Paul Klee: And the Object Second Part

Abstract

THE FIRST thing that will happen when one's mind stops being focussed on material objects is that it will make objects for itself. As it empties of sensations of sight or sound or touch or taste it fills up again with images. They are images of sight and sound and of touch and taste, but they are tied by association, which is to say in time. Each one follows ana provokes the next one.The Finding Place is built up in this way. Your eye catches first the shape of a house coming out of the painted surface. Then across and after this you see another sketch, one of Klee's childlike symbols for the house facade. At first there is a look of Gris or Picasso taking objects to bits and recombining them. Only instead of a putting together in space it is a coming after in time. Instead of stylizing objects to build up an analogy of form, Klee plays variations on a form which bring object analogies tumbling after them. Here a dog-tooth shape creates a mat, wineglasses, roofs and pyramids successively. Then it is echoed in larger forms. Finally the artist varies it to the square and cube and so goes into another series. Then the same thing happens again with the square and cube themselves and with the ladder form, step form, rod form and the sphere or ball. It is like Joyce's punning. Each new allusion you find adds to the states of living and feeling touched on and makes the symbol stronger. But in Klee the symbol is a form. A thought, as Von Wedderkop puts it, which when expressed and argued is destroyed, can exist in the formal content of Klee's pictures. Taken together the effect of these themes or variations is to give you the sense of a complete world. It is the material world seen subjectively, through the reversed telescope of association.