Frank Stella (b. 1936), WWRL, 1967. Alkyd on canvas. 62⅝ x 125¼ in (159 x 318.1 cm). Estimate: $4,000,000-6,000,000. Offered in Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Sale on 15 May 2019 at Christie’s in New York
The surreal and celestial compositions of Paul Klee
The art of Paul Klee (1879–1940) makes people smile. Take Fish Magic (1925), a jewel-like painting of a mystical realm that’s part earthly, part celestial, part aquatic. At the centre, a clock has struck nine. Little and large fish – some x-ray-like with bony details, others simple silhouettes – drift around it. Childlike flowers bloom, one bunch in a vase shaped like an hourglass. Blushing discs resemble planets. In the foreground, a cartoonish character with spaghetti arms and stumpy legs raises a fuchsia-pink hand in greeting and smiles back.
The works of the great Swiss-German modernist are whimsical and childlike, and at the same time full of inventiveness and wit. He liked ‘taking a line for a walk’ – and we like tagging along with him. At times that line extends into a series of stripes. Elsewhere it stretches taut into a tightrope. Klee tugs our gaze left and right with iridescent swatches of colour – a full moon, say, suspended between rooftops – and glimpses of an eye or an ear amid otherwise abstract shapes.
An artist with a knack for organisation, Klee created more than 10,000 paintings, watercolours, prints and drawings, each different from the next – and he catalogued the lot, allowing us to chart his progress.
Klee was born in Switzerland in 1879, the second child of a singer and a music teacher. He married a pianist – Karoline Stumpf, known as Lily. He himself was an accomplished violinist and, in a sense, a composer: slipping between figuration and abstraction, his artworks are like pieces of music, each with its own rhythm and pitch.
He had a remarkable ability to make shapes and colours pulse and sing, as in Small Harbour Scene (1919), which glows blue, purple, yellow, green. Some works are choruses, crescendos in every shade, while others are quiet, petering out like the end of a track. Even in his most abstract works, there’s a hint of reality – a blade of light, a building, piano keys.
He may have been organised, but he was also spontaneous and unpredictable: in the sketchy Hoffmanesque Scene (1921), ladders lead to nowhere, a heart is shot with arrows, an open-beaked cockerel perches atop a clock tower, and a slinky-like coil extends up and out of a figure’s nostrils.
An often-recited anecdote describes a studio visit from the American collector Edward M. M. Warburg, who was alarmed when he saw Klee’s tabby cat walking across a wet watercolour. Klee’s response: ‘Many years from now, one of your art connoisseurs will wonder how in the world I ever got that effect.’
Klee adapted multiple movements and mediums to suit his method. He studied in Munich, at the time the centre of contemporary art, where he mingled with Expressionists such as Wassily Kandinsky (with whom he became lifelong friends), Franz Marc and Gabriele Münter. A visit to Paris introduced him to the Cubist compositions of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, while trips to Tunisia and Egypt awakened his sense of colour.
During his stay in Tunisia in 1914, he began to use colour independently, aligning himself more closely with abstraction. He understood that colours – like materials and shapes – could make their own mood. Inspired by the North African light, he embraced yellows, oranges and reds, which seeped into works such as With the Mauve Triangle (1914), a bright, flickering watercolour.
Klee continued to paint while serving behind the lines in the First World War, and in 1920 he had a solo show of more than 350 of his works at the Galerie Neue Kunst Hans Goltz in Munich that truly established his reputation. The following year he got a teaching post at the Bauhaus, the revolutionary modernist school of art and design, and took up modernist staples such as grids and all things flat.
While he was there he made Winter Day, Shortly before Noon (1922), a foreboding image of fiery forms looming over a small house, a river of red running from its front door, its chimney smoking. Fate and catastrophe were common themes in the aftermath of the war. The work was executed with the oil-transfer technique that Klee had invented a few years earlier. The process enabled him to transfer his drawings onto a painted ground, resulting in fantastically frayed lines, and to meet the growing demand for his work.
The puppet-like figure in Ghost of a Genius (1922), with rod-straight arms and legs, was created in the same way: Klee took a sharp instrument and drew an outline of his curious character on a piece of paper with oil paint on the underside.
In 1931, Klee went to teach at the Düsseldorf Academy – and two years later, Hitler was appointed Chancellor. By April 1933, the new works by Klee, Max Beckmann, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and others that had been thriving in Germany were deemed ‘degenerate art’ and removed from public collections. Klee was banned from exhibiting and teaching.
His art took a shadowy turn. The title of Walpurgis Night (1935) refers to the eve of the first of May, the feast day of Saint Walpurgis, and marks the season’s change from winter to spring. In folk tradition, witches would come together in the Harz mountains to ward off evil, and in this gloomy work they emerge from the dark as cloaked figures, with owl-like faces and bark-like skin.
Three years later, in Forest Witches (1938), two heavily outlined figures are partially revealed against a dull green and vibrant red background.
Klee and his family fled to Switzerland, where his health declined. In 1936 he was diagnosed with scleroderma, an incurable autoimmune disease that makes the skin thicken and can cause mobility problems. Though it affected his practice, he continued to work until he died in 1940 at the age of 60, by which point his paintings had grown larger, his lines harsher, his shapes extra dark. Voice from the Ether: And You Will Eat Your Fill! (1939) shows a wide-eyed German with spiked hair and saliva spilling from his mouth listening to his leaders’ propagandist promises of wealth.
Throughout his life, Klee was preoccupied with words, and titles played a big part in his work. They gave viewers clues about how to look or what to look for. To begin with, they were lively and playful – from Rose Garden (1920), a quilt-like image of reds and pinks, to the meditative Dance of Moth (1923) – but after his enforced return to Switzerland they became more bleak: take Still Life in Brown (1937) and, in his final year, Untitled (Captive/Figure of this World – Next World) (c.1940).
Klee was a key figure in the development of modernism and his work has inspired artists from Joan Miró to Mark Rothko and Bridget Riley. His art might seem simple, but it’s masterfully composed. It’s also mostly modest in scale and demands close viewing. So go on, take a step closer. Within the patchwork colours and wonky puzzles, you’ll find dots, lines, faces, symbols, inscriptions – a dazzling wealth of invention.
Chloë Ashby, freelance writer and editor
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2. Stella started out painting houses and boats
Born to first-generation Sicilians in the small town of Malden, Massachusetts, Stella’s father was a gynaecologist, while his mother was an artistically inclined housewife who attended fashion school and painted landscapes. His father worked 60-hour weeks, and insisted his son both study hard and learn the importance of manual labour. Stella’s first experience of painting was re-coating houses and boats — generally on his father’s orders.
As a teen, Stella attended the prestigious Phillips Academy, where he once lost three teeth in a dormitory scuffle. His fiery attitude, however, was combined with a sharp intelligence; in 1954, he entered Princeton University, majoring in history. A talented lacrosse player, he also began to paint.
Frank Stella (b. 1936), Princeton II, 1956. Oil on canvas. 30⅜ x 28⅛ in (77.1 x 71.4 cm). Estimate: $25,000-35,000. Offered in Post-War and Contemporary Art Morning Session on 16 May 2019 at Christie’s in New York
4. New York became the artist’s adopted home
When he graduated in 1958, Stella moved to the city, reasoning: ‘I came here because it was the place where you could see art that I was interested in — it’s as simple as that’. It was here that he encountered the work of Abstract Expressionists including Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline, and where he rented his first apartment. Today, in his eighties, he lives in downtown Manhattan, keeping a studio in upstate New York.
The bleak conditions of Stella’s first New York studio were reflected in the 1959 work The Marriage of Reason and Squalor, II — its title referring both to Stella’s artistic intent and his less-than ideal living conditions.
6. Stella has always been acutely aware of other artists and art critics
His early works were inspired by the Abstract Expressionists he encountered in New York, Stella later commenting: ‘I wouldn’t have bothered becoming an artist if I didn’t like the artists of that generation so much.’ If Pollock and Kline proved influential, so too did the ‘flatness’ of work by Barnett Newman — as did paintings by Jasper Johns, whose 1958 exhibition first inspired Stella to use his now-trademark stripes as a compositional tool.
Frank Stella (b. 1936), Untitled, 1960. Oil on canvas. 9 x 9 in (23 x 23 cm). Estimate: $300,000-500,000. Offered in Post-War and Contemporary Art Morning Session on 16 May 2019 at Christie’s in New York
