Bauhaus, an extraordinary avant-garde experiment, was born as a reaction to the predominant snobbery in the cultural and artistic world, attempting a return to the past, to the craft that was getting out of the art scene. Ideated by architect Gropius, this evocative and democratic “loggia of the bricklayers”, this new corporation of constructors without distinction of class, without distinction between artisan and artist, the school had the goal of combining art, crafts and technology. Pointing to the exaltation of the craftsmanship and the dexterity of the artist, his practicality and utility, he proposed to form a modern order of artisans. Starting from these premises, Bauhaus experienced the construction of an artistic culture that was not elite, but belonging to the people, leading us to the birth of design as we know it today.
And it is this particular climate that presents to us today’s story whose protagonist, ‘Meister’ at the Bauhaus school and the famous avant-garde artist, Paul Klee, invites us to a new world of artistic and especially theoretical reflection. Using the metaphor of vegetable seeds, during a lesson at the Bauhaus held on November 5, 1923, Paul Klee expressed his idea of a genesis of a work, manifesting the philosophical and mystifying character of his art: “A certain external occasion, the relationship with the earth and the atmosphere, creates the ability to grow. The sleepy will of formation and articulation lies in its precise determination in relation to the underlying idea, the logos, or, as this term has been translated, to the word that was at the beginning. The word as a premise, as an idea for the genesis of a work.” The reference to the incipit of the Gospel of John (“In the beginning was the Word”) is not witnessing a creationist concept of the work of art imbued with divine nature, as much as the holistic nature of the act of creation. What is born in the artistic act is born at a given moment, but its conception, its invention, is in the exercise of thought, in the underlying creative idea: ex nihilo nihil fit, but by the simple word: art. Enclosed in its non-existence, the work is initially modeled in the mind and everything that is conceivable at a given moment is excluded with refinement by choosing through the idea a form, a music, colors, sensations that contribute to the definition of the idea itself: it is the gift of existence that can be implemented or forgotten but that can no longer be.
Klee, stimulated by this extraordinary cultural, artistic and human experiment in which he participates and contributes, reaches the fullness of his expressive means and the formation of a true artistic theory of creation, reflected in the Landscape with Yellow Birds. Its didactic activity, its artistic nature, music, memories, taste for color and childish designs are all found in this fabulous landscape, where in a shallow space, in a tropical forest, among bizarre plants flutter yellow birds, expressing a complex thought, such that his paintings are observable like a philosophical text. First of all, “art does not reproduce what is visible, but it makes visible what is not always so” the artist said, meaning art not as a mere representation of reality, but as an investigation revealing the deeper mechanisms hidden in nature. And how to make visible what is not so? Using imagination and “taking the line for a walk,” as he advised his students, to create new worlds with their own rules, to invent a whole series of the universes impregnated by the searching of colors and signs. His painting is all born in his imagination, developing a particular and unique expression, a kind of creative game; defined in his admiration for the naivety and purity of the children and in his passion for music, it is in this creative game that are interwoven harmonious symphonies in his canvases. Infantile expressivity is the tool through which the artist takes the spectator to look beyond what is visible, inviting him to go further, to the invisible hidden in that what is depicted: an abstract, magical and mysterious world , where the image becomes the musical metaphor.
In Klee’s paintings something special happens between color and sound. Through the use of elemental meanings as an alphabet for his language, he describes his poetics, his song or the invisible. The symbols that represent them are so simple that even a child might understand why the one is the part of the other; in some mysterious way, one resounds the other and, as in a mere melody, the sense of its entirety is in the final sum of its parts. His painting manages to establish, through colors and signs, a special arrangement that awakens areas of our brains delegated to interpret the sounds. Music becomes the par excellence expression of harmony, rhythm, movement, its theory of “active lines” and “passive areas” of its rhythmic images, which, emphasizing the temporal dimension, make of its art a painted music track.
Paul Klee
Landscape with yellow birds
1923
Watercolor on cardboard
44 x 35.5 cm
Basel, Doetsch Benziger collection