason sometimes of more use to you. The
1927/20. Tempera on canvas mounted on wood, 69.3 x 52.4 cm, right hand writes more naturally, the left more hieroglyphically.
The Museum of Modern Art, NY, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Fund and
exchange, 157.1945. Good handwriting, however, is not mere accuracy, but expres-
sion (keep the Chinese in mind) and with exercise it will grow
perspective, and indulged in his love of opposing movement and more sensitive, more spiritual.”96 In fact, Klee himself wrote with
counter-movement;94 he also turned back the historical clock by his right hand but painted with his left,97 and, according to his
resurrecting a freer, less restrictive aspect of setting (and read- son, Felix, “could do mirror-writing nimbly and correctly with his
ing) information. As languages became more standardized, such left hand.”98 He sometimes reversed words in his works—such as
inconsistencies were gradually corrected, though Klee probably “WIR” into “RIW” in The Angel and the Distribution of Presents
disapproved of these “corrections,” judging them to have robbed (der Engel und die Bescherung)99—and was also very attentive
language of the creative force it shared with visual art, perhaps to the way Felix learned language: the sounds he emitted, the
prompting him to adapt less restrictive configurations in Flowers mishaps he made as he mimicked his parents’ words, and, even
in Stone or Untitled (Still Life). Given the diversity of his produc- more importantly for our purposes, the syllables he inverted.100
tion, however, he still condescended to implement some of these Along these lines, it is intriguing that, at a specific moment
corrective devices in Pastorale (Rhythms) (Pastorale [Rythmen]) in time, some writing systems—such as the Brahmi, Greek, and
of 1927 (fig. 24), inserting bands in between the rows of script, Latin—completely changed the orientation of select letters. Used
much like a musical score.95 All the same, though the lines are no differently than before, they were simply reversed as though
clearly distinguished from one another, their directionality still re- reflected in a mirror.101 Weule’s Vom Kerbstock zum Alphabet
mains unclear, to say nothing of their meaning. included a diagram clearly showing some of these reversals (fig.
Though obviously not a professional linguist, Klee must have 25). James Smith Pierce even illustrated this very diagram and
understood the ambi-directionality of some early scripts. In 1938, Klee’s Bauhaus studies (fig. 26) in the same article, but without
he executed a painting combining arbitrary signs with hiero- drawing a direct connection between them.102 The reason for
glyphs, bedecked with arrows pointing both left and right, which
he appropriately called nach rechts, nach links (To the Right,
96 See Grohmann, Paul Klee, 374–75.
To the Left). He also recommended that his students keep both 97 Klee, The Thinking Eye, 427.
hands in practice, “for the left works differently from the right. It is 98 Klee, His Life and Work, 50.
99 Vogel, Zwischen Wort und Bild, 131.
100 Klee, Diaries, #858.
94 Vogel, Zwischen Wort und Bild, 142–43. 101 See Fisher, A History of Writing, 126, 137.
95 Laude, “Paul Klee,” 368–69. 102 Pierce, “Pictographs, Ideograms, and Alphabets,” 222, 226.
these alphabetic changes is unclear; perhaps some scribes found of writing operate: their configuration is compact enough to be
some letters still recognizable—i.e., detectable as invariant—yet easily written, their size is neither too small nor too large to tax
easier to write in reverse. As other scribes concurred, the innova-
tion spread like an epidemic throughout their respective cultures.
the retina’s scanning ability, and regular intervals are inserted in
between them to exclude overlap, permitting the reader to dif-
121
Regardless, Klee’s cognizance of these reversals should expand ferentiate element from element.112
the range of his configurations that can legitimately be called Yet, if some provide only the “look” or “feel” of writing, is Smith
“letters,” or at least answer Marianne Vogel’s question as to Pierce justified in calling Klee’s hieroglyphic markings “forgeries”
whether a reversed B or mirror-reflected J should be considered and “caprices,”113 or Laude a “lure,” a “form of deception”?114
a letter or an abstract form.103 Though severe, these terms, given the artist’s love of irony and
It goes without saying, moreover, that, in order to be adopted ambiguity, are apposite. Klee’s hybrid combinations, after all,
within any writing system, alphabetic characters must respect seem to be specifically concocted to generate mixed signals,
limitations governing human physical dexterity and be relatively induce uncertainty, and frustrate our low tolerance for meaning-
easy to outline. Any character too time-consuming to set down lessness. But, from the other side, might not this frustration also
becomes a good candidate for simplification or elimination. Not play a constructive role in, and contribute to, the overall mean-
surprisingly, historians of writing have remarked that, despite ing of Klee’s work? Earlier, Adorno was cited as having labeled
their superficial differences, most alphabetic systems throughout Klee’s markings “hieroglyphic,” the code for which “has been
the world betray noticeable similarities: the majority of charac- lost, a loss that plays into its content.”115 On this account, perhaps
ters are compact and can be outlined in a few strokes.104 And Klee’s failure to signify actually signifies, its very meaninglessness
they must also be neither too large nor too small to overtax the proves meaningful. To this author’s mind, this line of investigation
scanning capacity of our retina.105 Joseph Leo Koerner was cited seems highly promising, though Adorno unfortunately refrained
above as saying that, though many of Klee’s signs are unread- from exploring his own insight, and did not explain how the loss
able, they are “recognizable as writing. They cannot be mis- of meaning creates meaning in the works of Klee.
taken for ‘mere’ decoration.”106 Aichele also argued that Klee May we turn to neuroscience for assistance? Curiously,
exploited “the potential inherent” in graphic forms of represen- though reading and writing are synonymous with the transfer
tation “that resembled writing but could not be read.”107 These of information, these now ordinary and commonplace activities
statements are persuasive, but it is also worth asking: how exactly are, for all that, not fully comprehended by science. How the
do we recognize Klee’s markings as writing, especially if they human brain registers small markings as syllables, words, and
are unreadable?108 Why do they not simply strike us as abstract sentences, capable of inciting, say, all the meanings and emo-
marks? As Jean Laude put it, writing invites reading, but, here, tions we experience while reading literature, is still a source of
there is nothing to read, if, by reading, of course, we mean scan- wonder even (nay, especially) to neuroscientists. Paradoxically,
ning arbitrary marks that convey codified meanings.109 Might not insofar as brain functioning is concerned, scientific knowledge
the very definition of writing mandate that it be readable? On frequently advances when something goes awry. If a patient
this account, even the term “sign,” if used in the Saussurian sense, loses an ability or skill after a stroke or accident, localizing any
i.e., comprising both a signifier and a signified, both of which are anatomical damage identifies which part of the brain governs
arbitrary and conventional, proves altogether inappropriate in that ability or skill. Predictably, when specific areas are injured,
Klee’s case.110 To qualify as signs, the marks would need to be patients—again, regardless of culture, linguistic ability, or the writ-
decodable—at least to someone. ing system learned—lose the ability to recognize and differenti-
On this very point, Jean Laude interjected that, though it may ate the letters of their own alphabets, robbing them of their abil-
not hold true in every case, Klee’s markings betray little if any ity to read.116 Might a similar motivation, on a cognitive rather
repetition, which would be expected of any working alphabetic than anatomical level, underlie Klee’s ostensible deployment of
code.111 One would have to concede, therefore, that many of illegibility? Many of the characteristics he exploited in his pic-
Klee’s inscriptions, at least those that are undecipherable, qualify torial use of language—the reliance on pictographs and hiero-
neither as language nor as signs in the strict sense of the term. glyphs, the approximation of letters and topographical features,
Even so, Koerner and Aichele are still on to something: even if the ambi-directionality of script—were gradually eliminated from
they are not, the markings have the “look” or “feel” of writing. writing systems, primarily to dispel ambiguity and inject great-
Why? Arguably, because Klee cleverly made them conform to er clarity in the communicative process. By reintroducing these
both the visual and manual constraints under which most forms characteristics, Klee was suggesting the beginnings of things. (As
Martin Heidegger declared: “The beginning is the strangest and
103 Vogel, Zwischen Wort und Bild, 122. mightiest. What comes afterward is…[an] inability to retain the
104 Dehaene, Reading in the Brain, 177.
105 Ibid., 13–18.
106 Koerner, “Paul Klee and the Image of the Book,” in Legends of the Sign, 66.
107 Aichele, Paul Klee’s Pictorial Writing, 196. 112 Dehaene, Reading in the Brain, 174ff.
108 See Temkin, “Paul Klee and the Avant-Garde,” 28. 113 Pierce, “Pictographs, Ideograms, and Alphabets,” 223.
109 Laude, “Paul Klee,” 382. 114 Laude, “Paul Klee,” 389.
110 See also Vogel, Zwischen Wort und Bild, 125. 115 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 124.
111 Laude, “Paul Klee,” 388. 116 Dehaene, Reading in the Brain, 54ff.
 encodes information about its
mirror image,118 ensuring that
122 we recognize it from other
angles, and understand that a
different contour does not de-
note a different object.119 But
what is advantageous in one
context may be detrimental in
another. The very sensitivity to
invariance that ensures surviv-
al in our physical environment
actually impedes our ability to
read. Small children frequently
confuse the letter b with the let-
ter d, and often spontaneously
write in reverse. Of course, no
human body is perfectly sym-
metrical, and most individuals
are right-handed, implying that
one side is invariably privi-
leged in our left/right orienta-
tion. Even so, similar mistakes
have been observed the world
over, irrespective of culture
or alphabetic system used.120
Fascinated by his own son’s
process of learning language,
and by his inversion of syl-
lables, Klee must have sensed
something of the tension be-
tween our biological instincts
and the social conventions of
reading and writing. Although
speaking comes naturally,121
reading does not. And even if
Fig. 27: Stanislas Dehaene (b. 1965), Hypothetical Model for the Neuronal Hierarchy Supporting Visual children outgrow their difficul-
Word Recognition, in Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention (New York: ties—except for those stricken
Viking, 2009), 151. with severe learning disabili-
ties—the problems they face
beginning.” ) But was he also attempting to understand how while learning to read tell us a great deal about the mind. Spe-
117

language works by depriving it of its strange, mighty power to cifically, how artificial and contrived reading and writing actually
communicate? are, and, even if ancient biological abilities have been adapted
The mirror reversal of the Brahmi, Greek, and Latin scripts, for to this new skill, performing it may require leaving some of our
example, echoed in several of the Bauhaus exercises, cannot be own primary instincts behind, not least of which is our acute sen-
ascribed exclusively to the greater ease with which characters sitivity to what is invariant in symmetrical images.122
might be jotted down in reverse. There must be something about In keeping with his penchant to reverse the hands of time, it
mirror symmetry that proves salient to our condition as embod- was, no doubt, an attempt—however intuitive—to recover some-
ied beings—even before culture makes its indelible mark upon us. thing of the ambidexterity of the pre-reading brain that Klee
In the wild, for instance, an ability to identify predator or prey hoped to tap by prompting his students to draw with both hands,
regardless of vantage point is a distinctive advantage. In fact,
whenever the brain encodes information about an object, it also 118 Dehaene, Reading in the Brain, 272.
119 Ibid., 132.
120 Ibid., 264.
121 See Stephen Pinker, The Language Instinct (New York: Harper Perennial,
117 Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics (New Haven: Yale Univer- 1995).
sity Press, 1959), 155. 122 Dehaene, Reading in the Brain, 266ff.
or subjecting letters to mirror symmetry experiments in his Bau-
haus studies. Even more startling, and difficult to explain, is how Language and Movement
those same studies closely resemble a diagram Stanislas De-
haene devised (fig. 27) to distinguish the different areas of the
An important element unaddressed in Dehaene’s diagram,
yet directly relevant to any investigation of Klee’s aesthetic pro-
123
brain, and the hierarchical levels and discrete degrees of spe- duction, is how the brain processes the very physicality of writ-
cialization, at which neurons detect contrasts, contours, charac- ing. As intimated above, the limited space the retina registers at
ter shapes, individual letters, consonants, entire words and word any given moment constrains reading just as the size and range
combinations—the very neuronal chain of command, as it were, of our hand and wrist motion constrains writing. All the same,
that sets the process of reading into motion.123 Since Klee was writing, in our culture at least, varies from highly regimented, me-
unacquainted with these findings, any similarity between his ped- chanical typeface to the most spontaneous forms of calligraphy,
agogical sketches (fig. 26) and present-day diagrams of brain the latter often displaying no less variety and expressivity than
mechanisms responsible for language comprehension is purely individual strokes on a painted canvas.
accidental, and, most likely, would never have been noticed by Prone to experiment, Klee varied the technique with which
the present author were it not for the letter E being used in both he executed his marks.128 Sometimes, he courted a typographic
cases. But Klee was not insensitive to the way the brain processes quality, leaving the impression that his manner was impersonal
information. In notes published under the rubric Pedagogical and unemotional; at other times, he nearly incised his marks into
Sketchbook, he intimated that our vision is limited, that the eye thickly applied layers of paint, like a scribe writing on a clay
cannot scan entire surfaces with equal intensity. “The limitation tablet as old as the script itself (fig. 24). By evoking a distant
of the eye,” he writes, “is its inability to see even a small surface past, Klee endowed some of his images, as Charles Haxthau-
equally sharp at all points. The eye must ‘graze’ over the surface, sen has argued, with a certain “auratic” quality, as if his piece,
grasping sharply portion after portion, to convey them to the rare and priceless, warranted preservation in an archaeologi-
brain which collects and stores the impressions.”124 Present-day cal museum.129 Perchance, Klee appreciated writing’s ability to
neuroscientists call these eye movements “saccades”—also ac- give ideas a lasting physical presence they do not otherwise
knowledging that the eye takes in impressions only part to part, possess,130 a dichotomy that also evokes the lag between having
and then remits those impressions to the brain, where they finally an immaterial idea and its literal inscription, the temporariness
coalesce into holistic impressions. These limitations constrain our of one and the endurance of the other. But even as they leave
reading ability, since we are able to identify only about ten or enduring physical traces behind, different scripts do not perdure
twelve letters per saccade.125 Intriguingly, Jean Laude writes that equally. Ancient languages can bequeath a set of symbols for
Klee was describing a procedure analogous to that of reading posterity even as they themselves become extinct: e.g., although
in the proper sense of the term,126 in which case, the similarity we still use Latin script in Western Europe and the Americas, the
between Klee’s Bauhaus studies and Dehaene’s diagram may original language has fallen out of common usage. This discrep-
not be that coincidental after all. ancy between the permanent and the impermanent, the graphic
If permitted to speculate as to what this similarity might sig- marks and their meanings, might have intrigued Klee, perhaps
nify, one could propose that, just as Klee regressed from the al- because this condition approximates that of art. If written long
phabetic to the hieroglyphic, from the unidirectional to the multi- ago, an inscription’s message, for all intents and purposes, is sub-
directional, and from the lexical to the phonic, he also stymied full ject to erosion, even loss. The same applies to works of art, even
access to word identity. Given his propensity, as Aichele so aptly those created in the present, if the audience remains insensitive
put it, for “syntactical peculiarities that have a particularly disori- to the artist’s worldview. Feeling misunderstood, Klee could have
enting effect,”127 then, in that same spirit, Klee concocted scenar- associated his work with ancient scripts whose markings endure
ios that, though unbeknownst to him, derailed the functioning of physically, but whose meanings do not. Even as he forged these
neural mechanisms that support word recognition. Allowing us— associations, transcribing such scripts literally and factually in his
just barely—to recognize letters, but prohibiting them from forming work was unfeasible. Unfeasible, not simply because Klee was
consonants, let alone intelligible words or word combinations, no plagiarist,131 but because he could not exclude their poten-
Klee manufactured a kind of cerebral traffic jam. Beneath his tial decipherment in the future, in which case his point about the
art’s look of innocence, and his apparent playful temperament, erosion of meaning would be defeated. To mark the erasure of
Klee labored to hold our full understanding in check, perhaps meaning, Klee, ironically enough, had to erase meaning from his
hoping to learn something, however rudimentary or basic, from marks.
the frustration or lack of fulfillment experienced as a result. A similar interest may have motivated him to combine antithet-

128 Vogel, Zwischen Wort und Bild, 136.

129 See also Charles Werner Haxthausen, “Zwischen Darstellung und Parodie:
123 Ibid., 151. Klees ‘auratische’ Bilder,” in Paul Klee: Kunst und Karriere; Beiträge des
124 Paul Klee, Pedagogical Sketchbook, trans. Sibyl Maholy-Nagy (New York: internationalen Symposiums in Bern, ed. Oskar Bätschmann and Josef Hel-
Praeger, 1953), 33. fenstein (Bern: Stämpfli, 2000), 9–26.
125 Dehaene, Reading in the Brain, 16. 130 Klee, The Thinking Eye, 17. See also Paul Klee, “Philosophie de la création,”
126 Laude, “Paul Klee,” 365. in Théorie de l’art moderne (Paris: Gonthier-Méditation, 1964), 58.
127 Aichele, Paul Klee’s Pictorial Writing, 208. 131 Aichele, Paul Klee’s Pictorial Writing, 185.
124

Fig. 29: Paul Klee, Embrace (Umgriff), 1939/1121. Paste color,

watercolor and oil on paper, 24 x 131 cm, Collection Dr. Bernhard
Sprengel, Hanover.

surrealist automatism as abstract expressionism.135

Given his fascination with beginnings, Klee’s interest in spon-
taneity might have been piqued by the gestural characteristics of
children’s drawings. As James Smith Pierce wrote: “The first marks
made by a child, as Klee learned from watching his son Felix, are
only meaningless scribbles. There is no question of representa-
tion. The lines are nothing more than visual records of manual
motions and at first the child is not even aware of the connection
between the motion and the marks.”136 Not surprisingly, among
the key concerns Klee voiced in his Notebooks was for move-
Fig. 28: Paul Klee, Alpha bet I, 1938/187. Colored paste on ment: “the active movement from us to the work; the communica-
newspaper on cardboard, 53.9 x 34.4 cm, Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern.
tion of the work’s mobility to others, the beholders of the work.”137
In later years, Klee increasingly opted toward a more gestural,
ical means of execution, painting freely over newspaper (fig. 28), improvisational mode,138 perhaps due to a debilitating illness that
leaving the mechanically-reproduced print visible underneath, as inhibited his manual dexterity,139 and, in so doing, established the
though layers of sedimentation had accrued over a body of in- new style upon which his popularity among European surreal-
formation through time. Reluctant to confine himself to a single ists and American abstract expressionists largely rests. According
technique, Klee combined the personal and the impersonal— to Clement Greenberg, a champion of this new generation of
what was done by hand versus what was done by machine—in American artists, Klee “would often begin a drawing with no de-
the same visual field. In this respect, of course, his work betrays finitive intention or idea in mind, guided by nothing but the auto-
an unmistakable debt to Picasso and Braque, whose invention matic movements of his hand, letting the line go of its own accord
of collage, and incorporation of newsprint in the domain of high until it was recaptured by unplanned, accidental resemblances.
art, provide the obvious precedent.132 Klee broke new ground, These resemblances would be improved upon and elaborated,”
however, by seeking the effect, not of mechanical impersonality a process that “recapitulated the very beginnings of graphic art,
or historical impermanence, but of rapid spontaneity (fig. 29). the development from aimless scrawling to the representation of
He obviously appreciated the calligraphic quality of writing, hop- recognizable objects.”140
ing to collapse the differences between painting and drawing.133
And by giving the impression of working in an improvisational,
135 See Andrew Kagan, “Paul Klee’s Influence on American Painting: New
even gestural, manner, he stressed the concept of art, not as a York School,” Arts Magazine 49, no. 10 (June 1975): 54–59, Carolyn
finished product, but as a process,134 anticipating not so much Lanchner, “Klee in America,” in Lanchner, Paul Klee, 83–111, and Helfen-
stein and Turner, Klee and America.
136 Pierce, Klee and Primitive Art, 85.
137 Klee, The Thinking Eye, 169.
132 See also Jim M. Jordan, Paul Klee and Cubism (Princeton: Princeton Univer- 138 Ibid., 455.
sity Press, 1984). 139 See, for example, Robert Kudielka, Paul Klee: The Nature of Creation,
133 Klee, The Thinking Eye, 455. Works 1914–1940 (London: Hayward Gallery, 2002), 161.
134 See Laude, “Paul Klee,” 349. 140 Greenberg, “On Paul Klee,” 72.
 Although frequently mentioned, scholars have yet to con- communication: “the initial impulse in ourselves, the actual pro-
nect this aspect of Klee’s work to the conviction shared by many gressive carrying out of the work itself, and then getting the work
present-day linguists that communication originated, not in primi-
tive vocalization, but in gesture or signing.141 Though largely
across to others, to the beholders—these are the chief stages of
the creative act.”145 Intriguingly, and consistent with the present-
125
overlooked by art historians, this coincidence provides a critical day thesis that language emerged through signing, Klee associ-
interpretive nexus where art, language, and cognition intersect, ated the birth of writing with motion. “The Genesis of the script,”
a nexus that relates directly to Klee’s strong interest in the birth Klee professed, provides “a splendid parable of movement. The
of communication. The primacy of motion, in fact, was never far work of art, too, is experienced by us first of all as a process of
from his mind: “Initially,” he wrote, ”there is but one principle: creation, rather than as a passive product. The creative impulse
to move.”142 This proposition seems persuasive enough: even the suddenly springs to life, like a flame, passes through the hand
most basic microscopic organism seems animated by a primor- onto the canvas, where it spreads further until, like the spark that
dial urge to stir. Still, from this primitive, instinctual motility to the closes an electric circuit, it returns to its source: the eye and the
invention of complex forms of communication such as language mind.”146 To this end, artists must stress the “expressive motions
lies a seemingly unbridgeable gap. Upon reflection, however, of the brush, the genesis of the effect.”147 “The work as human
the growing consensus among present-day linguists that commu- action (genesis),” he concludes, “is movement both in the produc-
nication actually began with rudimentary signing makes perfect tive and the receptive sense.”148
sense. Imagine the following scenario: a group of thirsty hominids Thus, though a discussion of gesture might seem irrelevant to
look to quench their thirst and unexpectedly come upon strangers Klee’s engagement with language, the artist’s own association
whose language they find incomprehensible. While emitting arbi- of script, movement, and the workings of the mind—in concert
trary sounds is unlikely to advance communication—because ad- with the current postulate that language, gesture, and thought
dresser and addressee share no common code—gesture fits the are intimately linked—warrants its inclusion in this study.149 In ad-
bill perfectly. The leader of the first group might simulate the act dition, many painters feared visual ideas becoming stale through
of cupping water, pretending to drink, all the while looking be- excessive calculation and re-working; lest an image be spoiled,
mused as if he were desperately in need of something. To supply better make few preparatory sketches and transcribe one’s vi-
an appropriately intelligible response, all the leader of the sec- sion as quickly as possible. Klee endorsed this attitude with a
ond group need do is point in the direction of a stream or pond. vengeance: whenever “a type grows beyond the stage of its gen-
And since gestures are interactive, they may be repeated as often esis,” he declared, “the intensity gets lost very quickly.”150 The
as is necessary for the desired response to be elicited. Going desire to remain improvisational, then, was not simply a visual
further back in time, it stands to reason that, within discrete social or technical issue: it was, by Klee’s own admission, a means to
groups, language could also have emerged, independently and sustain the freshness of a work and establish an empathetic rela-
similarly, as improvisational signing, not as formal discourse. tionship between the observer and the artist’s process of creation
Requiring direct eye contact and unfettered hands, sign- (“the communication of the work’s mobility to others, the behold-
ing has obvious drawbacks. Vocalizations, on the other hand, ers of the work”). This relationship could allegedly function in-
reach anyone within earshot and afford the possibility to multi- dependently of artistic conventions and even approximate the
task. No wonder, verbalization gradually overtook signing, just original act of communication: the birth of language in physical
as phonetic writing displaced hieroglyphs and pictographs. But gesture, as a system of signing, not as the manipulation of arbi-
even if vocalization eventually won the day—sign language ex- trary signs, as in vocalization. For Klee, even figuration was “con-
cepted—many individuals still “speak with their hands,” adding nected with the concept of movement.”151 On this point, it might
gestures to speech for emphasis or rhetorical force. According also be relevant to add, if only parenthetically, that those very
to researchers such as David McNeill, however, these are not patients mentioned above, whose brain injuries prevented them
simply residues of language’s more gesticular ancestry; they from recognizing letters, could nonetheless manage to write them
should actually be “regarded as parts of language itself—not as out by hand, or recognize their outlines if physically traced on
embellishments or elaborations, but as integral parts of the pro- their own bodies.152 It would indeed be difficult to devise a better
cesses of language and its use.”143 These issues relate directly to defense of the intimate link between language and movement.
Klee’s art. As is well known, he sought to reinvent painting as if
from scratch. “I want to be as though newborn...,” he declared,
“ignoring facts and fashions, to be almost primitive.”144 Yet cast- 145 Ibid., 373.
ing off convention was no exercise in radicality for its own sake; 146 Ibid., 99.
147 Klee, Diaries, #640.
among the original motivations behind creativity, Klee insisted, is 148 Klee, The Thinking Eye, 357.
149 This is not to say, of course, that Klee was the only artist to have connected
physical movement with originary language (even Hugo Ball, a leading
141 See Michael Tomasello, Origins of Human Communication (Cambridge, Dadaist, mused whether sign language was “the real language of para-
MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2008). dise” [Hugo Ball, Flight out of Time: A Dada Diary (Berkeley: University of
142 Klee, The Nature of Nature, 13. California Press, 1996), 104]).
143 David McNeill, Gesture and Thought (Chicago, University of Chicago 150 Klee, Diaries, #928.
Press, 2007), 13. 151 Klee, The Nature of Nature, 26.
144 Grohmann, Paul Klee, 41. 152 Dehaene, Reading in the Brain, 57.
 Will Grohmann: “I remember [Klee] saying that one evening in
the excitement of drawing he had the feeling that he was striking
126 a kettledrum.”155 This revealing admission bespeaks the artist’s
thrill at having physically elicited the activity his work was depict-
ing, and establishing the very sympathetic/empathetic relation-
ship between work and audience mentioned above (although,
when using the term “audience” here, one must remember to
include the artist as well). How this relationship is set in motion
is well worth exploring, even if it has received little sustained at-
tention in the scholarly literature.
First, Kettledrummer closely approximates the “pictographs”
or “hieroglyphs” Klee introduced in previous works. Smith Pierce
has already connected Klee’s Abduction (Entführung) (1928) to
the old Chinese character for “seeing” in Weule’s Vom Kerbstock
zum Alphabet (fig. 31): “a combination of two independent sche-
mata—the eye that sees and the diagonal legs that move.”156 This
same character serves as a likely prototype, with modifications,
for Kettledrummer: the eye was retained and the legs eliminated,
replaced by arms in the process of beating a drum. If only on
these grounds, Kettledrummer fits very comfortably within the
compass of Klee’s exploration of language. For all that, the pic-
tographic image remains difficult to interpret. Many individuals
to whom the author of this essay showed the work did not au-
tomatically identify the figure as a drummer, although, once the
title was disclosed, they retroactively recognized the reference
and even deemed it appropriate (reinforcing Klee’s avowal that
a work of art begins with the title, or, more accurately, that its
meaning is often contingent upon it). The single central eye, by
virtue of being so conspicuous, dominates the piece. The vertical
shape at the upper left, by contrast, is so abstracted and physi-
cally disconnected from the main figure’s anatomy that it regis-
Fig. 30: Paul Klee, Kettledrummer (Paukenspieler), 1940/270. Colored
ters, at least at first glance, as a separate form, comparable to the
paste on paper mounted on cardboard, 34.6 x 21.2 cm, Zentrum Paul
Klee, Bern. abstract signs Klee often combined with figural shapes or land-
scape elements. But a comparable, though longer, form sprouts
from below the dark outline of the head, compelling the spectator
Kettledrummer: A Case Study to interpret it as a neck extending into a shoulder and, finally, into
This link is poignantly discernible in Kettledrummer (Pauken- a down-turned arm. In that context, the abstracted form at the up-
spieler) of 1940 (fig. 30). O. K. Werckmeister interprets the per left—despite being detached—now reads differently: namely,
piece’s overall configuration as a variation on the swastika, an as the figure’s right arm, an arm extended upward.
obvious allusion to Nazi brutality, with the red areas referencing Once the title guides our identification of the figure, we mar-
the blood spilled by the countless victims of this totalitarian re- shal our powers of projection to fashion not only a head out of a
gime.153 Though compelling, not all scholars have accepted this few rudimentary strokes, but also hands from the small circles at
interpretation. Franciscono prefers to see the piece as commemo- the termination of the arms. What is more, we infer these hands
rating Heinrich Knauer, the percussionist of the Dresden Opera as clasping the drumsticks the artist did not condescend to de-
Orchestra,154 a reading buttressed by an anecdote related by pict because he assumed, cleverly and rightly, that the audience

Fig. 31: Explanation of the Chinese Character for “Seeing,” in Weule, Vom Kerbstock zum Alphabet, 54.

153 O. K. Werckmeister, Versuche uber Paul Klee (Frankfurt: Syndikat, 1981),

117–18, 191. 155 Grohmann, Paul Klee, 349.
154 Franciscono, Paul Klee, 373. 156 Pierce, Klee and Primitive Art, 147.
 127

Fig. 32: Paul Klee, Old Fiddler (alter Geiger), 1939/310. Pencil
drawing, 20.9 x 29.7 cm, location unknown.

Fig. 34: William Morris Hunt (1824–79), The Drummer Boy, 1862. Oil
on canvas, 91.8 x 66.7 cm, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Gift of Mrs.
Samuel H. Wolcott, 66.1055.

Fiddler (alter Geiger) (fig. 32), in which face and violin, human
form and musical instrument, likewise merge into a single form.157
At this point, it is also worth mentioning how technically (and
experientially) difficult the suggestion of motion proves in a static
idiom such as painting. A falling object, for instance, is nearly
impossible to evoke on canvas as one can never be sure wheth-
er the object is falling, rising, or simply levitating in mid-air. To
avoid such confusion, visual artists—lest the effect of movement
be mitigated, if not compromised altogether—tend to depict ac-
tions at their onset or conclusion, never in mid-stream. Klee obvi-
ously took such advice to heart: he raised one of his drummer’s
hands to simulate the beginning of the action—an “upstroke”—
and lowered the other to simulate its completion—a “downblow”
(in drumming terminology). That reliable painterly practice not
only heightened the sensation of movement; it also helped evoke
the very kind of drumming Klee had in mind. We do not envis-
Fig. 33: Honoré Daumier (1808–79), Street Scene with a Mounteback
age the drummer tapping the drum lightly, or even producing a
Playing a Drum, c. 1865. Drawing in pen and watercolor over black
chalk, 33.5 x 25.5 cm, British Museum, London, Bequeathed by César drum roll with both arms staying below shoulder height—as in
Mange de Hauke, PD 1968-2--10-30. Honoré Daumier’s Street Scene (fig. 33)—but beating the drum
loudly, raising his hands, alternatively, one at a time, well above
would conjure them in their imagination. Alternatively, we might his head—not unlike the figure in, say, William Morris Hunt’s The
read the arms as extending into drumsticks themselves, with the Drummer Boy (fig. 34).
circles, not as clasping hands, but as the mallets at their tips—now Figure and title thus contribute something different to the
a part of, rather than an appendage to, the figure’s schematic
anatomy. Reinforcing this reading is Klee’s 1939 drawing, Old 157 Klee, His Life and Work, 99.
 construction of meaning: in
effect, word and image are
128 co-expressive without being re-
dundant.158 By itself, the image
provides insufficient informa-
tion to denote the figure unam-
biguously as a drummer; and
the title insufficient information
to denote the kind of drum-
ming performed. Image and
title thus combine to form a unit
of meaning that conveys more
than language and gesture
do in isolation. In this respect,
Klee’s piece approximates a
colloquial conversation where
a speaker mentions the act of
drumming, simultaneously ges-
turing toward the listener with
both hands in a manner simi-
lar to that portrayed in Morris
Hunt’s painting. The verbal
report provides one piece of
information, the gesture an- Fig. 35: Franz Kline (1910–62), Mahoning, 1956. Oil and paper collage on canvas, 203.2 x 254 cm,
other: this is what is meant Whitney Museum of American Art, NY, Purchase with funds from the Friends of the Whitney Museum of
by speech and gesture being American Art, 57.10.
co-expressive without being re-
dundant, and why David McNeill argues that gestures should be continuous, the speed slower, the tones darker and heavier, and
regarded as parts of language rather than superfluous embellish- the mood somber, even ominous.
ments. As we filter information from verbal and visual inputs, we The energetic quality of Klee’s representation, moreover—
construct an overarching scenario wherein both are interpretively even when compared to Hunt’s—is enhanced by the application
consistent,159 a largely intuitive rather than purely intellectual ex- of gestural strokes whose seemingly forceful execution introduces
ercise. At issue, then, is not valorizing one over the other as it a temporal, kinetic component to the spectator’s experience of
is underscoring how they mutually reinforce the construction of the work. Klee was highly cognizant of line’s potential to connote
meaning.160 a temporal dimension as we track its course, a progress inscribed
What distinguishes the gesture from the verbal report, how- in time, as opposed, he claimed, to our grasping of a plane, the
ever, is that the former becomes, quite literally, a material carrier surface of which is perceived instantaneously.163 Paradoxically,
of the idea.161 This materiality, in turn, endows the information this contradicts Klee’s other statement cited earlier, about the
conveyed with enhanced concreteness, an advantage that ex- eye’s “inability to see even a small surface equally sharp at all
plains why we gesture while speaking—not only to help us think points” and need to scan a surface “portion after portion.” (But
and add rhetorical emphasis to our speech, but also to deliver this would hardly be the first instance of an artist contradicting
our message with greater specificity. The same may be said of him- or herself.) For our purposes, then, the appropriate contrast
Klee’s image. Comparing it to Daumier’s, we infer, even on the to target is less that between a line and a plane as that between
basis of a few reductive strokes, a great deal about the kind of the tracking of a line and the comprehension of language: in this
drumming performed. In Daumier, the range of motion is nar- case, following a trajectory versus reading a title. On this point,
rower, the speed of the drumming faster, the sound continuous, McNeill argues that: “When co-expressive speech and a ges-
and the mood of the playing, in spite of the clown’s severe facial ture synchronize, we see something that is both simultaneous and
expression, festive. (In a way, there is a kind of asynchrony or sequential.”164 This observation is highly suggestive: if we take
mismatch between Daumier’s drummer and his playing.162) In Klee’s title as standing for “speech,” and the rapid brushwork as
Klee, by contrast, the range of motion is greater, the sound dis- standing for “gesture,” then our reading of Kettledrummer is also
simultaneous and sequential.
158 McNeill, Gesture and Thought, 22.
159 Ibid., 64.
160 Ibid., 92ff. 163 Paul Klee, cited in Paul Klee, ed. Jean-Louis Prat and Antoni Tapies, exh. cat.
161 Ibid., 58. (St. Paul-de-Vence: Fondation Maeght, 1977), 30.
162 Ibid., 128. 164 McNeill, Gesture and Thought, 91.
 While reading the title, we understand—almost instantaneous- strokes, post-holds, and retractions of each upstroke and down-
ly—the artist’s ambition to depict drumming, and, while perusing blow. And if such sequential phases pertain to the playing of
the piece, we experience—slowly and sequentially—how the lines
on the painting satisfy this purpose, and, more to the point, the
musical instruments, they also pertain, though perhaps to a lesser
degree, to the physical activity of painting and writing. As artists
129
kind of drumming Klee hoped to convey. Indeed, the gestural prepare to apply paint to canvas, they might visualize their intent
strokes vividly suggest both the heaviness and directionality of in their minds, rehearse the stroke in the air before making physi-
the drummer’s movements,165 fulfilling the ambition Grohmann as- cal contact with the canvas, and may even repeat the stroke in
cribed to Klee: to have the audience feel as though they were not the air after completion, all before contemplating whether the
simply watching someone hit a drum, but performing the activity effect created is the appropriate one. The same applies to the
themselves. Of course, since artists are highly adept at “hiding physical act of writing and even speaking (especially as one
their tracks,” one should never assume that traces left on can- accelerates or decelerates one’s cadence, introduces dramatic
vas or paper transparently reveal the speed of their execution. pauses, or raises or lowers one’s voice).
Many artists even delighted in fooling their audience, as is at- The import of Will Grohmann’s recollection—of Klee’s excite-
tested by a charming anecdote related by the American painter ment over the feeling of striking a drum while drawing—can now
Philip Guston about Franz Kline, an artist whose work often falls be better appreciated, cementing the relevance of gesture to
under the rubric of “action painting,” and whose mode of ex- Klee’s artistic philosophy, and, more broadly, to language and
ecution looks, and should theoretically be, even more spontane- thought. In fact, this anecdote also echoes recent debates as to
ous and improvisational than Klee’s (fig. 35). After watching him whether gestures are enacted for the benefit of the speaker, so
work, however, Guston recalled how Kline would spend “days or that ideas are formulated properly and the right words used, or
weeks reworking the edge of a stroke to give the impression that for the benefit of the audience, so that particular points are suc-
it was painted with intensity and élan.”166 Kline himself admitted: cessfully conveyed. The evidence, as is almost always the case
“Some of the pictures I work on a long time and they look as if in such debates, points in both directions. Congenitally blind indi-
I’ve knocked them out…. Immediacy can be accomplished in a viduals gesture while they speak, even to each other, suggesting
picture that’s been worked on for a long time just as well as if it’s that gestures enhance the speaker’s expression;170 but deaf chil-
done rapidly.”167 It is critical, therefore, not to confuse a painting dren, even those ignorant of sign language, spontaneously invent
with its effect, and to remember that artists wield a variety of signs to petition adults, suggesting that gestures are communi-
devices to beguile the spectator into making certain assumptions cative.171 If Grohmann’s recollection is accurate, Kettledrummer
about process, assumptions that do not necessarily correspond also suggests that painter and audience mutually benefit from a
to the way a painting was actually made. In fact, Klee frequently gesture’s enactment.172 Klee sought to contrive a specific impres-
reworked his own compositions, just as he did his diaries, reveal- sion for his audience, and obviously experienced great personal
ing how carefully he crafted both the images he painted and the delight in having pulled it off.
image he constructed for his public. One may also interject that, in everyday situations, gestures
How Kettledrummer was executed, therefore, is less relevant vary from insignificant gesticulations that accompany speech all
for our purposes than the impression Klee sought to manufacture: the way to conventional signs (“thumbs up” or signaling “OK”),
namely, that the piece was completed swiftly and energetically. pantomime, and formal sign language.173 Each betrays different
(For any work of art to “be successful,” he professed, “it is neces- characteristics, fulfills different functions, and engenders different
sary never to work towards a conception of the picture complete- meanings. Insofar as Kettledrummer is concerned, the image ar-
ly thought out in advance.”168) The more we accept his strokes as guably lies somewhere in the middle of this complex continuum,
rapid, the more effective the evocation of drumming. To this end, depicting neither meaningless gesticulation nor a purely conven-
Klee’s training as a musician proved a considerable advantage. tionalized sign for drumming. (In sign language, incidentally,
Though they appear continuous and fluid, most bodily move- the gesture for drumming is closer to Daumier’s painting than to
ments follow certain sequences: preparations, holding patterns, Klee’s or Hunt’s). By moving to the middle of this spectrum, Klee
strokes, post-stroke holds, and retractions169—sequences that ap- opens the possibility that the broader meaning of his image is not
ply all the more to the playing of musical instruments. Perusing simply gestural or iconic, but metaphorical. In metaphor, after all,
Kettledrummer with these ideas in mind, especially given that it literal situations are employed to convey non-literal ones: e.g.,
respects the aesthetic rule of depicting an action at its inception the “drum beat” of life, of a nation, or even of people’s hearts.
or at its close, one gets a visceral sense of repetitive rhythm, in At the conclusion of Walden, to cite a famous example, Henry
all likelihood because one also infers the preparations, holds, David Thoreau writes: “If a man does not keep pace with his
companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.

165 Ibid., 185.

166 Harry Gaugh, “Franz Kline: The Man and the Myth,” ARTnews 84 (Dec. 170 Jana Iverson and Susan Goldin-Meadow, “What’s Communication Got To
1985): 62. Do with it? Gesture in Congenitally Blind Children,” Developmental Psychol-
167 Franz Kline cited in Clifford Ross, ed., Abstract Expressionism: Creators and ogy 33, no. 3 (1997): 453­–67.
Critics (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1990), 101. 171 McNeill, Gesture and Thought, 45­–47.
168 Klee, Diaries, #857. 172 Ibid., 53ff.
169 McNeill, Gesture and Thought, 31–32. 173 Ibid., 5–7.
130

Fig. 37: Hans Holbein (c. 1497–1543), The Bride and Bridegroom
(Die Verliebten), in The Dance of Death, c. 1524–26. Woodcut, 6.5 x
4.8 cm, Kunstmuseum Basel.

Fig. 36: Einheit der Jugend in der Hitlerjugend! (Hitler Youth poster), hinged on being intimately associated with the fatherland. Klee
1935. Library of Congress, Washington, DC. could thus be turning a propagandistic image into its sinister op-
posite, showing the dark ferocity behind the sanitized pictures of
Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or health and enthusiasm the Nazis labored to publicize. Even so,
faraway.”174 this connection does not preclude Klee’s painting from signifying
In this case, drumming is not meant literally, but figuratively, a range of meanings. From the politically and personally specific
not to describe a physical activity, but to connote an abstract to the abstract and philosophical, the image could signify the
principle. For the metaphor to work, however, the connection Nazi takeover, the tragedy of fate, or the imminence of death
between the abstract principle (an individual’s lifestyle) and the (that of the percussionist of the Dresden Opera Orchestra, or
literal situation connoting it (the beating of a drum) cannot be even the artist’s own). Holbein’s The Bride and Bridegroom (fig.
entirely arbitrary: the analogy must somehow strike us as ap- 37) has also been proposed as a prototype for Klee’s piece, and
propriate. Yet that relationship still stands as culture-specific (be- with good reason, as a drummer has long been judged an ap-
cause the members of some cultures may, and others may not, propriate metaphor for the ever-present threat of mortality. Death
recognize that association as suitable).175 It is for this reason that is relentless; its beat unremitting, the rhythm of which we may
Werckmeister’s interpretation of Kettledrummer remains compel- ignore but ultimately cannot escape. We think that we step to the
ling—especially in view of the Nazi threat overtaking Europe, and music we chose, but with all due respect to Thoreau, it is death
of Klee himself having suffered from it personally, being forced that plays the tune. Note that the Hitler Youth poster and the
to relinquish his teaching post in Germany. In fact, Klee often Holbein both have the drummer’s hands raised above his head—
made satirical references to the Nazis in his work,176 and many like’s Klee’s image—implying that the beat is slow, heavy, and
propaganda images of Hitler Youth beating drums (fig. 36) were repetitive, and the call an especially urgent one, a condition that
disseminated during the Nazi period, apparently to galvanize applies equally to Hunt’s painting, since its purpose was to incite
the population into feeling loyalty for a regime whose authority young men to volunteer for the Union army during the Civil War.
No single interpretive scheme, of course, will exhaust the
174 Henry David Thoreau, Walden (London: W. J. Gage, 1888), 323. meanings of Kettledrummer, to say nothing of Klee’s visual and
175 See McNeill, Gesture and Thought, 48ff. intellectual engagement with the linguistic as a whole. But com-
176 Alexander Zschokke, “Begegnung mit Paul Klee,” Die Schweizerische
Monatszeitscrift (Oct. 1948): 74–76; cited in O. K. Werckmeister, “From paring the image to other depictions of drumming, as well as
Revolution to Exile,” in Lanchner, Paul Klee, 39–63. analyzing it in light of the way gesture and verbal language com-
plement each other, allows different facets of this painting, and whole.182 Though very few would countenance such ideas today,
of Klee’s aesthetics in general, to emerge in sharper focus. As a many artists at the time took them to heart.183 In 1922, when
result, one may propose that any investigation of Klee’s relation-
ship to language benefits from broadening its definition of the
Hans Prinzhorn, a psychiatrist trained in both art history and phi-
losophy, published a study on the art of the mentally ill, he read-
131
linguistic to include gesture and movement. The more elastic our ily connected his subject with the art of children and non-Western
definition, the more of Klee’s diverse sources and ideas may be cultures. The book was also circulated at the Bauhaus after its
included in the conversation, and the more complete our analy- publication, and Klee’s keen interest in its illustrations has been
ses of the numerous questions raised by his engagement with widely documented.184
the linguistic. Advantageously, art historical investigations would It would therefore be exceedingly naïve to assume that Klee
also align with current views in communication theory: that, if ges- simply resurrected the birth of communication, or that he was
ture did not actually precede vocalization, it at least functioned himself endowed with the childlike innocence some of his early
as its important auxiliary from the very first time human beings supporters and detractors imputed to him. The artist’s statements
started to communicate. cited throughout this essay evince the extent of his acute self-
awareness in many matters artistic. He may not have been as
knowledgeable about language- and image-processing as pres-
Klee, Childhood, and the Birth of ent-day neuroscientists and cognitians, but, if his Bauhaus Note-
Language books betray anything, it is how deliberate and thoughtful he
If Klee appropriated pictographic forms in his work, as well was about his métier. His teaching diagrams reveal an inordinate
as the idea that certain alphabets reversed the orientation of se- sensitivity to the subtle differences and nuances that ensue from
lect letters, he also intuited that topographical shapes inspired the the slightest alteration of line, shape, tone, or color. Even if his
configuration of writing, and the extent to which motion and ges- appreciation for outsider art was genuine and deeply felt, it was
ture contribute to communication. He then amalgamated these no less of a strategic move. On its basis, he could allege a dis-
disparate ideas and elements to evoke, in his own words, the tance from anything programmatic, and persuade his audience
“primitive beginnings of art.”177 His concern was with the origins that his art remained untainted by the calculating, selfish motives
of things: of art, of communication, of language. “The spirit [is] at of adults, a recurrent leitmotif in the writings of expressionist art-
its purest,” he declared, “in the beginning.”178 “Primitive feelings ists.185 (As related above, Klee described himself as a “childish
are the strongest.”179 man,”186 just as Egon Schiele opened an autobiographical poem
These interests also intersect with his admiration for children’s
art, a topic that deservedly received much attention in the art 182 Hoping to justify the psychological relevance of ancient myths—say, that of
historical literature. Klee included select childhood drawings in Oedipus or Narcissus—even Freud referenced this concept, confident in its
his oeuvre catalogue, and felt considerable pride upon their absolute scientific validity. Passed on from generation to generation, this
legacy was said to contain the inescapable aspects of, and exegetical keys
rediscovery.180 But it is equally worth stating that this interest is to, our very own psychological make-up. “The prehistory into which the
clearly time-bound and culture-specific, reflecting ideas voiced dream-work leads us back,” Freud writes, “is…the individual’s prehistory, his
by numerous artists and thinkers throughout the early twentieth childhood, and on the other, in so far as each individual somehow recapitu-
lates in an abbreviated form the entire development of the human race, into
century. Disillusioned with what they saw as the depersonaliza- phylogenetic prehistory too…symbolic connections, which the individual
tion of an increasingly materialistic culture, and with the rejec- has never acquired by learning, may justly claim to be regarded as a phylo-
tion of both the imagination and the supernatural in positivistic genetic heritage” (Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
[New York: Norton, 1966], 199). Even our primordial fantasies, he adds,
philosophy, numerous painters, from Gauguin onward, sought to “are a phylogenetic endowment. In them the individual reaches beyond his
regain a naïve, innocent perception of the world, one ostensibly own experience into primaeval experience” (ibid., 371).
183 Oskar Kokoschka, for one, was clearly exposed to the idea that ontogeny
uncorrupted by what they denounced as the decadent, over-re- recapitulates phylogeny from his teachers at the Kunstgewerbeschule in
finement of modern Western culture. In the discourse surround- Vienna, who, as Carl Schorske has already remarked, were greatly appre-
ing modernism, terms previously intended for censure—“simple,” ciative of children’s drawings, an art form which, in their view, “recapitulates
atavistically the childhood of peoples and the childhood of art” (Deutsche
“awkward,” and “childish”—now morphed into terms of appro- Kunst und Dekoration 22 [1908–09]: 53, quoted in Carl Schorske, Fin-de-
bation.181 Curiously enough, the possibility that a childlike vision Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture [New York: Knopff, 1985], 328). Vari-
could be literally accessed was commonly endorsed at the turn ants of the theory even appear in contemporary criticism: in a review of
1908, Alfred Wechsler wrote that, on account of his youth, Kokoschka “is at
of the twentieth century, primarily on account of the widely dis- the place where the first artists began, seven, eight or more centuries ago”
seminated postulate that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny: the (W. Fred [Alfred Wechsler], “Kunstschau 1908,” Österreicher Rundschau
idea that individuals recapitulate the evolution of the species as a 15 [Apr.– June 1908]: 452). For a fuller discussion of Wechsler, see Elana
Shapira, “The Interpretation of Children’s Drawings and the Reception of
Kokoschka’s Work at the Kunstschau 1908,” in Patrick Werkner, ed., Os-
kar Kokoschka—aktuelle Perspektiven (Vienna: Hochschule für angewandte
Kunst in Wien, 1998), 21.
177 Klee, Diaries, #905. 184 See Roskill, Klee, Kandinsky, 142, and Klee, His Life and Work, 180–85.
178 Ibid., #944. 185 In 1912, for instance, Egon Schiele declared that “One needs to observe
179 Ibid., #323. and experience the world with naïve, pure eyes in order to attain a great
180 Letter to Lily Stumpf, Oct. 3, 1902, in Klee, Briefe, 1:273. See also Haxthau- weltanschauung” (Egon Schiele: Letters and Poems 1910–1912 from the
sen, Paul Klee, 174ff. Leopold Collection [Munich: Prestel 2008], 127).
181 Roskill, Klee, Kandinsky, 1. 186 Klee, Diaries, #431. For the contemporary interest in the child, see also
 with the line: “I, eternal child.”187) Highly calculated, the claim no less by unrealistically negative than by unrealistically positive
of innocence knowingly resurrected an old ethical debate as to accounts of children, and may thus have formulated a more nu-
132 whether a genuinely good person acts morally by instinct or by
intellectual deliberation. While one tradition argued in favor of
anced view. Describing one of his own images—The Child with a
Pear—he wrote to his wife: “It has character, if also a malevolent
rational choice (how could ethical behavior be the result of mere one. The greed, the teeth, the animalistic traits should be brought
accident?), others argued the reverse: that an ethical person acts out, without neglecting the childlike grace.”194
naturally and instinctively (if performed reluctantly, contrary to Klee’s statements thus reveal the ambivalence with which
the agent’s natural inclinations, how could an action, no matter children were viewed in early twentieth-century culture. While
how salutary, be called moral?). he professed (in his often quoted review of 1912) that “ethno-
Klee clearly positioned himself in the latter camp, hoping the graphic museums,” “the nursery,” and “drawings of the insane”
moral attributes associated with naïveté and innocence would be revealed the “primordial origins of art,”195 by 1930, Klee told
readily ascribed to artists, like himself, whose work and personal- Hans-Friedrich Geist: “Don’t relate my works to those of children.
ities allegedly betrayed those very same attributes. But since this They are worlds apart.”196 This radical about-face might be attrib-
ethical debate was never unanimously resolved, the sword cut utable to Klee’s working under such remarkably diverse cultures
both ways and modern artists were as often criticized as praised and political regimes as the German Empire, the Weimar Repub-
for appropriating formal elements of children’s art.188 Rudolf Arn- lic, and the rise of the Nazis to power.197
heim, for one, decried Klee on account of populating his works Even more decisive, perhaps, was Klee’s belief, as Otto
with “child-like figures,” satisfying “a bourgeoisie” that recovers Werckmeister suspects, that child-like spontaneity was incompat-
from the terrors of the Great War with “sofa dolls and assorted ible with the expertise required of someone teaching at a state-
grotesque knickknacks.”189 It was not just the accusations of cru- funded institution like the Bauhaus.198 Smarting from the stings
dity, incompetence, and lack of training that were directed at of critics—that he was “only a very funny and amusing copier of
modernist artists. The very moral arguments they wielded boom- children’s drawings”199—as much as to excessive praise for the
eranged against them with equal force. For some, childhood same reasons, Klee had numerous reasons to dispel that convic-
represented a state of innocence before the corrupting influence tion. Not surprisingly, even his admirers began to distance his
of civilization, for others, the very corrupt condition from which paintings from the creations of children. As early as 1918, for
civilization was at pains to emerge. “Virtually all vices fester in example, Theodor Däubler exclaimed that “nothing remains here
the mind of the child,” Paul Adam declared, “…evil in adults is a of a childish effort! On the contrary: the most insignificant coin-
sign of their not having grown up. In the taverns, in the places of cidences are ruled out: everything that Klee produces must be
debauchery, in the prisons, it is the mental tone of the child which
animates and motivates.”190 For their part, Cesare Lombroso and
William Ferrero exclaimed: “What terrific criminals would chil- therefore considered a doubtful element which was to be held down or kept
inactive for as long as possible…. This distrust that every young man was
dren be if they had strong passions, muscular strength, and suf- ‘not quite reliable’ was felt at that time in all circles.”
ficient intelligence.”191 And in his “Three Essays,” Freud argued 194 Letter to Lily Stumpf, Nov. 5, 1905, cited in Haxthausen, Paul Klee, 196.
that children have a special proclivity toward cruelty because 195 Paul Klee, Die Alpen 5 (Jan. 1912): 302, reprinted in Schriften: Rezensionen
und Aufsätze, ed. Christian Geelhaar (Cologne: DuMont Buchverlag,
feelings of pity and empathy develop only later in life.192 At the 1976), 97.
turn of the twentieth century, therefore, the image of child bifur- 196 Hans-Friedrich Geist, “Paul Klee und die Welt des Kindes,” Werk 37
cates: a state of fragility and innocence, or one of criminality and (1950): 190–91.
197 See Werckmeister’s fascinating essay, “The Issue of Childhood in the Art of
perversion—a state of grace before the fall, or one of bestiality Paul Klee,” Arts Magazine 52, no. 1 (Sept. 1977): 138–51.
and instinct before civilization.193 Klee might have been affected 198 To be sure, Johannes Itten, who spearheaded the effort to get Klee appoint-
ed there, was equally fascinated with childhood: “That our play become
work and our work become celebration and our celebration become play—
Franciscono, Paul Klee, 92ff. this seems to me to be the highest accomplishment of human activity. To
187 See Egon Schiele, I, Eternal Child: Paintings and Poems, trans. Anselm shape the play of forces inside us—outside us—into a festive action by way
Hollo (New York: Grove Press, 1988), 6. of self-oblivious work—this means to create in the children’s way.” See Willy
188 See O. K. Werckmeister, The Making of Paul Klee’s Career, 1914–1920 Rotzler, Johannes Itten: Werke und Schriften (Zurich: Orell Füssli, 1972),
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 116–17, 235. 69. And Oscar Schlemmer, another of Klee’s Bauhaus faculty colleagues,
189 Rudolf Arnheim, “Klee Für Kinder,” Die Weltbühne 26 (1930): 170–73. who had originally tried, unsuccessfully, to get Klee hired at Stuttgart,
190 Paul Adam, “Des enfants,” La revue blanche 9 (1895): 350–53. wrote the following about him in a diary entry of 1916: “With a minimum
191 Cesare Lombroso and William Ferrero, The Female Offender (London: of line he can reveal all his wisdom. This is how a Buddha draws. Quietly,
Appleton, 1912), 151. at rest with himself…the most unmonumental line, because it is searching
192 Sigmund Freud, “Three Essays on the History of Sexuality” (1905), in The and childlike, in order to reveal greatness…. The acts of all important men
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, are rooted in a simple, but all-comprehensive experience.” See Oskar Sch-
vol. 7 (London: Hogarth Press, 1975), 192–93. lemmer, Briefe und Tagebücher, ed. Tut Schlemmer (Stuttgart: Hatje Cantz,
193 On the negative image of youth in turn-of-the-century Vienna, see also Ste- 1977), 24; also cited in Werkmeister, The Making of Paul Klee’s Career,
fan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 214. All the same, Itten left the Bauhaus, and the institution’s growing practi-
1964), 33: “The world about and above us, which directed all its thoughts cal and functional ethos was growing increasingly at odds with Klee’s own
only to the fetish of security, did not like youth; or rather it constantly mis- approach to creativity. See, for example, Marcel Franciscono, “Paul Klee
trusted it. Proud of its systematic ‘progress’ and of its order, bourgeois soci- in the Bauhaus: The Artist as Lawgiver,” Arts Magazine 52, no. 1 (Sept.
ety proclaimed moderation and leisure in all forms of life as the only virtues 1977): 122–27.
of man; all hasty efforts to advance ourselves were to be avoided…young 199 Lisbeth Stern, “Bildende Kunst: Klee,” Sozialistische Monatshefte 23 (1917):
people, who always instinctively desire rapid and radical changes, were 708.
called totally masterly, masculine art.”200 most to least ambiguous, particular visual solutions fall. Though
Däubler is perfectly right, of course (though his use of the term the mismatches orchestrated easily align with the modernist proj-
“masculine” is oddly misplaced), if only because no trained eye
would mistake Klee’s production with anything childish. The aes-
ect of undermining traditional means of rendering space, and
have been so described in the art historical literature, looking at
133
thetic possibilities afforded to children are, needless to say, unde- Klee’s engagement with the linguistic from the lens of recent cog-
niably limited. Having no training in physical anatomy or linear nitive psychology and neuroscience reveals a far more subtle,
perspective, academic realism or foreshortening are simply un- complex, and sophisticated agenda. n
available to them as workable options. This is not to make a quali-
tative or value judgment, only to identity the specific constraints I would like to thank John Sallis and Nancy Netzer for their invita-
under which any artist—child or adult—may be operating at a tion to contribute to this catalogue, and my colleagues Jeffery Howe
given time or place. As is attested by the exceptional diversity of and Michael Mulhern for their generous help and assistance. I also
his work, Klee, conversely, entertained and exercised numerous kindly acknowledge Kate Shugert for her editorial comments, Mar-
alternatives within a remarkably broad choice situation. He even tha Richardson for her help in securing loans, Adeane Bregman,
admitted as much himself: if modern works “produce a primitive Librarian at Boston College, for her invaluable contribution to my
impression,” he confessed, “this ‘primitiveness’ is explained by research, and Ursula Cernuschi and Suzy Forster for their continual
discipline, which consists in reducing everything to a few steps. It affection and support. Lastly, I dedicate this essay to the memory of
is no more than economy…. Which is to say, the opposite of real my granduncle, Heniek Storozum, a wizard on the chessboard and
primitiveness.”201 an exceptional human being.
Any distance Klee introduces between his work and the genu-
inely “primitive” is commendable, disclosing, as it does, his criti-
cal consciousness about himself and his work. Still, Klee walked
as fine and delicate a line as his own Tightrope Walker (Seiltän-
zer) (1923; plate 20). Though he rejected childishness, he never
completely disavowed its “look,” just as he occasionally rejected
language without disavowing its look. This strategic position, in
turn, allowed him to investigate how our perceptual and cog-
nitive abilities navigate the unexpected juxtaposition of visual
and conceptual elements. He loved, in his own words, “to rec-
oncile…opposites,”202 combining art and language, representa-
tion and abstraction, calculation and spontaneity, innocence and
sophistication. But a particular predilection was to cull writings
and scripts, pictographs or hieroglyphs, children’s drawings and
scribblings, to engender formal relationships, spatial qualities, or
hybrid amalgamations that, because of their ensuing ambiguities,
were gradually expelled from high art and writing systems over
time. This was not regression for its own sake. By reintroducing
these ambiguities, Klee could reignite the very cognitive discom-
forts that prompted their extinction in the first place, unravel their
logic, and reproduce them at will. If our visual and mental powers
train us to discriminate, Klee sought to conflate: the topographic
and the linguistic, the verbal and the visual, left and right ori-
entations, the phonic and the lexical, the static and the kinetic—
and then orchestrate these elements in such ways as to induce
doubt and uncertainty. With some latitude, we may propose that,
from an aesthetic vantage point, Klee was conducting his own
investigations into the process of human communication. Just as
scientific knowledge advances when brain functioning misfires,
perhaps Klee learned more by frustrating than facilitating the
operations of language. It was not just a question of devising
ambiguous visual solutions for their own sake as determining why
they provoke ambiguity, and where, along a sliding scale from

200 Theodor Däubler, “Paul Klee,” Das Kunstblatt 2 (1918): 24–27.

201 Klee, Diaries, #857.
202 Ibid., #389.
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