K. Porter Aichele - Paul Klee, Poet-Painter PDF

PAUL KLEE
POET/PAINTER
K. Porter Aichele
Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture
Paul Klee, Poet/Painter
Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture
Paul Klee, Poet/Painter
K. Porter Aichele
CAMDEN HOUSE
Copyright © 2006 K. Porter Aichele
All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation,

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First published 2006

by Camden House
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ISBN: 1–57113–343–7
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Aichele, Kathryn Porter, 1947–

Paul Klee, poet/painter / K. Porter Aichele.
p. cm. — (Studies in German literature, linguistics, and culture)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1–57113–343–7 (hardcover: alk. paper)
1. Klee, Paul, 1879–1940 — Criticism and interpretation. 2. Concrete
poetry, Swiss — History and criticism. 3. Visual poetry, Swiss —
History and criticism. I. Title. II. Series.
PT2621.L255Z565 2006
831⬘.912—dc22
2006020519
A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
This publication is printed on acid-free paper.

Printed in the United States of America.
Disclaimer:
Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook.
To view these images please refer to the printed version of this book.
Contents
List of Illustrations vi
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: The Artist (Poet/Painter) 1
1: “I Am a Poet, After All” 20
2: The Poetic and the Pictorial 65
3: A Poetic-Personal Idea of Landscape 93
4: Harmonizing Architectonic and Poetic Painting 122
5: Poems in Pictorial Script 154
Conclusion: Klee and Concrete Poetry 185
Appendix: What Counts as Poetry? 191
Works Cited 195
Index 213
Illustrations
1. Paul Klee, Sketches Illustrating Structural Rhythms 24

2. Christian Morgenstern, “Fisches Nachtgesang,” 1905 25
3. Paul Klee, Lady Bell-Tone Bim, 1922/258 26
4. Christian Morgenstern, “Bim, Bam, Bum,” Galgenlieder, 1922 27
5. Paul Klee, Entries 295–97 from the Diaries 37
6. Paul Klee, Entries 947–52 from the Diaries 38
7. Paul Klee, Entry 1081 A from the Diaries 39
8. Paul Klee, Fall, 1912/130 and Woe Is Me in the
Gale Wind, 1912/131 40
9. Paul Klee, Emilie, 1917/48 43
10. Paul Klee, Once Emerged from the Gray of Night, 1918/17 44
11. William Blake, “Holy Thursday,” Plate 19
from Songs of Innocence and of Experience 49
12. Paul Klee, Memorial Sheet (of Gersthofen), 1918/196 51
13. Paul Klee, Éhatévauih, 1925/124 53
14. Paul Klee, Alphabet AIOEK, 1938/227 54
15. Kurt Schwitters, “Register [elementar],” 1922 55
16. Paul Klee, The War Strides over a Village, 1914/179 67
17. Paul Klee, View of the Severely Threatened City of Pinz,
1915/187 68
18. Paul Klee, When I Was a Recruit, 1916/81 70
19. Paul Klee, ab ovo, 1917/130 71
20. Paul Klee, Flower Myth, 1918/82 73
21. Paul Klee, Cathedral, 1924/138 77
22. Lyonel Feininger, Cathedral, 1919 78
23. Kurt Schwitters, “Doof,” 1922 79
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS vii
24. Paul Klee, ORCHS, as Relative, 1940/61 84

25. Paul Klee, Landscape with Gallows, 1919/115 96
26. Carl Blechen, Gallows Hill under Storm Clouds, c. 1835 97
27. Antoine Court de Gébelin, Illustration from
Histoire naturelle de la parole, 1816 101
28. Paul Klee, View from a Window, 1920/27 102
29. Paul Klee, A Garden for Orpheus, 1926/3 107
30. Paul Klee, Park Near Lu, 1938/129 111
31. Paul Klee, Two-Dimensional Diagrams Illustrating
Structural Rhythms in Three- and Four-Part Time 123
32. Paul Klee, Mural, 1924/128 126
33. Kurt Schwitters, “Wand,” 1922 127
34. Paul Klee, Cathedrals, 1925/65 130
35. Ernst Stadler, “Fahrt ueber die Coelner
Rheinbruecke bei Nacht,” 1913 131
36. Paul Klee, River Spirit, 1920/233 135
37. Paul Klee, Long Hair and Soulful, 1929/299 138
38. Paul Klee, Illustrative Sketch from the Beiträge zur
bildnerischen Formlehre 139
39. Paul Klee, Palace, 1928/133 140
40. Paul Klee, Stricken City, 1936/22 144
41. Paul Klee, Tree Nursery, 1929/98 156
42. Paul Klee, Entry 902 from the Diaries 160
43. Paul Klee, Album Leaf, 1935/6 162
44. Joan Miró, Lithograph from The Lizard with Golden
Feathers, 1971 166
45. Paul Klee, Park N, 1935/15 167
46. Paul Klee, Growth Is Stirring, 1938/78 171
47. Paul Klee, Poem in Pictorial Script, 1939/170 175
Acknowledgments
D URING THE SUMMER OF 2004 I completed research for this study at the
Paul Klee Foundation in Bern, Switzerland. Staff members graciously
provided research services, including access to archival material, at a time
when they were preparing to move from facilities at the Bern Museum of
Fine Arts to the new Zentrum Paul Klee. Since that time, Fabienne
Eggelhöfer, Heidi Frautschi, Christine Hopfengart, and others have kindly
responded to my requests for information and reproductions. I very much
appreciate their patience and assistance. I am also very grateful for the gen-
erosity of the Paul Klee family estate and the Zentrum Paul Klee, which
graciously waived copyright fees.
The Office of Research Services at the University of North Carolina
Greensboro subsidized research travel, copyright fees, and other produc-
tion costs. Many supportive colleagues at this university contributed in
other ways. The staff of Jackson Library helped with tracking down biblio-
graphical references and ordering books. My colleague Heather Holian
shared her superior skills in the academic use of computer technology.
Andreas Lixl, head of the Department of German, Russian, and Japanese
Studies, expertly edited transcriptions and translations of German texts,
and Allison Seay, assistant editor of The Greensboro Review, carefully
checked my manuscript for typographical and other errors. For additional
assistance with this task, I extend thanks to Catherine Lafarge, professor
emerita of French at Bryn Mawr College.
Over the years I have profited from exchanges about Klee’s poetry
with numerous scholars, including Paul Bauschatz, Heide Bideau, Karel
Citroen, Sara Henry-Corrington, Stefan Frey, Robert Knott, Robert
Newton, Gail McDonald, and Marianne Vogel. I am also grateful for the
knowledge acquired in the course of lively post-conference discussions
with members of the International Association of Word & Image Studies.
I am very pleased to have this book published by Camden House and
wish to express my gratitude to the readers whose insightful queries and
inspired suggestions helped me write a better book than the one I originally
submitted. I am equally indebted to editor James Walker, who offered indis-
pensable help at every stage of the review process, from the first reading to the
last revision. He proposed smart, sensible solutions to every editorial conun-
drum I encountered along the way and made tactful suggestions about trans-
lations. As a copyeditor, Henry Krawitz was both diligent and diplomatic,
offering suggestions that improved the style and the content of my work.
x ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
It is with particular pleasure that I thank the poets I am privileged to

know, especially those who took time from their own work to comment on
mine. Fred Chappell’s critique of my first chapter is far more learned than
anything I could ever hope to write about poetry. Mark Smith-Soto, edi-
tor of the International Poetry Review, generously commented on the
same chapter, giving it his undivided attention at a time when he had more
on his mind. Like Klee, Fritz Janschka began his creative life as a poet
before realizing that he was meant to be a painter after all. He has shared
my curiosity about Klee’s work for thirty years, and he knows that I could
not have completed this book without the benefit of his extraordinary
intellect, his Morgensternian humor, and his culinary skills (in that order).
Concerning translations of poetry, only the graceless ones in this book
are mine. Those distinguished by wit and elegance are the work of Fred
Chappell, Fritz Janschka, and the authors I credit individually in notes and
acknowledge collectively here.
In addition to copyright holders named in the captions of illustrations, I
gratefully acknowledge the following institutions, individuals, and publishers:
the Klee family estate and the Zentrum Paul Klee for permission to quote
passages from Paul Klee, Tagebücher, 1898–1918, Stuttgart: Gerd Hatje,
Teufen: Arthur Niggli, 1988; Arche Verlag AG, Zürich-Hamburg, for per-
mission to quote poems in Paul Klee, Gedichte, ed. Felix Klee, © 1960, 1996,
2001; the University of California Press for permission to quote passages in
The Diaries of Paul Klee, 1898–1918, by Paul Klee, ed. Felix Klee, © 1968
The Regents of the University of California, University of California Press,
and Calligrammes, Poems of Peace and War, 1913–1916, by Guillaume
Apollinaire, trans. Ann Hyde Greet, introd. S. I. Lockerbie, © 1991 The
Regents of the University of California, University of California Press;
DuMont Literatur und Kunst Verlag for permission to quote and reproduce
poems from Kurt Schwitters, Lyrik, vol. 1 of Das literarische Werk, © 1973
DuMont Literatur und Kunst Verlag, Cologne; the Metropolitan Museum of
Art for permission to quote Guillaume Apollinaire’s “Le Poulpe,” in Le
Bestiaire, ou Cortège d’Orphée, trans. Lauren Shakley, © 1977 The
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Yale University Press for permission
to quote a passage from Christian Morgenstern, Songs from the Gallows, trans.
Walter Arndt, Yale University Press, 1993; Patrick Bridgwater for permission
to quote from his translations of poems in The German Poets of the First World
War, New York: St. Martin’s, 1985; Nicholas Jacobs for permission to quote
from Patrick Bridgwater, Poet of Expressionist Berlin: The Life and Work of
Georg Heym, London: Libris, 1991; Lucia Getsi for permission to quote her
translations from Georg Trakl, Poems, Athens, Ohio: Mundus Artium Press,
1973.
P. A.
June 2006
Introduction: The Artist (Poet/Painter)
I N 1908 PAUL KLEE PAINTED A FIGURE study entitled The Artist (Poet/
Painter) (Der Künstler [Dichtermaler], 1908/72). This watercolor has
been missing for years, so it cannot be compared to photographs or known
self-portraits of Klee.1 Assuming that The Artist (Poet/Painter) was a por-
trait of the artist as a young man, it would have visually reinforced the mul-
tiple identities Klee constructed for himself in his Diaries (Tagebücher).
Since Klee did not begin keeping a journal until 1898, he was faced with
the task of reconstructing the first nineteen years of his life, beginning with
his birth near Bern, Switzerland, in 1879. The earliest numbered entries in
the Diaries seem to have been assembled from memory and various writ-
ten records. As a result, they take on the character of “a system of frag-
ments,” which is how Friedrich von Schlegel described the literary genre
of memoirs.2
There is every indication that Klee’s systematically organized frag-
ments were the product of selective recall. It is surely not coincidental, for
example, that early entries in the Diaries contain numerous allusions to his
aspirations as a poet and his training as a musician. It is clear from their
placement and their tone that Klee intended to chart a course of indecision
about his choice of a profession. In a dramatic show of resolve, he claimed
to have “said goodbye to literature and music” (“der Literatur[,] der
Musik Valet gesagt”) when he left Bern in 1898 to study the visual arts in
Munich.3 He then admitted somewhat sheepishly that he had continued to
compose poetry as a creative outlet for his anxieties and frustrations, appar-
ently undeterred by the realization that his efforts were little more than
“studies, exercises in style” (“Studien, Stil-Versuche”).4 Reluctant to relin-
quish his literary ambitions, in the early spring of 1901 he drafted a pro-
gram for future development that still accorded primacy to poetry: “as
ideal profession, poetry and philosophy; as real profession, the plastic arts”
(“als idealer Beruf: Dichtkunst und Philosophie, als realer Beruf: die
Plastik”).5 A few months later reluctance gave way to fleeting regret:
I should have written many poems to give form to my newly gained cre-
ative strength. Of course, this intention was not realized. For to be a poet
and to write poetry are two different things. However that strength and
tranquility has [sic] remained dear to me even in my later life, and I don’t
intend to mock at it.
[Viele Gedichte sollten der neugewonnenen Kraft Form verleihen.
Natürlich kam es nicht zu einer Verwirklichung dieser Absicht. Denn
2 INTRODUCTION: THE ARTIST (POET/PAINTER)
Dichter sein und dichten ist zweierlei. Jene Kraft und Ruhe aber ist mir
auch für mein späteres Leben teuer geblieben, und ich möchte hierauf
keine Travestien leben lassen.]6
By 1901, then, Klee had acknowledged that his future as a poet held little
promise, even though his claim to being a poet implies that he still consid-
ered poetry an avocation. As indicated by the title The Artist (Poet/Painter),
he clung to a dual identity as late as 1908, by which time his professional
ambitions were focused exclusively on his visual production.
To prepare the reader of the Diaries for the inevitability of his com-
mitment to the visual arts, Klee peppered his memoirs with statements that
distill years of vacillation into flashes of insight: “The recognition that at
bottom I am a poet, after all, should be no hindrance in the plastic arts!”
(“Im Grunde Dichter zu sein, diese Erkenntnis sollte in der bildenden
Kunst doch nicht hinderlich sein!”).7 Once Klee made the transition from
poet to painter, he continued to write occasional poetry for particular cir-
cumstances and experimental verses for his own purposes. Some of these
were copied into a notebook he labeled “Geduchte,” which can be trans-
lated either as “Poams” or “Poums.”8 His vowel displacement is indicative
of the self-deprecating irony that characterizes much of Klee’s verbal poetic
production — even before he relegated it to the status of playful pursuit.
This is not to suggest that Klee ever thought of poetry as a trivial pursuit.
On the contrary, he took time to play only with what he valued and always
with a purpose. His playful engagement with poetry challenged him to
match wits with poets he admired; his purpose was to master skills and
internalize ideas he could apply either to writing poetry or to composing
poems in his unique pictorial script.
Klee’s conceptual understanding of what it meant to write poetry was
shaped by such canonical aesthetic treatises as Horace’s Ars Poetica, which
he quoted in the title of the painting ab ovo (1917/130), as well as by his
knowledge of a broad spectrum of poetry, from classical epics to the
shaped poetry of Guillaume Apollinaire and the sound poems of Kurt
Schwitters. His rigorous Gymnasium training gave Klee a strong founda-
tion in the history of literature. A brief survey of his exposure to the cre-
ative practices of early modernist groups and artists confirms that he was
equally well versed in the experimental poetry of his contemporaries,
including the German expressionists, the dadaists, and the surrealists.
During the second decade of the twentieth century, German expres-
sionist poetry proliferated in the periodicals that promoted the literary
avant-garde. Although Klee referred only to Gottfried Benn by name, he
could hardly have avoided the works of other German expressionist poets
even if he only skimmed through the influential magazine Der Sturm. The
context in which Klee mentioned Benn confirms that he would have been
familiar with the poets whose works appeared in Der Sturm. Writing to his
INTRODUCTION: THE ARTIST (POET/PAINTER) 3
spouse Lily Klee-Stumpf in March 1916 from Landshut, the military post
where he was stationed as a recruit, he referred to a plethora of correspon-
dence from “Walden, Moilliet, Benn etc.”9 As founder and editor of Der
Sturm, Herwarth Walden provided an outlet for some of the most innova-
tive expressionist poets, including Benn, Alfred Lichtenstein, and August
Stramm.10 Klee himself had graphic work published in Der Sturm, as well
as his translation of an essay by Robert Delaunay, so it is plausible to assume
that he paged through the magazine regularly as a way of keeping up with
the latest trends in art and literature. Beginning in 1913, Klee also showed
work at Walden’s Sturm Gallery, initially participating in an exhibition of
the Swiss Moderne Bund artists, among whom was Hans Arp.
Although Arp maintained ties with Der Sturm into the early twenties,
in 1916 he joined forces with other mavericks to found the Zurich-based
dada group. Like Arp, Klee exhibited with the dadaists, but his participa-
tion in their group activities was limited. In his Memoirs of a Dada
Drummer, Richard Huelsenbeck casually recalled that “Klee popped up in
Zurich every so often during our dada period there.”11 Typically, Klee was
more precise in recording his personal contact with the dadaists. Writing
to Lily Klee from Zurich on 22 June 1919, he noted that he had sought
out Waldemar Jollos, who had lectured on his work at a Dada Gallery exhi-
bition in 1917, and had also met with Arp, Marcel Janco, and Tristan
Tzara. He described the dada circle as quite interesting (“sehr interes-
sant”) and the people as lively (“voller Leben”).12 He made no mention of
the antics of dada performances or the poems that had been recited at ear-
lier dada soirées. Even so, he would have been familiar with dada poetry
through the group’s publications, including the 1919 Anthologie Dada,
and possibly through performances sponsored by the Berlin dadaists dur-
ing the early twenties.
The surrealists were another group with which Klee established a tan-
gential alliance. In a letter dated 27 November 1924 and written on the
letterhead of the “Bureau de Recherches Surréalistes,” Louis Aragon
chided Klee for not reading his mail or the copies of articles written about
him. Clearly unaccustomed to the role of supplicant, Aragon nevertheless
entreated Klee to provide reproductions of his work for a new journal, La
Révolution surréaliste.13 Klee responded promptly, agreeing to send photo-
graphs. Presumably he did so, for reproductions of his work were subse-
quently published in La Révolution surréaliste, along with surrealist
manifestos, reviews, and poetry. In October 1925 Klee’s first solo exhib-
ition in Paris opened at the Vavin-Raspail Gallery, which produced a small
catalogue with an introduction by Aragon and a poem by Paul Eluard. The
following month his work was also included in the first group exhibition
of surrealist art. Klee’s name, among others, was accorded footnote status
in André Breton’s first surrealist manifesto, and throughout the twenties
surrealist writers paid homage to what they perceived as the poetic qualities
of Klee’s visual images.14 Klee would respond in his own fashion to the
poetry of the surrealists, and even to their critical prose, but he persisted
in preserving his independence from this group — or any other one, for
that matter.
Despite Klee’s apparent aversion to typecasting and group solidarity, he
was in contact with a number of individual artists who moved within the
intersecting circles of modernism. Like Klee, many of them were poets as
well as visual artists. Some, notably Wassily Kandinsky, composed poetry for
only a relatively short period of time, whereas others, such as Arp and
Schwitters, pursued parallel paths of creative activity on a more sustained
basis. Arp, in fact, went so far as to admit that had he been obliged to make
a choice between poetry and sculpture, he would have chosen to write
poetry.15 As for Joan Miró, he claimed that in his experience painting and
poetry were virtually indistinguishable creative impulses.16 Throughout this
study of Klee as a poet/painter the work of these and other dual practition-
ers will serve as focal points of comparison. A few general observations about
their work in relation to Klee’s will introduce some of the theoretical princi-
ples and compositional devices that were common to modernist practices in
multiple spheres of creative activity.
As early as 1903 Arp had a poem and drawing published together,
thereby initiating a lifetime of reciprocal exchange between the recurring
themes of his verbal and visual compositions — and, most significantly,
their methods of construction. Between 1915 and 1920 he wrote and
rewrote the poems that would be published in 1920 under the title The
Cloud Pump (Die Wolkenpumpe). By his own account, he composed these
poems by tearing apart and rearranging sentences, words, and syllables.17
This process anticipated the production of his torn drawings (“dessins
déchirés”), which were based on the creative principle of “constellation.”
Arp’s technique originated in the act of destroying works to generate the
materials that were recycled into new works.18 Klee independently arrived
at a similar compositional technique, applying the term “productive ruin”
(“produktive Ruine”) to works he subjected to the process of destruction
as a constructive approach to pictorial composition.19 Klee’s carefully
edited Diaries and selected examples of his poems in both textual and
visual settings provide evidence that he applied variations on this technique
to his writing as well.
With the clearly focused perspective of hindsight, Arp himself acknow-
ledged that Kandinsky was the first artist who consciously produced poems
and paintings that marked the transition from “abstract” to “concrete,” by
which he meant autonomous compositions that were not based in direct
reference to observable reality.20 Sounds (Klänge), Kandinsky’s only pub-
lished volume of poetry, was issued in 1912 in a limited edition of thirty-
eight poems paired with fifty-six woodcuts that complement rather than
illustrate the texts. The most readily apparent correspondences between
verbal and visual images are the use of patterned repetitions and a tendency
to fragment syntactical units, both linguistic and pictorial.21 By comparison,
surviving examples of Klee’s earliest poems are far more traditional in their
formal structures, although he did use the same techniques in his later,
more experimental poetry. Similarly, a comparison between the woodcuts in
Sounds, which date from about 1907, and Klee’s View from a Window of My
Parents’ Home in Bern (Fensteraussicht der elterlichen Wohnung in Bern,
1909/25) indicates that Klee’s early graphic vocabulary is more represen-
tational than Kandinsky’s.22 However, as Klee subsequently negotiated con-
stant shifts between figurative and nonobjective abstraction, he deployed
repetition and fragmentation with as much inventive variety as Kandinsky.
Klee’s path first crossed Kandinsky’s in Munich, where both were affil-
iated with Der Blaue Reiter, and again at the Bauhaus, the experimental
design school where they taught and lived in close proximity during the
twenties. Klee did not see Schwitters with as much frequency, but his name
is invoked no fewer than ten times in reviews and articles Schwitters pub-
lished in Der Sturm between 1920 and 1926. Schwitters mentioned Klee
in a response to what he perceived as G. F. Hartlaub’s overwrought ana-
logies between art and music.23 Although sarcastic, the tone of this
commentary pales in comparison to the virulence directed against
“Dr. Weygandt,” the Hamburg physician who resorted to yet another crit-
ical cliché, namely, the analogy that paired modern art with madness.
Composed as a verbal and visual collage, this Merz diatribe contains
Weygandt’s critiques of Klee and Schwitters lifted from an issue of the
Berlin newspaper Germania dated 27 November 1921.24 Evidently
pleased with the visual effects of his polemical collage, Schwitters contin-
ued the practice in his tirade against a “Herr Lange,” whose choice of
words for a 1922 article in the Göttinger Zeitung gave Schwitters the
opportunity to play with variations on the noun “Kalk” (lime), “Kalkklees”
being an irresistible combination.25 Klee’s poetry and picture titles offer
ample evidence that he shared Schwitters’s propensity for wordplay. There
are also parallels between some of Klee’s experiments with visual poetry
and the typographic innovations of Schwitters’s experimental verse.
Nevertheless, any claim that the two exchanged ideas about creative strate-
gies must remain speculative.
In contrast, the relationship between Klee and Miró is more straight-
forward. Although the two never actually met, Miró frankly admitted that
he was profoundly influenced by Klee’s work.26 Klee’s influence on Miró’s
formal vocabulary has been well documented. More relevant to this study
is Miró’s remark that he made “no distinction between painting and
poetry” (“aucune différence entre peinture et poésie”).27 He was, in effect,
invoking poetic license to characterize a working process that privileged
neither words nor images in the formulation of poetic ideas. Miró began
to formulate these ideas in paintings of the early twenties, where there is a
fluid interplay between lines that form words and those that shape images.
Although Klee had begun to forge semantically reciprocal relationships
between poetic texts and pictorial symbols a decade earlier — by which
time he had already shifted his focus from poetry to painting — he was still
coming to terms with the theoretical concept of the poetic as it applied to
the visual arts.
As a dual practitioner, Klee used “poetic” not as a vaguely descriptive
adjective but rather to convey specific meaning. Specificity should not,
however, be confused with singularity. For Klee, as for other modern
artists, the term “poetic” had different connotations at different times
and in different contexts. In a letter to his then fiancée Lily Stumpf dated
11 July 1902, he referred to a conflict between his predilection for the
poetic (“das Poëtische [sic]”) and his frustrating search for pictorial themes
(“malerische . . . Motive”).28 In a lecture delivered in the early thirties
and transcribed by one of his students at the Düsseldorf Academy, where
he taught after leaving the Bauhaus, he rephrased the poetic-pictorial
polarity to privilege “the poetic, not the literary” (“ich sage Dichterisches,
nicht Literarisches”).29 Drawing on the verbal art of analogy, he advised his
students that artists could achieve the multiplicity of meaning inherent in
poetry by adapting poetic language to visual images. The changes of mean-
ing in Klee’s references to the poetic can be contextualized by examining
some of the theoretical and critical precedents that would have been famil-
iar to him.
The frequent use of “poetic” as a descriptive modifier of painting was
an extension of the assumptions underlying the ut pictura poesis tradition
initiated by Renaissance writers, who turned to classical treatises on poetry
in the absence of ancient theoretical texts on the visual arts. The theorists
who developed the concept and perpetuated the tradition cited Aristotle’s
observation that poetry and painting are both arts of ideal imitation and
quoted the simile ut pictura poesis from Horace’s Ars Poetica.30 Over time
these sources were inventively reworked to support the theory that there
are intrinsic correspondences between the sister arts of poetry and paint-
ing. As Rensselaer Lee explained in his introduction to Ut Pictura Poesis:
The Humanistic Theory of Painting, the theorists who wrote about art
expected that ut pictura poesis (“as is painting so is poetry”) would be
interpreted to mean “as is poetry so is painting.”31 In practice it was gen-
erally assumed that painters would look to poetry as models of appropriate
themes, subjects, and modes of expression.
Despite occasional objections, the theory of ut pictura poesis domin-
ated critical discourse in the visual arts until the eighteenth century, when
it was challenged in Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Laocoön: An Essay on the
Limits of Painting and Poetry (Laokoon, oder Über die Grenzen der Malerei
und Poesie) and Denis Diderot’s voluminous and highly subjective salon
criticism. Twice in his commentary on the Salon of 1767 Diderot famously
countered the concept of ut pictura poesis, noting that “what works well in
painting always works well as poetry, but the relation isn’t reciprocal.”32
Like Diderot, Lessing pointed to differences in the languages of poetry
and painting, arguing that while both are arts of imitation, they imitate in
different ways.33 A century later the poet and critic Charles Baudelaire dis-
tinguished between poetic painting and painting that attempted — invari-
ably without success — to illustrate poetry. He criticized academic artists
like Ary Scheffer, who depended on subject matter borrowed from poetry
rather than based on visual experience.34 In contrast, Baudelaire ascribed
positive connotations to the poetic, which he associated with an expressive
quality conveyed through an artist’s visual vocabulary and technique. This
was the meaning he applied to the work of Eugène Delacroix.35 Delacroix
himself used much the same terminology, drawing a distinction between
prosaic and poetic painting that would be reiterated by Klee and others of
his generation.36
By the early twentieth century the opposition between literary and
poetic painting was an established critical paradigm. The advocates of
modern art adopted and reinterpreted this theoretical contrast in the inter-
est of promoting the radical idea that poetic painting was altogether dif-
ferent from painting that imitated objects in the visible world. In “Light”
(“La Lumière”), which Delaunay wrote in 1912, he applied the terms
“descriptive” (“descriptif”) and “literary” (“littéraire”) to the art of imita-
tion, meaning images that literally resemble the objects they represent.37
In his translation of Delaunay’s essay for Der Sturm, where it was pub-
lished as “Über das Licht,” Klee replaced Delaunay’s adjectives with the
nouns “Beschreibung” and “Literatur,” while retaining the pejorative
implications of mimetic painting.38 The same year Delaunay wrote “Light”
Kandinsky published “On the Problem of Form” (“Über die Formfrage”)
in Der Blaue Reiter. In this important essay he proposed theoretical alter-
natives to the tradition of visual art that privileged the representation of
objects in the visible world. Kandinsky acknowledged this tradition in
naming two polar opposites of pictorial form: “1– the great abstraction
[and] 2– the great realism” (“die grosse Abstraktion [und] die grosse
Realistik”).39 Among modern artists, Kandinsky noted, the ideal was no
longer a perfectly calibrated balance between these two equally viable
forms of expression, as it had been in the past. He knew from his own prac-
tice that artists were exploring “many combinations of different harmonies
of the abstract with the real” (“viele Kombinationen der verschiedenen
Zusammenklänge des Abstrakten mit dem Realen”).40 These new combin-
ations, he added, would not be understood by most critics. The ideal critic
in Kandinsky’s view “would need the soul of a poet” (“eine Dichterseele
brauchen”).41 Just such a critic came to the defense of modern art in the
person of Apollinaire, who was as prolific a critic as he was a poet. In “Die
moderne Malerei,” an article first published in Der Sturm in 1913,
Apollinaire contrasted the art of imitation with modern art that is created
with formal elements borrowed from conceptual rather than visual reality.
This approach, he noted, leads to “poetic painting that is independent of
all visual perception” (“einer poetischen Malerei, die ausserhalb der
Betrachtung steht”).42 The kind of painting Apollinaire had in mind in
1913 was poetic in that it substituted the language of visual metaphor for
literally descriptive imagery. This is essentially the same meaning Klee
attached to the term poetic in his lecture dating from the early thirties.
Many of the ideas Klee developed in his lectures at the Bauhaus in the
twenties and at the Düsseldorf Academy in the early thirties are introduced
in an essay originally drafted in 1918 and entitled “Graphic Art” (“Graphik”)
but better known in its final version as the “Creative Credo” (“Schöpferische
Konfession”). Although in this essay, published in 1920, Klee did not use
the designation poetic, he did use metaphorical language to add his own
ideas to the theoretical foundations of modern art. After introducing the
dot, line, plane, and space as formal elements of the visual arts in section 1,
he demonstrated how they might be used on “a little trip into the land of
deeper insight” (“eine kleine Reise ins Land der besseren Erkenntnis”), a
metaphor he developed throughout section 2 and picked up again in sec-
tion 4.43 At the beginning of section 4 he specifically cited Lessing’s
Laocoön, in which “much fuss is made about the difference between tem-
poral and spatial art” (“wird viel Wesens aus dem Unterschied von zeitlicher
zu räumlicher Kunst gemacht”). Dismissing that idea as nothing more than
a “scholastic delusion” (“nur gelehrter Wahn”), Klee made the claim that
“space, too, is a temporal concept” (“auch der Raum ist ein zeitlicher
Begriff”). To undermine Lessing’s insistence that the painter must
renounce the element of time, Klee pointed to the temporal processes of
making and looking at a work of art.44 In section 5 he proceeded to con-
test other aspects of Lessing’s theoretical distinctions between painting and
poetry. Seemingly in response to Lessing’s observation that painting cannot
convey the invisible because “everything in painting is visible” (“bei ihr ist
alles sichtbar”), Klee countered that modern art can reveal “other, latent
realities” (“andere Wahrheiten latent”) that are veiled by the visible world.45
One of the arguments Lessing mounted most forcefully was that the signs
of poetry are not only successive but arbitrary, whereas those used by the
painter must bear a “suitable relationship to the thing signified” (“ein
bequemes Verhältnis zu dem Bezeichneten haben müssen”).46 Klee implic-
itly dismissed this distinction, characterizing a visual image as “a formal cos-
mos” (“ein formaler Kosmos”) created from “abstract elements” (“aus
abstrakten Formelementen”).47
Although the ideas in the “Creative Credo” evolved from Klee’s own
experiments with pictorial abstraction, nowhere in this essay did he state
explicitly that for decades artists had been systematically challenging the
established tradition of pictorial illusionism that had dominated artistic
practice since the Renaissance. This tradition values an artist’s ability to

construct a pictorial space that is a convincing representation of actual
three-dimensional space and to fill it with objects that resemble things vis-
ible in the world. Klee was among those artists who challenged that long-
standing tradition. Without question, Klee and other innovators would not
have been recognized as such had they not developed unique styles of
expression and made singular contributions to the diversity of modernism.
Individually and collectively they brought about revolutionary changes
that cannot be attributed to any single factor. It is nevertheless a matter of
historical fact that many of the modernist innovators worked across media,
the most frequent combination being the visual arts and poetry. It is, of
course, possible that this was a coincidence, but that seems unlikely given
the numbers of painters who wrote poetry and poets who painted. Not all
dual practitioners were doubly talented, and even those who were tended
to favor one creative pursuit over another. Most of the poet/painters of
Klee’s acquaintance established their reputations as visual artists. Other
dual practitioners, including Hermann Hesse and Else Lasker-Schüler,
became known as writers. Comparing the visual and verbal production of
any individual artist, the most readily apparent parallels pertain to isolated
examples of imagery. To cite but one example, the urban types that are sav-
agely caricatured in George Grosz’s paintings and drawings are easy to rec-
ognize in his word pictures of postwar Berlin because they are subjected to
the same treatment. More complicated is the question of whether the
poetry written by artists in the vanguard of European modernism had a
significant and sustained impact on other aspects of the visual work they
produced.
In Klee’s case there is sufficient evidence — verbal as well as visual —
to support the thesis that any assessment of his role in articulating a mod-
ernist aesthetic must consider his early efforts as a poet and his continued
engagement with poetry until his death in 1940 at the age of sixty. Verbal
evidence is found throughout Klee’s published writing, including the crit-
ical edition of the Diaries. This edition contains Klee’s edited entries and
variations on these entries written as autobiographical statements for
Wilhelm Hausenstein and Leopold Zahn, both authors of early mono-
graphs on his work. Klee’s statements for Hausenstein and Zahn are care-
fully crafted attempts to exert control over how his artistic development
would be recorded for his contemporaries and for posterity. He called atten-
tion to 1902 as a pivotal year in his early career, focusing on the struggle to
reconcile his dual allegiances to the poetic and the pictorial in his search for
an artistic identity.48 Once Klee acknowledged that he had greater potential
as a visual artist than he did as a poet, his poetic production became spor-
adic but by no means inconsequential. For most of his life he wrote poetry
only intermittently, occasionally incorporating some of his poetic verses into
visual frames of reference. However, he applied his knowledge of poetics to
his visual compositions with increasing frequency. As early as 1912 he wrote

a poetic text into the space of a drawing. At that point his graphic imagery
was still recognizably figurative, but by 1915 he was pairing letter forms
with visual abstractions, appropriating the most basic units of the language
of poetry to invent his own form of pictorial abstraction. During the post-
war years Klee continued to incorporate verbal signs into visual images, and
in the twenties he experimented with the pictorial equivalents of the formal
structures of poetry. By the thirties he had developed the pictorial writing
system that allowed him to make a definitive transition from writing poetry
to composing “poems in pictorial script,” to use the plural form of the title
he gave to a drawing dating from 1939. This study will retrace Klee’s steps
— not along a direct, linear path but meandering through the circuitous
byways of modernism in its multiple manifestations.
Because this work was conceived and written as a case study, I am
using the particularities of one artist’s theories and practices to frame some
general observations about the relationship between the visual and verbal
arts in the history of modernism as it developed in Europe during the first
four decades of the twentieth century. I propose that Klee could critique
Lessing’s theoretical distinctions with such conviction because his practice
of both art forms made him aware of commonalities rather than differences
in the languages of poetry and painting. Even before challenging Lessing in
his “Creative Credo,” Klee cited Horace’s Ars Poetica in his work entitled
ab ovo.49 This reference to one of the principal sources of the ut pictura
poesis tradition lends support to the theory that Klee was consciously
rethinking the implications of ut pictura poesis. For Klee it was again pos-
sible — and even desirable — for painting to be like poetry, albeit in ways
that would have been unthinkable to those who originally perceived simi-
larities between the sister arts. Klee’s work exemplifies what can be called
a new, modernist concept of ut pictura poesis, one that is fundamentally dif-
ferent from the traditional model in rejecting the assumption that painting
is an art of imitation. Klee and other modernists who equated poetic with
nonmimetic painting were actually taking much the same degree of liberty
with their sources as Renaissance theorists had.50 Their new concept of ut
pictura poesis was based on perceived parallels between painting and poetry
that Lessing had defined as differences when he took issue with ideas that
had prevailed since the Renaissance. In dismantling Lessing’s defense of
the distinctions between painting and poetry, Klee constructed a theoreti-
cal framework for painting that is similar to poetry in its use of arbitrary
signs arranged in a nonillusionistic space and its ability to communicate
what can be known and felt in addition to or in lieu of what can be seen.
How Klee put this theory into practice is what I intend to explore.
My purpose is twofold: to contextualize selected examples of Klee’s
poetry and to demonstrate how one poet-turned-visual artist transferred
theoretical concepts, structural principles, and thematic currents from
various written forms to the semantic spaces of drawings and paintings.

Recurring themes in his career as a poet/painter are charted by chapter
titles that quote or paraphrase his own words. Each chapter is organized
chronologically and analyzes selected representative examples of Klee’s
poetic images, both verbal and visual. Chapter 1 surveys examples of the
traditional and experimental poetry Klee composed between 1895 and
1938, some of which was recorded in textual spaces, such as the Diaries
and the notebook of “Geduchte,” while other examples were incorporated
into visual settings. In this chapter I identify recurring features of Klee’s
practice as a poet: his method of composing by editing and condensing; his
evident delight in playing with language; and his attention to the elements
of linear structure. In subsequent chapters I examine visual analogues of
these characteristic features, emphasizing symbolic imagery, structural rela-
tionships, and compositional techniques common to Klee’s poetry and
painting. I pair Klee’s visual images dating from 1914 to 1940 with poetic
texts from a number of sources, including librettos of operas he knew, as
well as books in his personal library and poetry published in contemporary
literary magazines. The works discussed in chapter 2 illustrate how Klee
mediated the shift from literary to poetic content, transforming verbal
images into visual equivalents. In chapter 3 I propose that he modernized
a traditional concept of landscape painting by adapting poetic forms and
devices. In chapter 4 I examine Klee’s process of “harmonizing architec-
tonic and poetic painting” by considering a number of sources for the
unique compositional structures he first developed while teaching at the
Bauhaus and subsequently reworked during his last years in Bern. In chap-
ter 5 I discuss works with rhythmic structures generated by the doubly
coded language Klee had invented by the last decade of his life.
In the chapters devoted primarily to Klee’s visual production, my inten-
tion is not to identify a particular literary model for every drawing and
painting. In some cases I do make such claims, but this is often impossible
with Klee’s own poetry. Since he rarely dated his poems, it is difficult to
establish firm chronological links to what appear to be related visual images.
Instead, my intention is to analyze examples of reciprocity in the processes
of making verbal and visual art and to examine commonalities in works of
poetry, drawing, and painting. I do not restrict comparative analyses to pair-
ings between Klee’s own poems and pictures. Rather, I draw widely from
the cultural milieu that, by all accounts, he absorbed with unstinting intel-
lectual curiosity. His Diaries and the letters written to Lily Klee-Stumpf
whenever the two were apart confirm that he read voraciously and was an
equally avid aficionado of concerts and theatrical productions. Although I
cite this kind of documentation when it is available and pertinent, I also
make some assumptions about what Klee may have read, including such
readily accessible periodicals as Die Aktion and magazines that featured repro-
ductions of his work, among them Der Sturm and the Cahiers d’art.
Throughout this study I reproduce entire poems or quote excerpts in

English as well as the language in which they were originally written, using
published translations when available. Similarly, when quoting directly
from any of Klee’s published writings, I cite the standard German and
English editions. Exceptions are his poems and letters, most of which have
not been translated. When not otherwise attributed, translations are mine.
To preserve the flow of a text written in English, I generally use English
translations of titles and prose passages followed by German, French, and
other foreign-language citations in parentheses or brackets. The one
exception pertains to poetic verse, which I always quote first in its original
language.
Klee’s picture titles constitute a category all their own. Unlike the
poems, which were usually untitled, his visual images were almost always
given titles. These titles are occasionally descriptive, but sometimes they
bear no obvious relationship to the image depicted. Often they are poetic
figures that verbally complement and therefore reinforce meanings inherent
in the visual images. A number of scholars have examined Klee’s titles,51 but
they are not the primary focus of this study. I discuss titles only when they
elucidate the strategies Klee applied in developing a sign system and com-
positional structures that oscillate between verbal and visual forms of
expression. With few exceptions, I cite the German and English titles listed
in the multivolume catalogue raisonné of Klee’s work, along with the num-
ber assigned to each work in Klee’s own oeuvre catalogue.52 In cases where
I briefly discuss visual images that are not illustrated, I refer the reader to
reproductions in the catalogue raisonné or other available sources.
Despite a vast body of Klee scholarship, relatively little attention has
been paid to his poetry. This is probably due to the fact that the reputations
of historical figures tend to be constructed within the confines of discipli-
nary niches, and most Klee scholars are art historians, like myself. Because
my academic training and interests encompass the history of literature as
well as art, I have gravitated to the interdisciplinary field of word and image
studies. The interpretive methods applied by scholars in this field have
proved to be particularly useful in analyzing Klee’s creative activity. In this
first book-length study of Klee’s poetic production, I again examine his
work from the critical perspective of word and image studies. Although it
contains translations of poems that have never been translated into English
and new versions of some that have been previously translated, it makes no
pretense at being a comprehensive edition of Klee’s poetry in translation.
This would require both a critical edition of the poems in German — which
has not yet been compiled — and the dedicated talents of a bilingual poet.
One such poet, Roman Jakobson, initiated scholarly inquiry into Klee’s
poetic practice. A practicing poet as well as a scholar and critic, Jakobson
applied his structuralist method to what he called an “octastich” from
Klee’s Diaries in an essay that first appeared in the inaugural issue of
Linguistic Inquiry and was reprinted in the collection entitled Hölderlin,

Klee, Brecht: zur Wortkunst dreier Gedichte.53 A less technical and more
accessible form of Jakobson’s methodology has served as a model for other
authors, including Marianne Vogel and Paul Bauschatz. Vogel’s valuable
contributions to Klee research include an unpublished paper that proposes
a semiotic-structuralist interpretation of twenty poems, as well as her pub-
lished dissertation, which establishes scholarly guidelines for determining an
inventory of Klee’s poetry.54 In conference papers and publications on
Klee’s work, Bauschatz retains the rigor of Jakobson’s structural linguistics
while expanding the scope of his perceptive textual analyses to include
selected visual as well as verbal texts.55
My own study focuses on one artist’s engagement with the kind of
cross-fertilization that is generally considered a hallmark of modernism as
a pluralistic aesthetic. Dual practitioners are not, of course, unique to mod-
ernism, but they have generated artistic innovation down through the
centuries. In this respect I am indebted as much to Deborah Parker’s
monographic study Bronzino: Renaissance Painter as Poet as I am to Renée
Riese Hubert’s essay “Paul Klee: Modernism in Art and Literature.”56
Other scholarly models include: Harriett Watts’s Three Painter-Poets: Arp,
Schwitters, Klee — Selected Poems; Marjorie Perloff’s numerous publica-
tions on modernist poetry and painting; and Clara Orban’s close readings
of futurist and surrealist word-image relationships in her Culture of
Fragments.57 Whereas my motivation in undertaking this study was to pre-
sent a substantive analysis of Klee’s multimedia poetic practice, my inspira-
tion in writing has been the challenge of affirming the following aphorism
found in Keith Haring’s journals:
Poems do not necessarily need words.
Words do not necessarily make poems.58
Notes
1
This work is listed among lost self-images of Klee in Michele Vishny’s essay “Paul
Klee’s Self-Images,” in Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Art, ed. Mary Mathews Gedo
(Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press, 1985), 1:165 n. 5; hereafter cited as “Klee’s Self-
Images.” The object file in the Zentrum Paul Klee contains no photograph of the
work but does document that it was sold to A. J. Eddy in Chicago. This would
have been Arthur Jerome Eddy, author of Cubists and Post-Impressionism (Chicago:
A. C. McClurg, 1914), a copy of which is in the Klee library, currently housed in
the Zentrum Paul Klee.
2
Friedrich von Schlegel, “Athenäums-Fragmente,” #77, in Charakteristiken und
Kritiken 1 (1796–1801), ed. Hans Eichner, in Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe
(Munich: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1967), 2:176.
3
Paul Klee, Tagebücher, 1898–1918, new critical edition, ed. Paul-Klee-Stiftung,
Kunstmuseum Bern, comp. Wolfgang Kersten (Stuttgart: Gerd Hatje / Teufen:
Arthur Niggli, 1988), #83, 1899–1900, 41; see also The Diaries of Paul Klee,
1898–1918, ed. Felix Klee (Berkeley: U of California P, 1964), 33. Subsequent ref-
erences to the Tagebücher include the entry number, the date indicated in the crit-
ical edition, and the page number; only page numbers are given for the Diaries.
4
Klee, Tagebücher #120, 1900, 52 (Diaries, 42); for other references to Klee’s
efforts at composing poetry, see Tagebücher #92, January–March 1900, 44; #110,
summer 1901, 50; #129, January–February 1901, 57 (Diaries, 35, 39–40, 46).
5
Klee, Tagebücher #137, 1901, 60 (Diaries, 48).
6
Klee, Tagebücher #172, 70 (Diaries, 57). Although included in the Diaries under
a section labeled “Before Italy (Summer 1901),” the reference to “my later life”
clearly indicates that it was written in retrospect, perhaps when Klee was rewriting
the original version of this passage in 1904, or possibly as late as 1921, when he
completed another round of editing and transcription. For documentation of this
activity, see chapter 1, note 3.
7
Tagebücher #121, summer 1900, 52 (Diaries, 42).
8
Marianne Vogel calls attention to the idiosyncratic spelling in her book Zwischen
Wort und Bild: Das schriftliche Werk Paul Klees und die Rolle der Sprache in seinem
Denken und in seiner Kunst (Munich: Scaneg, 1992), 16; hereafter cited as
Zwischen Wort und Bild.
9
Paul Klee, Briefe an die Familie, 1893–1940, ed. Felix Klee (Cologne: DuMont,
1979), 16 March 1916, 2:791. Subsequent references to Briefe include volume
number, date, and page number. A few years later Klee became familiar with the
essays contributed by Benn, Johannes R. Becher, and other expressionist writers
to the Schöpferische Konfession (1920), in which he published the essay cited in
note 43.
10
For a comprehensive survey and checklist of artists and writers featured in Der
Sturm, see Georg Brühl, Herwarth Walden und “Der Sturm” (Cologne: DuMont,
1983).
11
Richard Huelsenbeck, Memoirs of a Dada Drummer, ed. Hans J. Kleinschmidt,
trans. Joachim Neugroschel (New York: Viking, 1974), 66.
12
Briefe, vol. 2, 22 June 1919, 954.
13
A photocopy of the letter from Aragon and Klee’s handwritten reply are in the
documentary file of the Zentrum Paul Klee. The letter from Aragon is reproduced
and transcribed in Jürgen Glaesemer, Paul Klee — Handzeichnungen: 1921–1936
(Bern: Kunstmuseum, 1984), 2:94–96. On Klee’s presence in La Révolution sur-
réaliste, see Ann Temkin, “Klee and the Avant-Garde, 1912–1940,” in Paul Klee,
ed. Carolyn Lanchner (New York: Museum of Modern Art and New York Graphic
Society, 1987), 21–23. Subsequent references to this catalogue are abbreviated
MoMA, Klee.
14
For the note that mentions Klee and other visual artists, see André Breton,
Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: U
of Michigan P, 1969), 27. On the surrealist poets’ responses to Klee’s work, see
Temkin, “Klee and the Avant-Garde,” 28.
15
Quoted in Marcel Jean’s preface to Jean Arp’s Jours effeuillés: Poèmes,
essais, souvenirs, 1920–1965 (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), 25; hereafter cited as Jours
effeuillés.
16
This opinion was expressed in “Where Are You Going, Miró?,” interview with
Georges Duthuit (“Où allez-vous Miró?,” Cahiers d’art, 1936), in Joan Miró:
Selected Writings and Interviews, ed. Margit Rowell, trans. Paul Auster and Patricia
Mathews (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986), 151; hereafter cited as Rowell, ed., Miró:
Selected Writings.
17
Jean Arp, “Dada Was Not a Farce” (1949), in The Dada Painters and Poets: An
Anthology, ed. Robert Motherwell, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP,
Belknap Press, 1989), 294.
18
See Harriett Watts, “Hans Arp and the Principle of Constellation,” in Arp,
1886–1966, Minneapolis Institute of Arts and Württembergischer Kunstverein
(New York: Cambridge UP, 1987), 112–21.
19
The term “productive ruin” is cited by Jürg Spiller, the editor of selections of
Klee’s pedagogical and theoretical notes, in his introduction to The Nature of
Nature, vol. 2 of Paul Klee Notebooks, trans. Heinz Norden (New York: George
Wittenborn, 1973), 32; hereafter cited as Spiller, ed., The Nature of Nature. It also
appears in Paul Klee: Unendliche Naturgeschichte: Prinzipielle Ordnung der bild-
nerischen Mittel, verbunden mit Naturstudium, und konstruktive Kompositionswege,
ed. Jürg Spiller (Basel: Schwabe, 1970), 32; hereafter cited as Spiller, ed., Paul
Klee: Unendliche Naturgeschichte. The most comprehensive study of Klee’s tech-
nique of composing by cutting is contained in Wolfgang Kersten and Osamu
Okuda, Paul Klee / Im Zeichen der Teilung: Die Geschichte zerschnittener Kunst
Paul Klees, 1883–1940; mit vollständiger Dokumentation (Stuttgart: Gerd Hatje,
1995); hereafter cited as Im Zeichen der Teilung. This catalogue accompanied an
exhibition that opened at the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf
in January 1995 and traveled to Stuttgart’s Staatsgalerie.
20
Jean Arp, “Kandinsky, le Poète” (1951), in Jours effeuillés, 369.
21
For the English and German texts of Kandinsky’s poems, see Wassily Kandinsky,
Sounds, trans. Elizabeth R. Napier (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1981).
22
For a reproduction of View from a Window of My Parents’ Home in Bern, see
Paul-Klee-Stiftung, Paul Klee: Catalogue raisonné, 1883–1912 (London: Thames
and Hudson, 1998), 1:292; hereafter cited as Catalogue raisonné, followed by indi-
vidual volume numbers.
23
Kurt Schwitters, Manifeste und kritische Prosa, vol. 5 of Das literarische
Werk, ed. Friedhelm Lach (Cologne: M. DuMont Schauberg, 1981), 66; here-
after cited as Manifeste und kritische Prosa. The article was originally published
as “Tran Nummer 13, Das Privatscheuertuch,” Der Sturm (October 1920):
114–16.
24
Schwitters, Manifeste und kritische Prosa, 103; originally published as “Tragödie
Tran No. 22, gegen Herrn Dr. phil. et med. Weygandt,” Der Sturm (May 1922):
72–80.
25
Schwitters, Manifeste und kritische Prosa, 110; originally published as “Tran 25,
Sämischgares Rindleder,” Der Sturm (June 1922): 84–92.
26
Miró’s remark is cited in Brassaï, The Artists of My Life, trans. Richard Miller
(New York: Viking, 1982), 143. For other versions of Miró’s remarks about Klee,
see Carolyn Lanchner, “Klee in America,” MoMA, Klee, 109 n. 33.
27
Rowell, ed. Miró: Selected Writings, 151.
28
Briefe, vol. 1, 254. This letter is discussed in greater detail at the beginning of
chapter 2.
29
Cited in Petra Petitpierre, Aus der Malklasse von Paul Klee (Bern: Benteli,
1957), 32. In this book Petitpierre, who studied with Klee, published her tran-
scriptions of lectures Klee delivered at the Dessau Bauhaus and later at the
Düsseldorf Academy.
30
On poetry and painting as having the common goal of imitation, only achieved
by different means, see part 1 of Aristotle’s Poetics in The Poetics of Aristotle, trans.
Preston H. Epps (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1942), 2. For the Horace
quotation, see The Art of Poetry, a verse translation with introduction by Burton
Raffel, with the original Latin text, a prose translation, and biographical note by
James Hynd (Albany: State U of New York P, 1974), line 361, 39.
31
See Rensselaer W. Lee, Ut Pictura Poesis: The Humanistic Theory of Painting
(New York: Norton, 1967), 3; hereafter cited as Ut Pictura Poesis. For extensive
bibliographies of the ut pictura poesis tradition, see: Arno Dolders, “Ut Pictura
Poesis: A Selective, Annotated Bibliography of Books and Articles, Published
between 1900 and 1980, on the Interrelation of Literature and Painting from
1400 to 1800,” Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature 32 (1983):
105–24; and Ulrich Weisstein, “Literatur und bildende Kunst — Eine
Bibliographie,” in Literatur und bildende Kunst: Ein Handbuch zur Theorie und
Praxis eines komparatistischen Grenzgebietes, ed. Ulrich Weissten (Berlin: Erich
Schmidt, 1992), 320–43.
32
Denis Diderot, The Salon of 1767, vol. 2 of Diderot on Art, ed. and trans. John
Goodman (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1995), 65; see also 230–31.
33
See Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and
Poetry, trans. Edward Allen McCormick (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1984),
78–84; hereafter cited as Laocoön. This work was originally published as Laokoon [sic]:
oder, Über die Grenzen der Mahlerey und Poesie (Berlin: C. F. Voss, 1766).
34
Charles Baudelaire, “Salon de 1846,” in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Claude Pichois
(Paris: Gallimard, 1975), 2:474.
35
See Baudelaire, “L’Oeuvre et la vie d’Eugène Delacroix” (1863), in Oeuvres
complètes, 2:745.
36
Eugène Delacroix, The Journal of Eugène Delacroix, trans. Walter Pach (New
York: Grove, 1961), 19 September 1847, 173.
37
Robert Delaunay, “La Lumière,” in Du Cubisme à l’art abstrait, ed. Pierre
Francastel (Paris: S.E.V.P.E.N., 1957–58), 147. Delaunay’s essay was first pub-
lished in Klee’s German translation; see n. 38.
38
Klee, “Über das Licht,” Der Sturm (January 1913): 255–56. Klee’s translation
is also reprinted in Christian Geelhaar, ed., Paul Klee — Schriften: Rezensionen und
Aufsätze (Cologne: DuMont, 1976), 116–17; hereafter cited as Schriften.
39
Wassily Kandinsky, “On the Problem of Form,” in Theories of Modern Art: A
Source Book by Artists and Critics, ed. Herschel B. Chipp (Berkeley: U of California
P, 1968), 161; hereafter cited as Theories of Modern Art. The essay was originally
published in 1912 as “Über die Formfrage,” in Der Blaue Reiter, ed. Wassily
Kandinsky and Franz Marc (Munich: R. Piper, 1965), 147.
40
Kandinsky, “On the Problem of Form,” 161 (Der Blaue Reiter, 148).
41
Kandinsky, “On the Problem of Form,” 165 (Der Blaue Reiter, 166).
42
Guillaume Apollinaire, “Die moderne Malerei,” Der Sturm (February 1913):
272. This was not Apollinaire’s only publication in Der Sturm; a look through the
index confirms that he contributed other articles and poems in 1913–14. In
Apollinaire’s collected works “Die moderne Malerei” is translated as “La Peinture
moderne.” The sentence cited in the text reads: “Cette tendance mène à une pein-
ture poétique qui est indépendante de toute perception visuelle.” See Oeuvres com-
plètes de Guillaume Apollinaire, ed. Michel Décaudin (Paris: A. Balland and
J. Lecat, 1965–66), 4:282.
43
As already noted, the title of Klee’s first draft of this essay is “Graphic Art,” but
it has become known as “Creative Credo,” which is a variant of the title of the vol-
ume in which the essay was originally published: Schöpferische Konfession, ed.
Kasimir Edschmid (Berlin: E. Reiss, 1920). Photographs of the original manuscript
version are reproduced in Geelhaar, Schriften, pl. 51–58. This version is translated
as “Thoughts on Graphic Art and Art in General” in Paul Klee: Documents and
Pictures from 1896–1930, trans. Ralph Manheim (Bern: Klee-Gesellschaft, 1951);
hereafter cited as “Thoughts on Graphic Art.” Throughout this study I cite the
translation of the final version by Norbert Guterman, reprinted in Theories of
Modern Art, 182–86. The German text is taken from Geelhaar’s edition of Klee’s
writings: “Beitrag für den Sammelband ‘Schöpferische Konfession,’ ” in Schriften,
118–22. See “Creative Credo,” sec. 4, 183 (Schriften, 118).
44
“Creative Credo,” sec. 4, 184–85 (Schriften, 119–20).
45
“Creative Credo,” sec. 5, 185 (Schriften, 120). Cf. Lessing, Laocoön, 66. For the
German edition, see Laokoon oder über die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie, vol. 2 of
Gesammelte Werke, ed. Wolfgang Stammler (Munich: C. Hanser, 1959), 862; here-
after cited as Laokoon. Invoking Lessing has become a favorite critical device among
twentieth-century critics and historians. For example, see Clement Greenberg’s
essay on midcentury modernists entitled “Towards a Newer Laocoon,” in Clement
Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 1, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago:
U of Chicago P, 1986); and Richard Brilliant, My Laocoön: Alternative Claims in
the Interpretation of Artworks (Berkeley: U of California P, 2000).
46
Lessing, Laocoön, 78 (Laokoon, 875).
47
“Creative Credo,” sec. 5, 186 (Schriften, 121).
48
See Tagebücher #429, July 1902, 155 (Diaries, 125); for variants of entry #429,
see pages 488 and 521 of the German ed. Neither author picked up on the poetic-
painterly opposition as a theme, although both combined a brief biography with
chapters devoted to themes. Zahn used “Mystik und Abstraktion” and “Das kos-
mische Bilderbuch” as thematic chapter titles in his Paul Klee: Leben — Werk —
Geist (Potsdam: G. Kiepenheuer, 1920). Hausenstein chose the thematic titles
“Musik und Malerei” and “Physik und Metaphysik” in his Kairuan, oder, Eine
Geschichte vom Maler Klee und von der Kunst dieses Zeitalters (Munich: Kurt Wolff,
1921). On how these two publications shaped Klee’s reputation, see Christine
Hopfengart, Klee, vom Sonderfall zum Publikumsliebling: Stationen seiner
öffentlichen Resonanz in Deutschland, 1905–1960 (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern,
1989), 23–46.
49
This painting is discussed in detail in chapter 2.
50
Lee illustrates the point about Renaissance theorists with numerous examples in
Ut Pictura Poesis, 3–7.
51
See, e.g., Manfred Faust, “Entwicklungsstadien der Wortwahl in den Bildtiteln
von Klee,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und
Geistesgeschichte 48 (1974): 25–46, and Matthias Kühn, “‘Gewagte Symbiosen,’
Bild und Bildtitel im Spätwerk Klees,” in Paul Klee: Das Schaffen im Todesjahr, ed.
Josef Helfensten and Stefan Frey (Bern: Kunstmuseum/Stuttgart: Gerd Hatje,
1990), 93–99; hereafter cited as Das Schaffen im Todesjahr. See also Vogel,
Zwischen Wort und Bild, 149–51.
52
The nine-volume Klee catalogue raisonné was published simultaneously in
German (Bern: Benteli) and English (London: Thames and Hudson). Volume 1
appeared in 1998, volume 9 in 2004. Volumes list works chronologically and con-
tain titles, dates, catalogue numbers, provenance, current locations, exhibition his-
tories, and bibliographical references for all of Klee’s works. In those cases where
the English translation differs from the one used consistently in previous Klee
scholarship, I opt for the more familiar translation.
53
See Roman Jakobson, “On the Verbal Art of William Blake and Other Poet-
Painters,” Linguistic Inquiry 1 (January 1970): 3–23; Hölderlin, Klee, Brecht: Zur
Wortkunst dreier Gedichte, ed. Elmar Holenstein (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
1976). More recently Jakobson’s essay has itself become the subject of critical
scrutiny; see Sarah Wyman, “The Poem in the Painting: Roman Jakobson and the
Pictorial Language of Paul Klee,” Word & Image 20 (2004): 138–54.
54
A copy of Vogel’s typescript is on file in the library of the Zentrum Paul Klee;
it is dated 1985 and is entitled “Eine semiotisch-strukturalistische Interpretation
von 20 Gedichten Paul Kees und eine teilweise Interpretation seines gesamten
poetischen Werkes”; hereafter cited as “Eine semiotisch-strukturalistische
Interpretation.” I wish to thank to Marianne Vogel for permitting me to cite from
this unpublished work. For the sections of Vogel’s published dissertation that per-
tain to Klee’s poetry, see Zwischen Wort und Bild, 15–18, 82–87, 101. In the pages
devoted to an assessment of Klee’s poetic practice Vogel quotes from unpublished
correspondence with his friend Hans Bloesch.
55
See Paul Bauschatz, “Paul Klee’s Anna Wenne and the Work of Art,” Art
History 19 (March 1996): 74–101; idem, “Paul Klee’s Speaking Pictures,” Word &
Image 7 (1991): 149–64. In the 1996 article Bauschatz links the name “Anna
Wenne” in two paintings by Klee to the “Anna Blume” of Schwitters’s poetry.
56
Deborah Parker, Bronzino: Renaissance Painter as Poet (Cambridge: Cambridge
UP, 2000); Renée Riese Hubert, “Paul Klee: Modernism in Art and Literature,”
in Modernism: Challenges and Perspectives, ed. Monique Chefdor, Ricardo
Quinones, and Albert Wachtel (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1986), 212–37.
57
See Harriett Watts, Three Painter-Poets: Arp, Schwitters, Klee — Selected Poems,
trans. Harriett Watts (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1974). Marjorie
Perloff’s relevant publications include Frank O’Hara: Poet Among Painters (New
York: Braziller, 1977) and The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and
the Language of Rupture (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986). See also Clara
Elizabeth Orban, The Culture of Fragments: Words and Images in Futurism and
Surrealism (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997), hereafter cited as The Culture of
Fragments.
58
Keith Haring Journals, with an introd. by Robert Farris Thompson (New York:
Viking, 1996), 10.
1: “I Am a Poet, After All”
— Tagebücher #121, 52 (Diaries, 42)
A LOGICAL POINT OF DEPARTURE FOR ANALYZING Klee’s poetry would be

a critical edition of the extant poems. Unfortunately, no such edition
exists, in part because Klee left this segment of his creative output in rela-
tive disarray. Although he complained about becoming a bureaucrat when
he began compiling the oeuvre catalogue of his drawings, paintings, and
prints in 1911, he nevertheless kept meticulous records, assigning a title,
date, and number to each work.1 He was no less methodical when it came
to transcribing his Diaries, which he edited repeatedly between 1904 and
1921, possibly with eventual publication in mind.2 By contrast, the only
attempt to collect his poetic production for posterity was rather desultory.
Sometime during the twenties he wrote twenty-nine poems onto nine pages
of the notebook of “Geduchte.”3 Except for six minor corrections, the
handwritten texts read as clean copy, so they were probably transcribed
from other sources. Four loose sheets tucked into the back of the notebook
indicate that Klee intended to add other entries. Evidently, he either lost
interest in the project or lost track of the notebook, for by the late twenties
he had resumed the habit of jotting down poems in piecemeal fashion.
Just as Klee did not make any systematic effort to record his poetry for pos-
terity, neither, apparently, did he seek opportunities for publication during his
lifetime. Once he shifted his creative activity from poetry to the visual arts, he
continued to incorporate selected poems into drawings and paintings but oth-
erwise seems to have kept his poetic production to himself. After his death, Lily
Klee discovered the notebook of “Geduchte” among his papers. The poems
recorded in this notebook were anthologized by Carola Giedion-Welcker in
1946.4 Klee himself had incorporated earlier poems and poetic fragments into
his diaries, where they would be preserved as integral parts of his multifaceted
activity as a writer. These selections were published in the 1957 edition of the
Tagebücher. Other poems were found in letters and in pocket diaries dating
from the late twenties and early thirties. Drawing from all these sources, Klee’s
son, Felix, edited and published a collection of Gedichte in 1960.5 Although this
publication has been reprinted periodically there is still no critical edition of
Klee’s poetry.
Establishing a definitive catalogue of Klee’s poems will require reconcil-
ing the list of manuscripts compiled in Vogel’s publication (Zwischen Wort
und Bild: Das schriftliche Werk Paul Klees und die Rolle der Sprache in seinem
Denken und in seiner Kunst) with the considerably longer list of poems in
“I AM A POET, AFTER ALL” 21
the index of the published Gedichte.6 I have collated these two very different
inventories of Klee’s scattered poetic output in the appendix to this study,
entitled “What Counts as Poetry?” The response to this query is a modest
but respectable body of work consisting of at least seventy-seven poems,
twenty-seven sets of line endings, and no fewer than nine additional poetic
texts incorporated into visual frames of reference. Since it is entirely possible
that some manuscripts were either lost or destroyed, those documented in
the appendix may represent only a portion of Klee’s actual production over
the course of a lifetime. In any case, what has survived suffices to situate Klee
in a historical context that includes predecessors as well as contemporaries.
The following survey of Klee’s poetic production considers poems that he
identified as such and acknowledges the different contexts that he himself
indicated, namely, textual spaces and pictorial settings.
Poems in Textual Spaces

The earliest surviving example of Klee’s poetry dates from 1895, when he
was sixteen. It is a predictable effusion of wishful thinking committed to
verse in the no less predictable form of ballad quatrains with cross-rhymes:
In später Stunde sitze ich The hour grows late, I sit alone,
hier in dem kahlen Zimmer here in this cold, bare room
den ganzen Tag dacht’ ich an Dich, I thought of you the whole day long,
ich seh Dein Bild noch immer. your image I still see.
Ich seh’die Locken herunter wallen, I see your tresses, how softly they fall,
ich seh’ das blasse Rot der Wangen, I see the pale red of your cheek,
Du bist das schönste Mädchen You are the fairest maiden of
von allen. them all.
Warum doch staun’ ich so mit Why do I gaze wide-eyed, still
Bangen? so meek?
Beim Spiele hab’ ich Dich heut’ I saw you today, so carefree at
gesehn. play.
Wir haben gesprochen von vielen Together we talked of so many
Dingen, things,
beinahe konnt’ ich nicht I almost couldn’t resist
widerstehn,
das Gespräch bis auf die Liebe bringing up the subject
zu bringen. of love.
Wir sahen uns innig an als When we parted our glances

wir schieden, were passionate,
22 “I AM A POET, AFTER ALL”
und drückten uns warm die Hand, warm, too, the clasp of our hands,
doch mein stürmischer Geist yet my stormy spirit was not
war nicht zufrieden satisfied
und in mir tobte ein feuriger and inside me raged a furious
Brand. fire.7
By his own admission Klee penned sophomoric verses such as these to

compensate for his “too meager satisfactions” (“zum Ausgleich mangel-
hafter Befriedigungen”).8 He was under no illusion about their merits. On
the contrary, he was the first to suggest that they be relegated to a category
of poetry he labeled “as authentic as it was bad” (“ebenso echt als
schlechte Kunst”).9 Klee must have saved this particular example either out
of sentimental attachment or, more likely, from a proclivity for documen-
tation. It is tempting to suggest that he kept it over the years because its
rhythmic structure proved to be a convenient point of reference in calcu-
lating the rhythmic patterns that he diagrammed for his students at the
Bauhaus and incorporated into his own pictures of the twenties.
Some of Klee’s early efforts at writing poetry may have been inspired
by good-natured classroom competition with his school chum Hans
Bloesch, who shared his literary ambitions. After completing their
Gymnasium studies, the two occasionally sent each other poems, no doubt
conscious of continuing a long tradition of exchanges between fellow
poets. Poems are interspersed throughout their correspondence, from
1898 to 1901. Judging from three published examples of Klee’s contribu-
tions to the exchange, the two friends must have been intent on regaling
each other with cheeky imitations of the German classics. One of these
poems was written as a variation on the free-verse forms used by Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Hölderlin, both of whom would have
represented unattainable ideals for would-be poets.10 As Jürgen Glaesemer
has suggested, others are distantly related to the early poetry of Heinrich
Heine, another luminary in the pantheon of German poets whose names
recur in Klee’s Diaries and correspondence.11 Klee inserted one such poem
in the Diaries as “a short sample of the way I used . . . to rhyme in the
popular vein” (“eine kleine Probe wie ich damals im Volkston reimte”):
I
Nun hat dich genommen der Tod, Now Death has taken thee,
der rosenrote Schein the rosy red tone
ist falsch, nur hingeworfen. is thrown on falsely.
Gardinen zauberfein Curtains magic in their delicacy
färbten mein Lieb, was tot colored my love, who was dead,
gestorben nie zu erwachen. dead never to awake.
II
Sagt an ihr Leut was soll ich tun Tell me, you people, what shall I
ihr Leut? do, people?
Mein Herz das brennt so sehr, My heart burns so,
nun hab ich kein Liebchen mehr, now I have no sweetheart more,
und zum Küssen und wieder to kiss and kiss again.
zum Küssen,
o dass ich ein Vöglein wär, Oh, if I were a little bird,
als Vöglein wüsst ich Bescheid a little bird would know,
ans rauschende Meer flög ich weit, I would fly to the distant seas that roar
mein Herz darin zu kühlen. and cool my heart therein.12
This travesty of a poetic lament is reminiscent of any number of entries in

Heine’s Book of Songs (Buch der Lieder), with its double-edged theme of
loss and longing liberally laced with irony. Klee achieved this effect, as
Heine himself had, by playing with poetic form. Included in the Book of
Songs is a group of “Fresco Sonnets to Christian S.” (“Fresko-Sonette an
Christian S.”). The fifth and sixth exemplify Heine’s deft use of the
octave/sestet division to counter the expected sentiments of love poetry.13
Klee took a different approach to ironic inversion, using an inverted son-
net form and disregarding traditional metrical counts as well as rhyme
schemes. Content adds another twist to Klee’s spoof of Heine’s sonnets.
Knowing that the poems in the Book of Songs were ideal texts for lush
Romantic lieder, he penned words fit for a street-song.
Klee’s move from Bern to Munich exposed him to every aspect of con-
temporary culture, including new poetry. During the years he lived in
Germany (from 1898 to 1901 and again from 1906 to 1933), the lyrical
tradition of German poetry was upheld by Stefan George and his circle of
doting disciples. Klee never mentioned this elite literary coterie in any of
his published writings, nor did he acquire any of George’s numerous pub-
lications for his personal library.14 There is little doubt that Klee’s poetic
sensibilities were more attuned to the work of Christian Morgenstern.
Whereas George’s steady poetic output over four decades perpetuated and
renewed established traditions, Morgenstern’s ironic voice exemplified the
idea of renewal through innovation. This ideal Klee found especially com-
patible. In what was probably intended as a facetious allusion to turning
thirty as well as a statement of fact, the last line in his Diaries for 1909
reads: “Ended the year with Morgenstern’s Gallows Songs” (“Mit
Morgenstern[s] Galgenlieder sei das Jahr beschlossen”).15 Klee sustained a
lasting interest in Morgenstern’s poetry. His library contains Bruno
Cassirer’s editions of Morgenstern’s Palmström and Palma Kunkel, as well
the collected Gallows Songs (Galgenlieder), all well thumbed and, in some
instances, liberally annotated. He even occasionally took the liberty of
Disclaimer:
Some images in the printed version of this book
are not available for inclusion in the eBook.
To view the image on this page please refer to

the printed version of this book.
Fig. 1: Paul Klee, Sketches Illustrating Structural Rhythms, Static and Dynamic
(PN 17a M20/59a). Graphite and colored pencils on paper, 27.4 ⫻ 21.8 cm. Zentrum
Paul Klee, Bern. © 2006 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst,
Bonn. Photograph courtesy of the Zentrum Paul Klee.
crossing out Morgenstern’s choice of words and substituting others, as in

the case of the fourth line of “Noon News” (“Die Mittagszeitung”) where
he changed “Ganz ohne Zubereitung” (“Entirely without preparation”)
to “Ohne alle Zubereitung” (“Without any preparation”).16
Klee was just as intrigued by Morgenstern’s typographic innovations
as he was by the poet’s verbal dexterity. A case in point is the fish that sur-
faces in Klee’s teaching notes, collectively known as the “Pedagogical
Estate” (“Pädagogischer Nachlass,” usually abbreviated as PN) (fig. 1). The
schematically rendered fish scales are a variation on the same combination
of visual notations that make up Morgenstern’s “Fish’s Night Song”
(“Fisches Nachtgesang”) (fig. 2). In Lady Bell-Tone Bim (Glockentönin
Bim, 1922/258) (fig. 3) Klee appropriated other aspects of Morgenstern’s
experimental language. His drawing gives whimsical graphic expression
to Morgenstern’s poetic equivalents of bell tones. Moreover, the title words
“Bim, Bam, Bum” are written out to approximate the spatial distribution
Disclaimer:

Fig. 2: Christian Morgenstern, “Fisches Nachtgesang,” 1905. Reproduced from Alle

Galgenlieder (1950) with permission of Suhrkamp/Insel Verlag. Digital image by Dan
Smith.
of the same words as they appear in typeset form in the 1922 edition of the
Galgenlieder in Klee’s library (fig. 4).
Many of Klee’s own poems also bear the stamp of Morgenstern’s
distinctive style. On the first page of the notebook of “Geduchte” one
encounters the vivid image of a donkey that is as succinctly and wittily ren-
dered as any of the beasts in Morgenstern’s poetic menagerie:
Esel Donkey
seine Stimme macht mir his voice gives me the
Grausen creeps
während lange Ohren schmausen. while Long Ears feasts.17
A caricature honed on Morgenstern’s verbal wit, Klee’s donkey makes an
altogether suitable companion for the two who grouse in Morgenstern’s
poem “The Two Donkeys” (“Die beiden Esel”).18 Another short poem in
the notebook of “Geduchte” indicates that Klee appreciated the subtle
inflections that add variety to Morgenstern’s wry poetic voice:
Einst werd ich liegen im Nirgend Someday I’ll lie nowhere
bei einem Engel irgend. next to an angel somewhere.19
This sanguine prediction suggests that Klee was rehearsing ideas for an epi-
taph. The celestial consort he envisioned for himself is quite unlike the
angels that figure prominently in his visual production. There they pertly
serve food (An Angel Serves a Small Breakfast / Ein Genius serviert e. kl.
Frühstück, 1915/29) or watchfully stand guard (Vigilant Angel /
Wachsamer Engel, 1939/859). In contrast to these mutable graphic
configurations, all of which assume recognizable forms and specific identi-
ties, the angel evoked in Klee’s poem is one of the dematerialized spirit
Disclaimer:

Fig. 3: Paul Klee, Lady Bell-Tone Bim (1922/258). Ink on paper mounted on
cardboard, 22.5 ⫻ 41.6 cm. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, U.S.A.
Acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest (9.1950). © 2006 Artists Rights Society
(ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern
Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.
that hover over the point of a needle in Morgenstern’s “Scholastic

Conundrum I” (“Spitzfindiges”):
. . . Denn die nie Erspähten . . . Remote from human foci
Können einzig nehmen Platz auf Surely they can only sit on
Geistigen Lokalitäten. Rarefied spiritual loci.20
Klee was seduced not only by Morgenstern’s poetic images but also by
his facility for rhymes based on wordplay. The end rhymes that initiate the
wordplay in Morgenstern’s “Nein!” (“Pfeift der Sturm?/ Keift ein
Wurm?”) are transposed as internal rhymes in word pairs that Klee entitled
“Motto”:
Sturm und Wurm Storm and worm
Sang und Drang Song and stress
Wurm und Sang Worm and song
Drang und Sturm Stress and storm21
Klee’s sequence of word pairs was neatly inscribed on the title page of
Georg Büchner’s Danton’s Death (Dantons Tod), a historical drama based
on documents from the French Revolution. On first reading, the four lines
of verse are as light as the Büchner play is weighty, suggesting that they
were intended as an incisive bit of literary criticism. This may well have
Fig. 4: Christian Morgenstern, “Bim, Bam, Bum,” Galgenlieder (1922). Digital

image by Dan Smith.
been the case, but it is also likely that Klee’s play on the literary usage of
Sturm und Drang encoded personal meaning and perhaps a private jest.22
The worm that inches its way into the first line of Klee’s short poem
is a recurring figure of speech throughout Büchner’s play, most memorably
in the revolutionary street song from act 1, scene 2:
Die da liegen in der Erden They who’re lying underground
Von de Würm gefresse werden. Soon by all the worms are found.23
Not coincidentally, “Wurm” is also the name of a particularly slimy character
in Friedrich von Schiller’s Intrigue and Love (Kabale und Liebe), which has
been cited as an example of the stylistic excesses of Sturm und Drang.24
Borrowed from the title of a drama by Friedrich Maximilian Klinger, the oft-
quoted phrase was originally used to characterize a group of writers whose
works heralded the spirit and language of German Romanticism. In its more
general descriptive usage, Sturm und Drang is as applicable to the revolu-
tionary rhetoric in Büchner’s play as it is to Schiller’s dramatic style. What
meanings these allusions had for Klee when he wrote down his “Motto”
sometime between 1913 and 1914 remains a matter of conjecture.25 The fact
that the first word is “Sturm” opens up the possibility that the word pairs are
a covert allusion to the beginning of Klee’s association with the periodical
Der Sturm, the gallery of the same name, and the entrepreneurial Walden,
who presided over both.26 It is perhaps also significant that Der Sturm
championed expressionist writers who inherited aspects of the Sturm und
Drang tradition and revived the literary reputation of Büchner. Framed in
this context, the multiple allusions encoded in “Motto” attest to Klee’s aware-
ness of the theoretical foundations and stylistic precedents of the kind of
expressionist poetry with which he himself would experiment once he came

to terms with Morgenstern.
Klee’s playful gloss on the literary cliché Sturm und Drang strives for
the same effect Morgenstern achieved in marshaling wordplay to give
unexpected twists to the conventional language of German lyric poetry.
On one of the loose sheets slipped into the back of the notebook of
“Geduchte” is another poem that juggles internal and end rhymes. A rare
example of Klee’s unedited drafts, this working copy confirms that he
acquired the knack for verbal sleight of hand only through laborious prac-
tice. He wrote out three stanzas with a fountain pen, then added two add-
itional possibilities in pencil, numbering the lines of one variation to
indicate a change of sequence. The first quatrain introduces the two sets of
spoonerisms that recur in all the variations:
Rach [sic] und Degen Shoof and rowers
ein Dach dem Regen A roof for showers
Schurm und Stirm Shorm and stelter
im Sturm ein Schirm In storm a shelter27
Subsequent stanzas were constructed by rearranging lines and transposing
words in much the same way that Morgenstern used reiteration and trans-
position in “The Snail’s Monologue” (“Gespräch einer Hausschnecke mit
sich selbst”).28 By extending four lines of wordplay into a sequence of stan-
zas, Klee created what Vogel characterizes as a “serial text.”29
At his best Klee rose to Morgenstern’s level of linguistic virtuosity with-
out depending on serial transpositions. In one poem in the notebook of
“Geduchte” Klee cleverly manipulated language to undermine the logic of
philosophical inquiry:
Es war mal was It was once such
und fragte das: and was a question of:
es gelte was? what does it matter?
von nein zu kein from no to none
liegt zwischen kein ein with not one in between
von immer zu hin from always to that way
gewann es Sinn it made sense
bis ging ein Schein until it appeared
in wahrlich ein. to be true.30
Another example of Klee’s acquired mastery of the poetic devices that
Morgenstern deployed with seemingly effortless skill is “1/1000,” which
he jotted down in a pocket diary in 1928:
1/1000
Ein One
Tausend Schwein Thousand swine
steht in Pein stand and pine

ohne neun without nine
hundert neun hundred nine
und neunzig sein and ninety being
es gleichen Schwein equal to one swine
allein alone.31
Here wordplay extends to numbers in a variation on the unorthodox syn-

tax, reiterative rhyme scheme, and typographic structure that Morgenstern
perfected in “The Does’ Prayer” (“Das Gebet”):
Die Rehlein beten zur Nacht, The does, as the hour grows late,
hab acht! med-it-ate;
Halb neun! med-it-nine;
Halb zehn! . . . med-i-ten . . .32
Morgenstern, it seems, was the poet Klee wanted to be. Like countless oth-
ers who have made the effort, Klee learned how fiendishly difficult it is to
trump a master wordsmith at wordplay. Sustained by equal measures of
pluck and perseverance, he continued to try, occasionally matching
Morgenstern’s dazzling gift for manipulating every aspect of language.
However, he never quite managed to impose his own imprint on
Morgenstern’s innovations. The dada poets were more successful in this
regard, not simply because they were daring to the point of being outra-
geous but because they borrowed more sparingly from Morgenstern’s
repertoire of poetic devices and images.
Despite Klee’s limited engagement with dada as a collective, he had
cordial relations with individual members of the group — especially
Schwitters and Arp — and briefly flirted with the kinds of verbal assem-
blages they composed. By the time Schwitters began writing shaped poetry
in 1921, he had thoroughly assimilated the multiple influences of the arbit-
rary word constructions introduced in Morgenstern’s poem “Das grosse
Lalula,” the columnar verbal structures of Stramm, and the sound poems
of dada grand master Hugo Ball. These influences are evident in his
“Cigars [elementary]” (“Cigarren [elementar],” 1921), which consists of
various permutations of the title word, the first being:
Ci
garr
ren,
the last printed with instructions that it be sung: “Cigarren . . . (Der letzte
Vers wird gesungen).”33 Arp, who likewise experimented across a range of
contemporary innovations, felt a particular affinity for the sound effects of
dada poetry. His “Second Hand,” (“Sekundenzeiger,” c. 1924) could well
replace one of the two pairs of hands on Morgenstern’s “Korf’s Clock”

(“Die Korfsche Uhr”),34 but the onomatopoeic meter is unmistakably dada:
dass ich als ich That I when I
ein und zwei ist it’s one and two
dass ich als ich that I when I
drei und vier ist . . . it’s three and four . . .35
Compared with the inventive variety of these poems by Schwitters and
Arp, Klee’s “Abel and His Brothers” (“Herr Abel und Verwandte”) is tame
and tentative, even if it does evade predictability.36 Beginning “A -bel / Be
-bel / Ce -bel,” Klee did not proceed, as might be expected, through the
entire alphabet, but rather chose to eliminate “Ef -bel,” “Jot -bel,” and
“Ypsilon -bel” from Abel’s alphabetic progeny. Considered in historical
context, “Abel and His Brothers” would have seemed quaintly behind the
times in 1933, when it was written into a pocket diary. Like much of Klee’s
experimental poetry, this alphabet poem, begotten of biblical allusion, is
derivative in its style and structure.
There is, however, one category of Klee’s poetic production that does
not seem dated or derivative even though it fits neatly into the framework
of modernist experimentation. This category comprises the line endings
recorded in the Diaries between the summer of 1901 and December of the
same year. Klee’s decision to channel his poetic instincts into forms other
than written poems can be validated by some general observations con-
cerning these fragments. Of the nine diary entries that list line endings,
most refer to short verses Klee identified as either poems or epigrams,
although on three occasions he recorded the rhyme schemes with no edi-
torial comment. Some of the line endings are simple end rhymes, while
others fall into more complex patterns. Klee himself was all too aware that
the making of a poem required far more than a facility for rhyme. He
acknowledged as much when he dismissed the poem represented by the
following words and phrases as “too contrived, too well rhymed and too
little dreamed” (“zu sehr erdacht, zu sehr gereimt, und zu wenig
geträumt”):
An Gottes Stell / grell / eigene Schöne / Töne
In God’s abode / too loud / beauty of one’s own / tones.37
Since the lines are reduced to strings of words, the reader of the Diaries
must accept Klee’s assessment of what he perceived as weaknesses of poetic
form in the original version. In no other case did he pass judgment on a
poem in its entirety, but it does seem probable that other sets of line end-
ings were likewise salvaged from discarded poems. If so, Klee apparently
deconstructed his epigrammatic verses by using an examination technique
perfected during years of drilling in classical studies. As a Gymnasium stu-
dent he would have demonstrated a command of Greek or Latin verses
committed to memory by writing out the first and last words of each line.38
In adapting this technique to editing poems that failed to measure up to
his exacting standards, Klee may well have discovered the technique of
composing by cutting.
Yet another possibility is that at least some of the line endings were com-
posed as such, making them bouts-rimés, which are sets of rhymed words
from which poems could be written — in theory if not in practice. Bouts-
rimés were exchanged among amateur literati in the eighteenth century and
were subsequently popularized as parlor games in the nineteenth.39 This tra-
dition of popular verse would have given Klee license to indulge his pen-
chant for wordplay even as he came to realize that he had limited talent for
writing poetry. Why he included so many of the rhymed line endings in his
carefully edited Diaries is a question that warrants further investigation.
Based on an assessment of the fragments Klee preserved, he could not
have been motivated by the compulsion to leave evidence of his universal
appeal as a poet or his originality. Some of Klee’s epigrammatic fragments
can be characterized as too self-indulgent, others as too familiar. No fewer
than six are ironic reflections on Klee’s chronic state of indecision about
the focus of his creative activity. One example suffices to demonstrate the
wisdom of his choice of the palette over the pen:
Palette / errette / behagte mir nie / Greisenpoesie
Palette / save (it) / never suited me / hoary poesy.40
Another set of line endings cited in the Diaries resorts to the banality of
rhymes pairing “Brust” (“Breast”) with “Lust” (“Desire”) and “Bäumen”
(“Trees”) with “Träumen” (“Dreams”).41 Isolated as end rhymes, these
word pairs seem trite because they have been used so often. They would
have been familiar to Klee not only from poetry by amateurs but also from
the work of Joseph von Eichendorff, whose poetry epitomizes the German
Romantic tradition. Klee unquestionably knew Eichendorff’s work, which
was standard fare in Gymnasium curricula and was well represented in his
personal library. Eichendorff’s “Evening” (“Der Abend”) contains variants
of the same rhymed pairs listed in the Diaries, with “Lust” and “Brust”
framing “Träumen” and “Bäumen.”42 If Klee consciously extracted these
rhymes from Eichendorff’s poem, it is not impossible that some of his
verse fragments were conceived as parodic allusions to the Romantics’ cult
of the literary fragment. If so, he probably would not have felt compelled
to record the fragments with caveats such as: “I believed I should at least
succeed in making myself ridiculous” (“Ich glaubte es müsste mir wenig-
stens gelingen, mich selber lächerlich zu machen”).43 Since there is no
indication that Klee ever intended his laconic line endings to be read as a
new form of poetry, the most likely explanation for why he retained them
is that he was giving priority to process over product. He understandably
did not wish to preserve poems that he felt might be held up to ridicule,
but he did want to leave tangible traces of his sustained efforts to write
poetry. An emphasis on process would be consistent with the principle that
shaped much of his work and has since been recognized as a defining char-
acteristic of any modernist aesthetic. Placed in this context, Klee’s verse
fragments stand as evidence of the techniques of composing by editing and
cutting, which he would apply to both his poetic and pictorial practice.
It is not known whether Klee applied a variation on the compositional
technique of editing to the epigrams in the original version of his Diaries
or whether the truncated versions emerged from subsequent transcriptions
of the text. However, it seems likely that many of the twenty-nine poems
recorded in the notebook of “Geduchte” were composed in this way. The
final poem in the notebook is unusual in that it is parenthetically titled yet
typical in terms of its landscape imagery and compact form:
(helft bauen) (help build)

Vogel der singest Bird that sings
Reh das springest deer that springs
Blume am Fels flower on the rock
im See der Wels in the sea the fish
im Boden der Wurm in the ground the worm
zu Gott helft bauen to God help build
den Turm the tower
echo: “zu Gott” echo: “to God.”44
Although rhythm, rhyme, and nuances of phrasing give formal coherence
to this poem, it does not represent a complete word picture but rather a
sequence of image fragments. Almost a third of the other poems in the
notebook of “Geduchte” are even more condensed, consisting of images
compressed into rhymed couplets that have the pithiness of aphorisms.
They read like self-contained poetic ideas rather than excerpts from longer
poems or verbal sketches for visual ideas; many are distillations of images
that appear elsewhere in Klee’s oeuvre.
Just how inventively Klee recast poetic figures in aphoristic form can
be illustrated by examining three motifs that recur in both his poetry and
paintings. All three are introduced in the first section of a poem recorded
as diary entry #1081 A, dated August 1917:
Weil ich kam erschlossen sich Blüten, Because I came, blossoms opened,
Die Fülle ist ringsum weil ich bin Fullness is about, because I am.
Zum Herzen zaubert meinem Ohr My ear conjured for my heart
Nachtigall sang The nightingale’s song.
Vater bin ich allem I am father to all,
Allen auf Sternen All on the stars,
und in letzten Fernen . . . And in the farthest places . . .45
With a change in its material structure, the blossoming plant in the first
line continues to flourish in another poetic setting, where brevity of form
is paired with precision of imagery:
Was artet einsam und allein? What thrives alone, just let it be?
es ist die Planze Elfenbein. A plant made out of ivory.46
Here, as in many of his paintings, Klee transformed a natural object into a
poetic figure by endowing it with a strange specificity unrelated to natural
appearances. He applied a variation on this device in depicting the nightin-
gale conjured in the 1917 poem. In Persian Nightingales (Persische
Nachtigallen, 1917/92) the legendary songbirds would seem to be
deprived of their distinctive voices, but Klee provided an alternative. To
circumvent the difficulty of visualizing sound, he added two letters with
sound values that substitute for the sounds of a song, thus restoring the
voice of the nightingale described in another short poem:
Als verstummte Nachtigall As a silenced nightingale

war einst ein beträchtlich Nichts was once a considerable
der Fall. nothing, of no avail.47
The star, a ubiquitous image in Klee’s oeuvre, often signifies an analogy
between the poet/painter and a divine creator. This is the meaning implicit
in the 1917 poem and in Klee’s postwar nocturnal landscapes. In the poem
quoted below, the star is isolated as a symbol of the spiritually detached self
and cosmic perspective is synonymous with aesthetic distance:
Alle alle hatt ich gern All, I loved all of it

und jetzt bin ich kühler Stern. now removed, a distant star I admit.48
The number of short poems like this in the notebook of “Geduchte”
begs the inevitable comparison with Else Lasker-Schüler, for whom the
two-line strophe was a poetic staple. Although she never used this verse
form alone, her two-line stanzas are often complete semantic units that can
be excerpted from their poetic contexts. One of many examples is the
fourth of the six strophes that constitute her “But Your Brows Are a
Storm” (“Aber deine Brauen sind Unwetter”), in which she characteristi-
cally gave original form to the same metaphor Klee would use:
Ich bin ein Stern I am a star

In der blauen Wolke deines Angesichts. In the blue cloud of your face.49
Since Klee never mentioned Lasker-Schüler in any of his published writings,

there is no way of knowing whether or not her poetry influenced his pref-
erence for condensed forms and images. Circumstantial evidence neverthe-
less points to the likelihood that he was familiar with her poetry and may
have met her. She was married to Walden, and even after the two separated
and then divorced, her works appeared regularly in Der Sturm until 1913,
the year Klee began his professional association with Walden and published
his translation of Delaunay’s essay in Der Sturm. Unfettered by the con-
straints of domestic responsibility, Lasker-Schüler moved freely in those
quarters of Munich and Berlin where writers and artists mingled. Like Klee,
she was in contact with the painter Franz Marc, and when he died on the
battlefront, she memorialized him in her writing, as Klee did.50 Though less
accomplished as a visual artist than as a poet, she, too, was a dual practi-
tioner and knew other poet/painters, including Grosz, whom she sketched
in one of her many portrait poems.51 Grosz seems not to have responded
in kind, evidently preferring the verbal energy of German expressionism to
the imagistic concentration of Lasker-Schüler as a model for his own poetry.
Klee’s association with Walden’s journal and gallery leaves no doubt
that he, too, was exposed to German expressionism, although the impact
of this exposure is more difficult to gauge than in the case of Grosz. In
Grosz’s poetry, as in his drawings and paintings, he responded with gusto
to the sordid social realities and frenetic pace of life in urban Berlin. His
poem “From the Songs” (“Aus den Gesängen”), a veritable catalogue of
expressionist vocabulary and stylistic devices, presents a verbal lineup of
unsavory urban types:
Ihr Hundesöhne, Materialisten, You sons of a bitch, conspicuous
consumers,
Brotfresser, Fleischfresser — Bread stuffer, meat eater —
Vegetarier!! vegan!!
Oberlehrer, Metzgergesellen, Schoolmaster, apprentice hacker, girl
Mädchenhändler! trafficker!52
The only example of Klee’s poetry that is comparable is a string of seven
slang epithets separated by exclamation points, a favorite form of punctu-
ation among expressionist writers. With characteristic irony Klee entitled
his jeers “Cheers” (“Zurufe”):
Krummfahrer! Bösharrer! Schmutzstarrer! Sloucher! Bad ass! Smut lover!
Pelzläuser! Wissbesser! Louse! Know it all!
Schmerling! Schmoozer!
Duckmäuserlehrling!! Brown-nosing little punk!!53
Because these compound invectives are not in the context of a longer
poem, they lack the aggressiveness of Grosz’s taunts. The perfunctory
nature of Klee’s poetic exercise in name-calling suggests that the verbal
provocations of expressionist poetry held limited appeal for him. Judging
from two poems recorded in the notebook of “Geduchte,” other aspects
of German expressionist poetry were more to his taste.
The most obvious points of comparison pertain to composition and
grammar. The following poem is reproduced as Klee recorded it in manu-
script form:
weil ich ging as I walked

ward Abend evening came
Wolkenschleier cloud cover
hüllten das Licht veiled the light
dann schattete das nicht then there was no shadow
über Allem over all.54
This is an abbreviated version of the second section of the longer poem
recorded in the Diaries as entry #1081 A:
Und And
weil ich ging ward es Abend Because I went, evening came
und Wolkenkleider And cloud garments
hüllten ums Licht Robed the light.
weil ich ging Because I went,
Schattete das Nicht Nothing threw its shadow
über allem . . . Over everything . . .55
Klee’s model for composing by editing seems to have been the poetry of
Stramm. The irregular verse lengths and the absence of internal punctuation
marks in both versions of Klee’s poem are common to “Dream” (“Traum”)
and other poems by Stramm.56 The juxtaposition of syntactic fragments in
the short version gives it the truncated structure and condensed imagery
that are likewise signatures of Stramm’s experimental poetry, most of which
was composed the year before he was killed on the front in 1915. Klee must
have known Stramm’s poetry, which, beginning in 1914, regularly appeared
in Der Sturm and was collected in a posthumous anthology published by
Walden in 1918. Stramm’s experimental poetic forms resulted from a
process of distillation inspired by the realization that essence of meaning
could be contained in and extracted from brevity of form. There is no evi-
dence that Klee adopted Stramm’s most radical innovation, namely, the
columnar word chain, although the line endings are arranged this way in the
collected Gedichte. Klee himself never invited such a direct comparison with
Stramm, but many of the rhymed couplets and image fragments in the note-
book of “Geduchte” indicate that he appropriated the compositional tech-
nique of poetic distillation used by Stramm and his contemporaries.57
Another poem in the notebook of “Geduchte” experiments with the
formal idiosyncrasies and elliptical language of expressionist poetry:
Der Wolf spricht, am Menschen The wolf, chewing on

kauend, und im humans and
Hinblick auf die Hunde: looking at dogs, speaks:
Sag mir wo ist dann Then tell me where is
sag mir wo? tell me where?
ist dann ihr Gott? is their god then?
wo ist ihr Gott? nach dem . . . where is their god? after this . . .
du siehst ihn hier you see him here
ganz dicht bei dir so very near
liegen im Staub vor dir lying in the dust
den Gott der Hunde the god of the dogs
Sehn und wissen ist eins To see and to know is one
dass wer von mir zerrissen that who is torn apart by me
ein Gott nicht ist. is no god.
Wo ist dann ihr Gott? Where then is their god?
1926 192658
Here Klee asked a question that could be answered by the statement that
dramatically ends chapter 2, part 1, of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke
Zarathustra (Also Sprach Zarathustra): “This old saint in his forest has not
yet heard of it, that God is dead!” (“Dieser alte Heilige hat in seinem Walde
noch nichts davon gehört, dass Gott tot ist!”).59 Klee’s persistent questions
exude spiritual skepticism, which is reinforced by an image that is as horrific
as any in Benn’s collection The Morgue and Other Poems (Morgue, und
andere Gedichte), a slim volume of expressionist poetry published in 1912
and reissued in 1923. Benn’s visceral description of baby rats feeding on the
organs of a dead girl in “Beautiful Youth” (“Schöne Jugend”) is unmiti-
gated by any reassuring conventions of poetic structure.60 On the contrary,
the shock value of the image is underscored by an unconventional stanzaic
form without a traditional metric structure or rhyme scheme. Klee’s poem
is no less shocking in its abrupt transition from the description of a grue-
some tableau to an ostensibly logical sequence of rhetorical questions and
cynical observations. Like Benn, Klee eschewed conventional stanzas, but
he scrupulously observed metric stresses. Stressed syllables are actually
marked in the manuscript version of the poem, suggesting that Klee was
trying to replicate the rhythmic chewing of an animal gnawing on human
flesh. Moreover, the scanned meter and rhythmic repetition of phrases give
the wolf’s relentless monologue the cadence and ironic moral authority of
a fable. Since Klee seldom dated his poems, it seems likely that the promi-
nence of the date “1926” was intended to provide a specific frame of refer-
ence. Interpreted in the context of the turbulent history of Weimar
Germany, Klee’s contemporary fable reads like an arch commentary on the
political conditions and spiritual climate of the mid-twenties.
The staggered lines of the manuscript layout of “Der Wolf spricht” illus-
trate yet another aspect of German expressionist poetry that Klee adapted to
his own purposes. A rethinking of the visual elements of poetic form was
common even among those expressionist poets who did not radically depart
from the stanzaic and linear structures of traditional lyric poetry. The most
innovative of the expressionists in this regard was Stramm. In his novel poetic
constructions — with their long, unbroken left margins, repetitive sound
patterns, and unconventional syntax — layout emanates from and reinforces
carefully calculated semantic structures. Stramm’s keen sensitivity to the spa-
tial structure of poetry was informed by his practice as a visual artist. Klee, a
fellow dual practitioner, would have appreciated the integral relationship
among the linguistic, aural, and visual properties of Stramm’s concentrated
verse forms. He would have recognized that one of the theoretical premises
underlying Stramm’s typographic structures paralleled his own assertion that
“space is a temporal concept.”61 He might also have perceived in Stramm’s
new poetic forms a denial of Lessing’s theoretical distinctions between the
verbal and visual arts.62 At the very least he would have intuited that Stramm
was also attempting to bring verbal and visual elements together in a new
structural harmony.63 It is entirely likely that such commonalities predisposed
Klee to experiment with the layouts of contemporary poetry as he channeled
his poetic instincts into his other writings and visual production.
During the postwar years, when Klee was preparing what is the only
extant clean copy of the Diaries, he applied techniques of poetic composi-
tion to the formatting of selected entries. One example is entry #295,
Disclaimer:

Fig 5: Paul Klee, Entries 295–97 from the Diaries (Tagebücher, II, Rome, November
1901). Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern. © 2006 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG
Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Photograph courtesy of the Zentrum Paul Klee.
Disclaimer:

Fig. 6: Paul Klee, Entries 947–52 from the Diaries (Tagebücher, III, Munich, 1914–1915).
Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern. © 2006 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-
Kunst, Bonn. Photograph courtesy of the Zentrum Paul Klee.
where lines of prose are concentrated into what look like stanzas to make
room for the insertion of the four-leaf clover that serves as a visual signa-
ture (fig. 5). Another variation on a verbal text that is spatially distributed
to resemble the typographic structure of a poem is found on the manu-
script page where entries #950–52 are written out (fig. 6). These entries,
which include self-consciously quotable passages on memory and abstrac-
tion, as well as the phrase “I crystal” (“ich Kristall”), are presented with as
much attention to visual design as the manifestos issued by the futurist
poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti or the covers of literary magazines such
as Dada. That Klee used poetic form as his model for the layout of entries
#950–52 is affirmed by referring to entry #1081 A (fig. 7) as a basis for
comparison. This later entry represents the only instance in the Diaries
where Klee devoted an entire page to a single poem. The rhythmical dis-
tribution of indented lines, centralized placement of selected words, and
use of asterisks as indicators of textual breaks are remarkably similar on
both pages. Klee underscored the visual impact of prose texts in poetic lay-
outs by using the collage technique of cutting and inserting in the case of
the four-leaf clover, or by cutting and pasting in the second illustrated
example, where the words “ich Kristall” were cut out — presumably from
Disclaimer:

Fig. 7: Paul Klee, Entry 1081 A from the Diaries (Tagebücher, IV, Gersthofen, August
1917). Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern. © 2006 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG
an earlier version of the Diaries, and affixed to the clean copy. Klee was, in
effect, applying to the compositional layout of his Diaries a variation on
the technique of composing by editing that he had applied when he
reduced his epigrams to line endings; he would use this method again in
writing the poems recorded in the notebook of “Geduchte” and his pocket
diaries. The more literal variation on composing by editing — composing
with scissors — is a technique he was applying in his visual practice as early
as 1910.64 His adaptation of this technique to the final editing of the
Diaries suggests that by the postwar period he was thinking of his writing
as an extension of his activity as a visual artist.
Poems in Pictorial Settings

As documented by Wolfgang Kersten and Osamu Okuda, there are numer-
ous examples of drawings from 1912 that were cut apart. In two cases
fragments were recombined to create new ensembles.65 One of these new
groupings also combines verbal and visual imagery in a drawing that
depicts a figure juxtaposed with the following poem:
Disclaimer:

Fig. 8: Paul Klee, Fall (1912/130). Pen on paper, 8.6 ⫻ 14 cm., mounted on
cardboard with Woe Is Me in the Gale Wind of Forever Fleeing Time (1912/131),
pen on paper, 4.1 ⫻ 18 cm. Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern. © 2006 Artists Rights Society
(ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Photograph courtesy of the Zentrum Paul
Klee.
Weh mir unter dem Sturmwind ewig Woe is me in the gale wind
fliehender Zeit of forever fleeing time.
Weh mir in der Verlassenheit ringsum Woe is me abandoned all around
in der Mitte allein isolated and alone.
Weh mir tief unten auf Woe is me deep down in
dem vereisten Grunde Wahn. the frozen depths of madness.66
Klee’s poem is not exceptional in its formal structure, which pairs the stan-
dard convention of short parallel constructions with free verse. Nor is it
original in its content, which combines the related themes of flight and
isolation. These themes were common to German Romanticism and
expressionism, although they were not usually expressed there with such
economy. The brevity of Klee’s poetic indulgence in self-pity is, however,
a distinction it shares with Lasker-Schüler’s “Flight from the World”

(“Weltflucht”).67
What makes Klee’s poem unique is the way it is combined with draw-
ing. The text is handwritten, which reinforces the authenticity of the first-
person voice, and also implies a relationship between the author of the
poem and the drawing of the figure, with its hands raised in a gesture of
consternation, desperation, or despair (1912/131) (fig. 8). Another draw-
ing, entitled Fall (Sturz, 1912/130), is mounted above, on the same
underlying support, and is aligned so that the right border is flush with the
right margin of the text below.68 Despite the fact that the falling figure is
stylistically similar to the one below, there does not appear to be an illus-
trative relationship between this second drawing and the poetic text within
the same visual frame of reference. In Sounds Kandinsky likewise avoided
an illustrative relationship between his poems and the accompanying
woodcuts, although he did so by using visual abstractions instead of
recognizable figurative imagery.69 Klee’s experiment in combining a poetic
text with visual representation falls chronologically between Stéphane
Mallarmé’s poem A Throw of the Dice (Un Coup de dés, 1897) and
Apollinaire’s Calligrammes (1913–16). Although it is neither as typo-
graphically radical as Mallarmé’s poem nor as visually integrated as
Apollinaire’s shaped texts, it does address issues that were central to a
modernist agenda.
Apollinaire’s pattern poems, which he called “lyrical ideograms”
(“idéogrammes lyriques”) until he coined the term “calligramme,” were
recognized in avant-garde circles as graphic images that transcended tradi-
tional distinctions between spatial and temporal forms of expression.70
Visual and verbal evidence indicates that Klee was familiar with
Apollinaire’s calligrammes. He stenciled an uppercase ‘E’ into the center
of a small painting entitled E (1918/199) as a linguistic substitute for the
bird’s-eye view of the Eiffel Tower in Apollinaire’s “Ocean-Letter”
(“Lettre-Océan”).71 An untitled and undated prose poem leaves little
doubt that Klee also knew Apollinaire’s “It’s Raining” (“Il Pleut”):
In einem Zimmer gefangen. Grosse Gefahr. Kein Ausgang. Da: ein
offenes
Fenster, hinauf, abstossen: ich fliege
frei, aber es regnet fein, es regnet fein, es regnet,
regnet, regnet . . . . . . regnet . . . . . .
[Caught in a room. Great danger. No exit. There: an open
window, upward, jump: I am flying
free, but it’s drizzling, it’s raining gently, it’s raining,
raining, raining . . . . . . raining . . . . . .]72
Klee avoided the temptation to imitate the spatial configuration of
Apollinaire’s “It’s Raining,” which visually represents the falling rain
described in his text. Instead, he opted to evoke the sensory perception of

a drizzle with unexpected syntactical breaks and ellipses, suggesting rain-
drops and, at the same time, indicating temporal duration. Similarly, in the
1912 combination of words and images, he experimented with the spatial
distribution of graphic marks. Fall was cut from a larger multifigured com-
position and was further altered by the erasure of a second form barely vis-
ible slightly above and to the right of the free-falling figure. The staggered
configuration of marks and blank spaces leaves an opening for another
handwritten text and also suggests a temporal sequence within the new
composite text. Fall thus becomes the visual substitute for unwritten lines
of poetry, with the space between the two juxtaposed fragments function-
ing like ellipses or a stanza break.
Klee’s experiments in cutting and recombining were initiated inde-
pendently of the cubists’ experiments with collage. For the cubists collage
provided a vehicle for exploring fundamental questions about the conven-
tions of drawing and painting.73 Klee constructed a context for exploring
some of these same questions on his own terms. Whereas the cubists rel-
ished the juxtaposition of fragments taken from disparate contexts and
consisting of different materials, Klee restricted himself to words and
images of his own making. In the course of combining Fall and Woe Is Me
in the Gale Wind, he quite literally, if unintentionally, put into practice the
roots of the term “script,” a noun that brings together the manual activ-
ities of drawing and writing (“scribere”) with that of cutting (“skeri”).74
The outcome of these manual activities is a hybridized text that reflects on
the origins of writing. The similarity between the letter forms written in
Klee’s cursive script — notably the “f’s” and “h’s” — and the loopy limbs
of the drawn figure references a manuscript culture in which writing his-
torically evolved from drawing. The visual analogies between letter forms
and figurative images also pose a possibility that would have far-reaching
implications for Klee’s script pictures of the twenties and thirties, namely,
that poetic metaphors can be constructed by juxtaposing symbols from dif-
ferent sign systems.
Even after Klee abandoned any serious ambitions as a poet, he
continued to amuse himself with nonsense poems in the spirit of
Morgenstern. One such poem is a nursery rhyme that reads as if it were
written for an occasion, then copied and colored by hand. The delightful
text and its colorful embellishment set this work apart from the banality
of commercial greeting cards. Unfortunately, the original, possibly made
to be given as a gift but subsequently sold, is now missing. A photo-
graphic reproduction (fig. 9) shows that the text was inscribed twice on a
single sheet of paper — in cursive script at the bottom of the sheet, in lieu
of a title, and hand-printed above, where uppercase letters are incorpo-
rated into the image of a child, presumably the “Emilie” to whom the
visual/verbal text was dedicated (1917/48):
Disclaimer:

Fig. 9: Paul Klee, Emilie; Widuwilie / Widuwintu Kantilie / Widumops / Katops /

anatolischer Mops (1917/48). Watercolor and pen on paper mounted on cardboard,
24 ⫻15.4 cm. Location unknown. © 2006 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York /
VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Photograph courtesy of the Zentrum Paul Klee.
EMILIE
WIDUWILIE
WIDUWINTU
KANTILIE
WIDUMOPS
KATOPS
ANATOLISCHER MOPS
Using rhyme, assonance, and alliteration, Klee concocted a frothy play on
words that would have delighted the recipient with its reference to a pug
dog (“anatolischer Mops”). Contained within undulating bands of color
that serve as the ribboned adornment of an occasional poem, the words
function graphically as well as aurally.
This small watercolor illustrates one of Klee’s standard techniques for
imposing visual structure on a poetic text. With few exceptions, in his own
Disclaimer:

Fig. 10: Paul Klee, Once Emerged from the Gray of Night (1918/17). Watercolor,
pen, and pencil on paper mounted on cardboard, 22.6 ⫻ 15.8 cm. Zentrum Paul
Klee, Bern. © 2006 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.
Photograph courtesy of the Zentrum Paul Klee.
poetic practice he conscientiously observed the rhythmically modulated

lines of poetic form. For Klee this was an essential and inviolable element
of poetic structure. In composing visual settings for his own poetic texts or
for textual fragments from other sources, he adopted the linear structure
of poetry. The lines arranged across the surface of Emilie can be read
simultaneously as freehand substitutes for the lined pages of the kind of
notebook in which Klee would copy the “Geduchte” and as the formal
components of an abstract graphic language that delineates a spatial setting
without describing the objects it contains in any literal way. Here the linear
supports of a poetic text double as the skeletal structure of a visual image.
Although the integration of pictorial image and verbal text takes place only
at the most superficial level, Emilie anticipates the structural rhythms that
would characterize Klee’s subsequent efforts to bring together the poetic
and the architectonic.
Klee had added color to visual settings for poetry as early as 1916,
when he produced six word pictures incorporating selected verses from
Chinese poems in German translation. In these works he tapped into two
established traditions. While conscious of adding to a rich history of
Chinese “poem-paintings” that combine poetic texts with visual imagery,
he also took the opportunity to reconsider the practice of Western manu-
script illumination from a modernist perspective. In 1918 Klee continued
to pursue this avenue of investigation with Once Emerged from the Gray of
Night (Einst dem Grau der Nacht enttaucht, 1918/17) (fig. 10), which
provides a visual setting for a poem that is very likely his.75 In October
1917 he wrote to Lily Klee from his military post, floating the idea of com-
piling an anthology of poetry that might include his own work, verbal as
well as visual (“Ich werde gelegentlich eine Sammlung guter Gedichte
anlegen und eventuel componieren, wenigstens teilweise. Andere nur
leicht illustrieren”).76 This project — probably hatched as a diversion from
the tedium of office work at his military base — may have prompted him
to write “Once Emerged from the Gray of Night” and to try his hand at a
new approach to illustration.
Like Emilie, Once Emerged from the Gray of Night contains not one
but two autograph copies of the poem. At the top of a cardboard support,
where illustration conventions would have dictated a headpiece, the poem
is carefully written out in Klee’s cursive hand:
Einst dem Grau der Nacht enttaucht

Dann schwer und teurer
und stark vom Feuer
Abends voll von Gott und gebeugt
Nun ätherlings vom Blau umschauert,
entschwebt über Firnen
zu klugen Gestirnen.
[Once emerged from the gray of night

Then ponderous and prized
and strengthened by fire
Evenings bowed by the fullness of God
Now heavenly showered with blue,
vanished over snow-covered mountains
to the knowing stars.]77
According to literary practice, the handwritten text would be considered

fair copy, so it is logical to assume that there were earlier drafts, although
Klee seems not to have saved them. The text he preserved is a finely crafted
exercise in expressionist word painting that envisions evenings experienced
as sensory extremes of heat and cold. With the exception of the warm
orange-red associated with fire, the color palette is cool, ranging in tone
from a relatively light celestial blue to the darker, achromatic gray of night.
Blue and gray, the only two colors specified by name, recur in a full spec-
trum of contemporary poetry — from the phonetic tongue twister in
Morgenstern’s “Jingle of the Gallows Brothers” (“Bundeslied der
Galgenbrüder”): “da tauts, da grauts, da brauts, da blauts!” (“it dews, it
grays, it brews, it blues!”)78 — to the second version of Georg Trakl’s
“Music at Mirabell” (“Musik im Mirabell”):
Ein Brunnen singt. Die Wolken stehn A fountain sings. Clouds hover
Im klaren Blau, die weissen, zarten. In clear blueness, white and delicate.
Bedächtig stille Menschen gehn At evening quiet people
Am Abend durch den alten Garten. Wander thoughtfully through the
old garden.
Der Ahnen Marmor ist ergraut. Ancestral marble fades to gray,
Ein Vogelzug streift in die A flight of birds vanishes in the
Weiten. distance.
Ein Faun mit toten Augen schaut With dead eyes a faun gazes
Nach Schatten, die ins Dunkel After shadows gliding into
gleiten. darkness.79
Like the two stanzas quoted from “Music at Mirabell,” Klee’s poem evokes
nature in an accumulation of discrete images that have no obvious tempo-
ral or spatial continuity. The internal structural coherence of both poems
results from a rhythmic flow achieved by coordinating metric stresses,
rhyme, and assonance. Rhythm also contributes to a consistency of mood,
as does color imagery. Klee adapted these same poetic devices to the reit-
eration of his text in its visual setting.
The second copy of the poem was hand-printed in blocky letters
inscribed within colored squares that are similar though not uniform in
shape. By substituting the squared units of a grid for the curvilinear sup-
ports of Emilie, Klee segmented his text into letters that are easily legible
as words only by referring to the cursive text written above. The letters are
formed with a combination of vertical, horizontal, diagonal, and curved
lines, making some of the letter forms as difficult to decipher as the words
they constitute. Compartmentalized in the individual units of the grid, the
letters are even more disjointed than the sequence of verbal images that
make up the text. However, like the poem itself, the visual setting is struc-
turally coherent. Order is visually imposed not only by the grid, which
functions like the linear and stanzaic structures of a poem, but also by the
rhythmic repetition of straight and curved lines and by the distribution of
color in patterns that are comparable to assonance and end rhyme. The
specific colors named in the text are also used in the grid, with strong con-
trasts of color values in the upper section and a more even distribution of
value in the lower half. This results in the visual appearance of a tonal shift
that relates to the text. Despite these correspondences between visual and
verbal signifiers, color values and words are not illustratively paired, as is
evident by the yellow, violet, blue, and green washes in the squares that
contain the word “Grau.” Nor are there exclusive correspondences
between specific colors and letters. Apparently, the logic of Klee’s color
scheme was dictated by external factors.
A diagram from one of the standard sources of color science would
have been a readily accessible model for a grid with color notations.
Hermann von Helmholtz, author of the comprehensive Treatise on
Physiological Optics (Handbuch der physiologischen Optik), plotted the
wavelengths of complementary colors on a grid, naming colors rather than
showing them.80 In Once Emerged from the Gray of Night Klee visualized
the hues that Helmholtz indicated only by name, thereby introducing the
distinction between experience and sensation to which Helmholtz also
referred.81 The reader of Klee’s poem makes color associations based on
experience. By contrast, the viewer responds to the sensations evoked by
colors, which communicate independently of a text that is intentionally
obscured. The color palette of Once Emerged from the Gray of Night is,
in fact, integrally related to the text, albeit conceptually rather than literally.
It is significant that Klee chose a color scheme dominated by the comple-
mentary pairs of blue/orange, yellow/violet, and red/green. Helmholtz
and other color theorists defined complementary colors as those that pro-
duce white when mixed in specific ratios. Klee, like other practicing artists,
had learned from experience that mixing a primary color with its secondary
complement produced not white but gray.82 In theory a mixture of all the
complementary colors in Once Emerged from the Gray of Night would pro-
duce the gray named in the poem. Klee led his students through such exer-
cises in color theory while teaching at the Bauhaus in the twenties.
Knowing that artists usually apply color theory more intuitively than sci-
entifically, he cautioned his students to beware of those who “give us laws
instead of works” (“Gesetze geben an Stelle von Werken”),83 specifically
citing those who advised against the use of gray. He could have used Once
Emerged from the Gray of Night as an illustrative example. In combining
complementary colors with washes of gray, he defied theoretical precepts
in favor of the principle of harmony. The colors are not paired in equal
ratios or repeated at regular intervals but are instead distributed over the
surface to establish a balanced color scheme that corresponds to the bal-
anced relationship of the lines that form the letters of the text. In calculat-
ing this relationship between color and text, Klee extended the principle of
pictorial harmony to establish a harmonious relationship between a poetic
text and its visual setting.
Because Klee’s working process is revealed beneath the transparent

watercolor washes, it is clear how carefully he calculated the relationship
between the handwritten words and their color complements. He first
printed the text in pencil, which is still visible beneath the India ink overlay
of the letter ‘S’ in EINST. The illuminated version of the text was copied
on a sheet of paper, which Klee cut in two and mounted with a strip of
silver-colored paper between them, giving visual shape to the composi-
tional break in his poem.84 In customary fashion, he signed and dated the
work on a neatly ruled line at the bottom of the cardboard support.
Ordinarily he would have included a title on the same line, but in this case
he did not. Perhaps Klee conceived this word picture as a substitute for the
manuscript copy that might otherwise have been recorded in the Diaries
or the notebook of “Geduchte.” He would not have known that William
Blake often followed a similar practice, preserving his illuminated texts
only in the handwritten versions he copied onto plates prepared for a
process he called “Illuminated Printing.”85 Klee was, however, familiar
with Blake’s work, and there are parallels between Once Emerged from the
Gray of Night and the first project Blake executed using his experimental
printing process.
Blake invented “Illuminated Printing,” a relief etching process, in 1788
and used it the following year to print the mirror-written texts of a collec-
tion of poems he entitled Songs of Innocence. By 1793 he had further devel-
oped the process so that he could print the illustrations to his Songs of
Experience in opaque pigments. In the interim, he issued a limited edition
of the Songs of Innocence, with copies hand-colored in watercolor as orders
were received.86 Had Klee delved into the collection of the Bavarian State
Library in Munich while living there, he could have perused one of twenty-
six extant copies of this first edition of the Songs of Innocence.87 Although
Klee does not seem to have made this discovery, he was nevertheless
exposed to Blake’s work, if only through photographic reproductions. In
1904, when he was at work on the etchings that would comprise his Opus
One, he visited Munich’s Kupferstichkabinett. There he was shown a book
about Blake in English, possibly Richard Garnett’s popular illustrated
monograph.88 Although he admitted to being briefly diverted by Blake’s
unique vision, he quickly regained his own sense of direction. Klee never
again mentioned Blake in either his Diaries or letters, but it is plausible that
Blake’s work surfaced in his memory when he engaged in experiments
designed to channel his early practice as a poet into his visual production.
Blake had been similarly intent on finding a single vehicle for unifying his
doubly coded artistic production. In focusing on the technical problems of
how to reproduce texts without typesetting and letterpress printing, and
how to replicate images without printing separate plates, Blake was chal-
lenging the way that illustrated books had always been produced. Klee for-
mulated a different but equally daunting challenge for himself.
Disclaimer:

Fig. 11: William Blake, “Holy Thursday,” Plate 19 from Songs of Innocence and of
Experience. Collection of King’s College, Cambridge, United Kingdom. Photograph
courtesy of Peter Jones, Librarian, King’s College Library.
Given his experience with book illustration, Klee knew that commer-
cial publishers were reluctant to trifle with readers’ customary expectations
of an illustrative relationship between literary texts and accompanying
visual imagery. In Once Emerged from the Gray of Night he took on the
problem of how to reinfuse generally accepted assumptions about illustra-
tion with the medieval concept of illumination as a form of visual
enhancement. He would have found some adaptable visual precedents in
Blake’s early printed books. One pertinent example is the illustrated text
of “Holy Thursday,” plate 19 from Songs of Innocence (fig. 11). To the
extent that its head- and tailpieces literally depict “the children walking
two & two in red & blue & green,” this plate is conventionally illustrative.
Close scrutiny reveals a more innovative use of line and color to design a
visual structure that reinforces the structure of the poetic text. The linear
registers that regulate the spacing and alignment of Blake’s handwritten
text are disguised by vines that meander between lines and occasionally
stray into margins. To visualize stanzaic breaks, Blake introduced dense
concentrations of the vine motifs and a subtle change in color. Klee con-
temporized these devices in his Once Emerged from the Gray of Night,
reducing the tendriled vines to a linear grid and adding the wide strip of
metallic paper. In the absence of any documentation about his intentions,
it is impossible to ascertain why or if Klee was experimenting with modern
variations on Blake’s illuminated texts. Perhaps he was curious about

Blake’s mechanical process as a viable alternative to commercial publishing
for his projected anthology.
It is also possible that Klee thought of his hand-colored word picture
as another one of his modernist interpretations of the traditional Chinese
poem-painting. In China, as in the West, there is a long tradition of reci-
procity in the relationship between the arts of painting and poetry. Klee
would have been knowledgeable about this tradition, having read Hans
Heilmann’s Chinesische Lyrik vom 12. Jahrhundert Chr. bis zur Gegenwart,
which Lily Klee gave to him as a gift in 1916.89 In Heilmann’s lengthy
introduction to his anthology, he noted that each word of a Chinese poem
“has its own painterly sign” (“sein eigenes malerisches Zeichen hat”).90
With the emergence of what Jonathan Chaves has called the “integral
poem-painting” during the Song Dynasty (960–1279), the Chinese
added the dimension of calligraphy to this relationship.91 The artist capa-
ble of composing a poem, envisioning its visual equivalent, and rendering
both the poetic text and its pictorial counterpart on the same support was
said to have mastered the “three perfections” — poetry, painting, and
calligraphy. The preferred subject matter of the Chinese poet/painter
was nature, invoked in concise, imagistic phrases that challenge the con-
ventions of visual coherence. In imagining visual parallels for such lan-
guage, the poet/painter might choose to bypass illustrative imagery in
favor of correspondences between compositional layouts and
rhythmic patterns. The technical skills required for calligraphic writing
expanded the potential for parallels to include analogies based on expres-
sive brushwork. Klee could have discovered a model for rethinking the
Western tradition of ut pictura poesis in any number of Song Dynasty
poem-paintings.
By pairing the script version of “Einst dem Grau der Nacht ent-
taucht” with a hand-lettered and colored text, Klee was intentionally con-
trasting the legible with the visible.92 It is his visible variant that
approximates the idiosyncratic features of calligraphic writing, as well as
the structural parallels between verbal and visual imagery that are com-
mon to the Chinese poem-painting. Like calligraphic characters, Klee’s
printed letters are verbal signs rendered in a personal visual style. The
blocky graphic signs are schematized to fit into the units of a grid that
defines a textual space occupied by both verbal and visual elements. This
doubly coded space is characteristic of Chinese poem-paintings, as is the
correspondence between Klee’s structural grid and the linguistic units of
his poem. What is unique about Once Emerged from the Gray of Night is
the absence of any literally descriptive motifs. To achieve a perceptible
degree of poetic distance between verbal and visual signs, Klee elimi-
nated illustrative imagery altogether, substituting colored squares as
the principal visual signifiers. In doing so he retained the Chinese
Disclaimer:

Fig. 12: Paul Klee, Memorial Sheet (of Gersthofen) (1918/196). Pen, pencil, and
watercolor on paper mounted on cardboard, 28.5 ⫻ 21 cm. Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern,
private loan. © 2006 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst,
Bonn. Photograph courtesy of the Zentrum Paul Klee.
preference for poetic suggestion over literal graphic transcriptions. The

result of this experiment is a nontraditional poem-painting that marks a
significant step in the process of reconstructing the theoretical premise of
the ut pictura poesis paradigm to further the modernist impulse toward
abstraction.
The short poem written into the structural framework of Memorial
Sheet (of Gersthofen) (Gedenkblatt [an Gersthofen], 1918/196) (fig. 12) is
altogether different in tone from either the nonsense poem dedicated to
“Emilie” or the ethereal word painting of Once Emerged from the Gray of
Night:
Du still allein, Thee, calm and alone,
Ihr Ungeheuer (To your monstrous rout
mein Herz ist euer, my heart goes out,)
mein Herz ist dein! my heart’s thine own!93
As with many of Klee’s terse, trenchant verses, the tone of this rhymed qua-
train is acerbically ironic. In this instance irony was the vehicle for a satiri-
cal commentary on contemporary visual culture. O. K. Werckmeister has
linked Klee’s title to the memorial sheets that assigned names to the grim
statistics of wartime Germany.94 Military officials often informed families
that loved ones had fallen at the front by sending mass-produced memorial
sheets, which paired the aestheticized image of a dead soldier with a line of
saccharine verse. Blank space was typically left to individualize the generic
image with a name. Klee’s Memorial Sheet (of Gersthofen) is a parody of
these commercialized expressions of institutional sympathy. Using both the
familiar ‘dein’ and the formal ‘euer,’ Klee composed a greeting-card qua-
train in which his satirical intention is slyly masked by a jaunty rhyme. Read
together, the first and last lines make a mockery of the pretense of com-
municating the private pain of grieving survivors in trite rhymes. Inserted
between these lines is a parenthetical aside expressing a widespread senti-
ment that was manifestly at odds with official propaganda.
The technique of conflating different voices and divergent points of
view was as common to modernist poetry as it was to cubist painting,
where exterior and interior surfaces and multiple points of view are spa-
tially integrated, as they are in Memorial Sheet (of Gersthofen).95 Given
Klee’s penchant for exposing process, it seems likely that he was drawing
attention to a compositional device he had transferred from one medium
to another. The syntax of Klee’s poem is intentionally confusing, but its
meaning is as transparent as the skeletal structure that contains it. Not
coincidentally, the transparency of the architectural structure allows the
viewer to observe the artist in his quarters on the military base at
Gersthofen, where he was stationed when armistice was officially declared
in November 1918. Klee depicted himself tucked in bed with pencil and
paper. He could be drafting the verse that is projected up in the rafters,
drawing the stereographic image of his room in the barracks, or writing a
letter to his spouse. In a letter written to her on 19 November and subse-
quently transcribed (with minor changes) into the Diaries, he contrasted
the chaotic end of the war with the serenity and security of his living
space.96 Snugly ensconced in his tidy room, Klee could reflect on the col-
lapse of the German war effort from an ironic distance that corresponds to
the physical distance of the viewer in relation to the interior depicted in
Memorial Sheet (of Gersthofen).
During the war years Klee had continued his practice of writing about
his thought processes and working methods, both in the Diaries and in let-
ters. In the aftermath of the war this practice shifted to the semantic spaces
of images such as Memorial Sheet (of Gersthofen). Although Klee did not
add to the Diaries in the postwar years, he did lavish considerable time on
preparing clean copy. If, in the editing process, he recognized parallels
between his line endings and Stramm’s poetry, he did not immediately take
Disclaimer:

Fig. 13: Paul Klee, Éhatévauih (1925/124). Pen on paper mounted on cardboard,
8.8 ⫻ 15.7/15.5 cm. Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern. © 2006 Artists Rights Society (ARS),
New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Photograph courtesy of the Zentrum Paul Klee.
the next logical, though admittedly daring, step — that of composing

poetry with single words or an even more reductive form of poetic lan-
guage, the single letter. He did, however, compose visually with that small-
est of linguistic units, producing a body of work in which uppercase letters
function as both initials and visual abstractions. This occurred even before
Schwitters proclaimed that “not the word but the letter is the original
material of poetry” (“nicht das Wort ist ursprünglich Material der
Dichtung, sondern der Buchstabe”).97 After moving into the sphere of the
Bauhaus in the early twenties, Klee continued to experiment with new
forms of poetry in visual settings.
One example is Éhatévauih, 1925/124 (fig. 13), where letters are sus-
pended in a pictorial space. The title is a phonetic transcription of the
sound values of letters distributed in a pattern that diagrams the rise and
fall of speech. Although not included in any inventory of Klee’s poetry, this
configuration of letters represents his only experiment with the kind of
sound poetry that was the featured attraction of every dada soirée. Both
Hugo Ball and Raoul Hausmann vied for the recognition of having
invented the sound poem, yet there were numerous precedents, including
the poetry of Morgenstern and Kandinsky, both of whom are listed on the
programs of dada performances.98 Ball’s dada diary and Huelsenbeck’s
Dada Almanac describe various kinds of sound poetry, including “simul-
taneous poems” and “grammalogues.” Klee’s Éhatévauih represents yet
another variation on dada sound poetry.
Instead of reciting or typesetting his experiment in sound poetry, Klee
chose to spatialize it in a visual frame of reference. The pattern of letters is
superimposed on loose configurations of calligraphic swirls that evoke the
Disclaimer:

Fig. 14: Paul Klee, Alphabet AIOEK (1938/227). Colored paste on paper mounted
on cardboard, 27.3 ⫻ 21 cm. Achim Moeller Fine Art, New York. © 2006 Artists
Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Photograph courtesy of the
Zentrum Paul Klee.
atmospheric effect of nebulous clouds. As in his earlier Inscription in Clouds

(Inschrift in Wolken, 1919/209), the overlay of letters reinforces the illusion
of spatial depth. Given the layered relationship of letters to cloud forma-
tions, it is possible that Klee was attempting to visualize the layers of associ-
ation implicit in the sound poem to which Ball gave the title “Labada’s
Cloud Chant” (“Labadas Gesang an die Wolken”).99 It is equally possible,
however, that Klee’s visual exercise in the modernist concept of simultane-
ity was not so literally referential. In theory the viewer who enunciates the
sound values of the title Éhatévauih and simultaneously registers the rela-
tionship between letter forms and cloud formations could experience one of
those “magical floating words” with “resonant sounds” that Ball designated
“grammalogues,” or word images (“die Verwendung von ‘Sigeln,’ von
magisch erfüllten fliegenden Worten und Klangfiguren”).100 Ball himself
disdained word images that others had already invented,101 writing what he
called “Poems without Words” or “Sound Poems” (“ ‘Verse ohne Worte’
Disclaimer:

Fig. 15: Kurt Schwitters, “Register [elementar],” 1922. © 2006 Artists Rights Society
(ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. © 1973 DuMont Literatur und Kunst
Verlag.
oder Lautgedichte”), which often took the form of words reduced to sound
patterns.102 Klee designed his own exercise in abstract poetry, applying Ball’s
reductive process to a pictorial setting as well as a sound poem. In doing so
he made a decisive break with lines that represent in conventional ways,
either by forming legible words or by describing recognizable objects. Here
the poetic text and the underlying visual configuration are reduced to
graphic abstractions, one written out, the other drawn. The analogous rela-
tionship between verbal and visual signs suggests that writing and imaging
had become not simply parallel but virtually interchangeable activities in
Klee’s mind. He stated as much in his pedagogical notes on form-produc-
tion, making the claim that “the word [sic] and the picture, that is, word-
making [sic] and form-building are one and the same” (“Schrift und Bild,
das heisst Schreiben und Bilden, sind wurzelhaft eins”).103 This startling
theoretical assertion is validated in Éhatévauih.
When Klee returned to letters as compositional units, it was once again
with the wistful intention of writing poetry, or at least the Beginning of a
Poem (Anfang eines Gedichtes, 1938/189), which is the title he gave to one
of five alphabet drawings dating from 1938. The structural settings of the
alphabet drawings, including Alphabet WE, 1938/226 and Alphabet
AIOEK, 1938/227 (fig. 14), are variations on the linear grid of Klee’s Once
Emerged from the Gray of Night, although the letters themselves are differ-
ent in that they are clearly legible and open-ended in their combinatorial
possibilities.104 In these respects the 1938 alphabet drawings acknowledge
the legacy of Schwitters’s “Register [elementary]” (“Register [elementar]”)
(fig. 15) and “Typographic Visual Poem” (“Gesetztes Bildgedicht”), both
dating from 1922. Yet Klee’s drawings pointedly reject the rigidity imposed
by Schwitters’s printed letter forms and typesetting grids. The letters are
arranged in a compositional grid that resembles a slightly warped word-game
playing board, distorted so that straight lines are varied with diagonals and
curves to resonate with the shapes of the letter forms. The game analogy is
an appropriate one, for the combination of letters specified in the title seems
to have resulted from a kind of cryptographic word game.
There are numerous ways to interpret the letter ciphers “AIOEK” and
“WE” and the graphic structures that contain them. Given Klee’s proclivity for
self-referential allusions, it is logical to surmise that Alphabet AIOEK and
Alphabet WE might bear some relation to Beginning of a Poem, where paired
numbers and words make up the phrase “so fang es heimlich an” (“so let it
secretly begin”).105 This enigmatic phrase suggests that Beginning of a Poem is
a visual version of a “puzzle poem,” so described because the poet invites the
reader/viewer to solve a poetic conundrum.106 Assuming that Alphabet
AIOEK and Alphabet WE are structurally similar to Beginning of a Poem, the
alphabet would again be the external determinant of a poetic construct, within
which adjacent letters are isolated as constituent units of puzzle poems. The
assumption that the verbal units “AIOEK” and “WE” belong to the language
of poetry places Klee’s drawing in a broad cultural context that embraces Jean
Cocteau’s irreverent insistence that even the most beautiful poem is “nothing
more than a mixed-up alphabet.”107 Accepting the supposition that “AIOEK”
and “WE” are the titles of poems composed in this way, questions still remain
concerning what they mean and how they function as poetic signifiers.
“WE” can be read as the first-person plural pronoun in English, but it
is highly unlikely that this was Klee’s intention, especially since “AIOEK”
makes no orthographic or phonetic sense as a word in any known language.
It is, of course, quite possible that Klee was inventing new words, in which
case Alphabet AIOEK and Alphabet WE could be understood as realizations
of Velimir Khlebnikov’s prediction that “henceforth a work of art could
consist of a single word.”108 In the cases of “AIOEK” and “WE,” those
words might be characterized as hypograms, a term used by Ferdinand de
Saussure to specify a theme word that lends itself to anagrammatic transpo-
sitions. Saussure’s research on anagrams encompassed poetry across global
cultures, ranging from sacred Vedic texts to Saturnian verse.109 Although
Klee would not have had access to Saussure’s unpublished research, he
might well have been familiar with the cabalistic tradition of cryptographi-
cally encoded anagrams. He might also have known that medieval poets
used anagrammatic theme words, the most famous example being the
acrostic from François Villon’s Testament (Le Testament, 1461) in which a
vertical sequence of initial letters spells out the poet’s last name.110
There are infinite numbers of variations on the basic principle of com-
posing poetry by arranging the letters of a word or a group of words. A
poem based on the anagram “WE” might contain one word in each line that
begins with “W” and ends with “E.” Alternatively, the anagram “AIOEK”
might determine not the beginning of a poem but the last letters of line
endings in a five-line stanza. This use of an anagram would be an extension
of Klee’s earlier practice of listing the final words of his epigrammatic verses.
Read as the ultimate reduction of poetic texts to their anagrammatic theme
words, or hypograms, Alphabet AIOEK and Alphabet WE stand as evidence
of a self-fulfilled prophecy Klee had voiced in a note to Bloesch as early as
1901: “Possibly or even probably I will end up expressing myself through
the word, which I almost believe is the highest form of art” (“Vielleicht oder
wahrscheinlich komme auch ich schliesslich dazu mich durch das Wort
auszudrücken, ich glaube fast es ist die höchste Kunst”).111
When Klee restricted his poetry to words or sound patterns, it was
often derivative, but with his anagrammatic alphabet poems he found his
own voice. These exercises in letter poetry have their parallels in drawings
where linguistic symbols slip into visual abstractions. Subsequent chapters
will examine the strategies that Klee appropriated from modernist aesthetic
practices in order to effect a transition from verbal to visual poetry, ulti-
mately forging the new sign language he used to compose his poems in
pictorial script.
Notes
1
Tagebücher #895, spring 1911, 312 (Diaries, 256). The handwritten oeuvre cat-
alogue is in the collection of the Zentrum Paul Klee.
2
On the editing and recopying of Klee’s Diaries, see Christian Geelhaar, “Journal
intime oder Autobiographie? Über Paul Klees Tagebücher,” in Paul Klee: Das
Frühwerk, 1883–1922 (Munich: Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, 1979),
246–60; hereafter cited as Das Frühwerk. See also O. K. Werckmeister, The Making
of Paul Klee’s Career, 1914–1920 (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989), 5–8, 41–44;
hereafter cited as Klee’s Career. Both authors cite a letter to Lily Stumpf in which
Klee mentioned making the first transcription for possible use in drafting an auto-
biography (Briefe, vol. 1, 16 April 1904, 414).
3
The notebook labeled “Geduchte” is in the archives of the Zentrum Paul Klee.
Based on a conversation with Wolfgang Kersten, observations about Klee’s hand-
writing, and the fact that one poem is dated 1926, Vogel surmises that Klee prob-
ably recorded the poems between 1922 and 1926 (Zwischen Wort und Bild, 16,
38 n. 13).
4
The 1946 edition, published by Benteli, was revised and reissued as a new edition
in 1965; see Carola Giedion-Welcker, Anthologie der Abseitigen: Poètes à l’écart
(Zurich, Arche, 1965), 93–99.
5
Paul Klee, Gedichte, ed. Felix Klee (Zurich: Arche, 1960). The most recent
reprint (2001) is the one cited throughout these notes.
6
Cf. Gedichte, 135–38, with Vogel, Zwischen Wort und Bild, 15–18.
7
Gedichte, 105. This poem is published from a manuscript in the collection of Felix
Klee. In this translation I attempted to preserve some of the rhythms and rhymes,
and acknowledge the assistance of Jim Walker.
8
Tagebücher #50, November–April 1897–98, 23 (Diaries, 14).
9
Tagebücher #50, November–April 1897–98, 23 (Diaries, 14); also cited in Vogel,
Zwischen Wort und Bild, 84.
10
This poem was published in Gedichte, 22–23, and Tagebücher #111, summer
1911, 50–52 (Diaries, 40–41). For references to Goethe and Hölderlin in Klee’s let-
ters, see the index in Briefe, vol. 2, 1381, 1321. Both Goethe and Hölderlin are well
represented in the library of Paul and Lily Klee. See, e.g., Goethe’s sämmtliche Werke
in vierzig Bänden (Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta’scher, 1840).
11
I quote one of these poems in my text. Another of Klee’s Heine-inspired poems
from this period is included in a letter of 1 March 1899 to Bloesch; a variant is pub-
lished in Gedichte, 20, and Tagebücher #82, 1899–1900, 41 (Diaries, 33). The ver-
sion from the letter to Bloesch is translated by Jürgen Glaesemer in “Klee and
German Romanticism,” MoMA, Klee, 70. Glaesemer enumerates the characteristic
features of these “chansons,” citing their “perfumed eroticism, the romantic surges
of emotion and feeling for nature,” and noting that “Heinrich Heine is their god-
father.” In the Klee library is a multivolume edition of Heine’s work: Heinrich
Heines sämtliche Werke in zwölf Bänden, ed. Gustav Karpeles (Leipzig: Max Hesse,
n.d.). Several volumes are inscribed “Lily Stumpf, 24.Dez.05,” suggesting that the
set may have been a holiday gift from Klee or one of his family members.
12
Tagebücher #77, summer 1899, 40 (Diaries, 31). The translation and capitaliza-
tion are variants of those in the English edition.
13
See Heinrich Heine, Sämtliche Werke (Munich: Winkler, 1969), 1:98–99.
14
Werckmeister speculates that Klee’s negative reaction to his bust portrait by the
sculptor Alexander Zschokke may have been motivated by his skepticism about the
classicizing pretensions of the George circle. See his essay “Klees Zeichnung ‘Vor
dem Tempel. 1932/155,’ ” in Paul Klee im Rheinland, ed. Uta Gerlach-Laxner
and Frank Günter Zehnder (Cologne: DuMont / Bonn: Rheinisches Landesmuseum,
2003), 243–44.
15
Tagebücher #868, December 1909, 297 (Diaries, 242).
16
Christian Morgenstern, Palma Kunkel (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1921), 17. The
copy with Klee’s marginal notations cited here is in the Zentrum Paul Klee. I wish
to thank Stefan Frey, curator of the Klee estate, for confirming that this notation is
in Klee’s own handwriting.
17
Gedichte, 8. In this translation I use Long Ears as a synecdoche, thus the upper-case
letters and singular verb. My transcription restores the layout on page 3 of the note-
book of “Geduchte,” which is the first page on which Klee wrote. Throughout the
notebook he wrote only on odd-numbered pages, leaving the verso of each page blank.
18
See Christian Morgenstern, Galgenlieder: A Selection, trans. Max Knight
(Berkeley: U of California P, 1963), 82–83; hereafter cited as Galgenlieder.
19
Gedichte, 9, reproduced as it is recorded on page 9 of the notebook of “Geduchte.”
20
Christian Morgenstern, Songs from the Gallows, trans. Walter Arndt (New Haven,
CT: Yale UP, 1993), 132; the poem cited is elsewhere entitled “Scholastikerproblem.”
For reproductions of the two works by Klee, see Catalogue raisonné, 2:227 for
1915/29 (there translated as “genius,” elsewhere as “angel”) and 8:398 for
1939/859.
21
Gedichte, 16, printed from the autograph version handwritten in Klee’s personal
copy of Georg Büchners Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Paul Landau, vol. 1 (Berlin: Paul
Cassirer, 1909). Compare this with Morgenstern’s “Nein!” in Galgenlieder (Berlin:
Bruno Cassirer, 1922), 5. This is likely a replacement for the earlier edition Klee
mentioned in the Diaries; see note 15. Like the other volumes of Morgenstern in
the Klee library, this one is marked with a system of Xs and slashes that must have
had meaning for Klee.
22
Vogel characterizes this poem as a latter-day example of Sturm und Drang in
“Eine semiotisch-strukturalistische Interpretation,” 73.
23
Georg Büchner, Dantons Tod and Woyzeck, ed. Margaret Jacobs, 4th ed.,
Manchester German Texts (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1996), 33. Translation
by Fritz Janschka.
24
See, e.g., John Simon, “The Original Miller’s Daughter,” Opera News 66
(March 2002): 35.
25
Vogel has established these dates based on the script used and recollections of
Felix Klee concerning when his father acquired the edition of Büchner’s work in
which “Motto” is inscribed. See Zwischen Wort und Bild, 16, 38 n. 12.
26
Klee’s ambivalence toward Walden when the two were first introduced by Franz
Marc indicates that the beginning of their relationship may well have been strained,
if not stormy. See Tagebücher #914, summer–fall 1912, 329–30 (Diaries, 274).
27
Gedichte, 15, reproduced as it is recorded on the undated manuscript interleaved
in the notebook of “Geduchte.” Although “Rach [sic] und Degen” can be trans-
lated as “Revenge and sword,” I have sacrificed meaning to Klee’s system of trans-
posing letters.
28
Galgenlieder, 28–29.
29
Vogel, “Eine semiotisch-strukturalistische Interpretation,” 62.
30
Gedichte, 8, reproduced as it is recorded on page 5 of the notebook of
“Geduchte.”
31
Gedichte, 16, reproduced from the autograph copy in a 1928 pocket diary.
Translation by Fritz Janschka.
32
Morgenstern, Galgenlieder, 22–23. Vogel also cites Morgenstern as a source of the
style of Klee’s “1/1000” in “Eine semiotisch-strukturalistische Interpretation,” 46.
33
Kurt Schwitters, Lyrik, vol. 1 of Das literarische Werk, ed. Friedhelm Lach
(Cologne: Verlag M. DuMont Schauberg, 1973), 199; hereafter cited as Lyrik.
The poem was originally published in Elementar. Die Blume Anna: Die neue Anna
Blume, eine Gedichtsammlung aus den Jahren 1918–1922 (Berlin: Der Sturm,
1922), 7–8; hereafter cited as Elementar. Die Blume Anna.
34
Morgenstern, Galgenlieder, 150–51.
35
Hans Arp, “Sekundenzeiger,” in German Poetry, 1910–1975, ed. and trans.
Michael Hamburger (New York: Urizen Books, 1976), 104–5.
36
For the entire text see Gedichte, 120, and Briefe, vol. 2, 1245, reproduced from
the autograph copy in a 1933 pocket diary. A literal translation of the title
(“Mr. Abel and Relatives”) would sacrifice the biblical allusion.
37
Tagebücher #306, November 1901, 89 (Diaries, 72). Translation by Fred Chappell.
38
For this information about examination techniques in classical studies, I am
indebted to poet and classical scholar Fred Chappell.
39
For a brief history of bouts-rimés, see Tony Augarde, The Oxford Guide to Word
Games (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1984), 135–38.
40
Tagebücher #306, November 1901, 89 (Diaries, 72). Translation with help from
Fred Chappell.
41
Tagebücher #184, summer 1901, 73 (Diaries, 60).
42
“Der Abend” appears in several editions of the author’s work in the Klee library,
e.g., Gedichte von Joseph Freiherrn von Eichendorff, ed. Franz Brümmer (Leipzig:
Philipp Reclam, n.d.), 58.
43
Tagebücher #325, December 1901, 98 (Diaries, 78).
44
Gedichte, 12. I have preserved the layout and parentheses in the title as they
appear on page 19 of the notebook of “Geduchte.”
45
Tagebücher #1081 A, 442 (Diaries, 375). Translation from the English edition.
46
A more literal, unrhymed translation would read: “What thrives lonely and alone? /
It is the plant called ivory.”
47
Gedichte, 28. I have reproduced it as it is recorded on page 5 of the notebook of
“Geduchte,” only without the notations for stressed syllables, which Klee added to
the autograph copy. For a reproduction of Persian Nightingales, see Catalogue
raisonné, 2:411. Kersten and Okuda link this painting and the poem recorded in
Tagebücher #1081 A to a Persian-Turkish literary tradition, interpreting the
nightingale as an “ornament” of the “artist-ego” (Im Zeichen der Teilung, 66).
Similarly, the “silenced nightingale” in the couplet could signify Klee the poet who
subsequently regained his voice as a painter.
48
Gedichte, 9, reproduced as it is recorded on page 7 of the notebook of
“Geduchte.” A more literal, unrhymed translation would read: “All, I loved all of
them / Now a cooler star I am.”
49
For the original text and the translation, see Your Diamond Dreams Cut Open
My Arteries: Poems by Else Lasker-Schüler, trans. Robert P. Newton (Chapel Hill:
U of North Carolina P, 1982), 186–87; hereafter cited as Your Diamond Dreams.
50
See, e.g., “Franz Marc,” Your Diamond Dreams, 234–37. Cf. Klee, Tagebücher
#1008, July-August 1916, 400–402 (Diaries, 343–45).
51
“Georg [sic] Grosz,” Your Diamond Dreams, 222–23.
52
George Grosz, “Aus den Gesängen,” in “Ach knallige Welt, du Lunapark,”:
Gesammelte Gedichte, ed. Klaus Peter Dencker (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1986), 21;
hereafter cited as “Ach knallige Welt.” This poem was first published in Neue
Jugend, nos. 11–12 (1917): 243.
53
Gedichte, 9. My transcription restores the layout of page 7 of the notebook of
“Geduchte.” Klee’s wordplays and inventions defy a literal translation.
54
55
Tagebücher #1081 A, 442–43 (Diaries, 375); see also fig. 7.
56
See August Stramm, Das Werk, ed. René Radrizzani (Wiesbaden: Limes, 1963), 21.
57
At the International Association of Word & Image Studies (IAWIS) conference
held in Ottawa in August 1993, Paul Bauschatz presented a paper entitled
“Language, Rhyme, and Space,” in which he grouped Klee with Stramm and Louis
Zukofsky and analyzed texts by all three, including three sets of Klee’s line endings.
58
Gedichte, 12. In the manuscript version on page 17 of the notebook of
“Geduchte” Klee added standard metric markings to indicate rhythmic stresses
beginning with the line “Sag mir wo ist dann.”
59
Friedrich Nietzsche, Also Sprach Zarathustra: Ein Buch für alle und keinen
(Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam, 1975), 5; and Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Clancy
Martin (New York: Barnes & Noble, 2005), 9. Vogel likewise cites this passage
from Nietzsche in “Eine semiotisch-strukturalistische Interpretation,” 43.
60
Gottfried Benn, Gedichte, vol. 3 of Gesammelte Werke, ed. Dieter Wellershof
(Wiesbaden: Limes, 1960), 8.
61
62
Lessing, Laocöon, 78 (Laokoon, 875).
63
On Klee’s ambition in this regard, see Tagebücher #429, 488.
64
For illustrations documenting Klee’s process of composing by cutting and com-
bining, see Kersten and Okuda, Im Zeichen der Teilung, 322–68.
65
Kersten and Okuda, Im Zeichen der Teilung, 39–44, 94–101, 322–23.
66
The text of this poem is transcribed from the drawing and published in Gedichte,
109. My transcription retains the line breaks in Klee’s original text.
67
Glaesemer establishes the link between Klee’s poem and German Romanticism
in “Klee and German Romanticism,” 80. Vogel links the text to Tagebücher #920,
1913, 333: “Weh mir unter dem Druck der wiederkehrenden Stunde, in der Mitte
allein, in der Tiefe der schleichende Wurm” (Zwischen Wort und Bild, 145–46).
The first line of Klee’s “Motto” combines the words “Sturm” and “Wurm”
excerpted from the two texts.
68
Jürgen Glaesemer (Paul Klee — Handzeichnungen: Kindheit bis 1920 [Bern:
Kunstmuseum, 1973], 1:209) reproduces the two drawings, catalogued as 1912/130
and 1912/131 separately, with the notation that they are mounted on the same sup-
port. Kersten and Okuda (Im Zeichen der Teilung, 99) reproduce the two together.
69
See the text and illustration to Kandinsky’s “Open” (“Offen”) in Sounds, 31, 122.
70
As an example of the critical reception of Apollinaire’s calligrammes, see Gabriel
Arbouin, “Devant l’Idéogramme d’Apollinaire,” Les Soirées de Paris 2 (1914): 383–85.
71
See my book Paul Klee’s Pictorial Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002),
122–25, where Klee’s watercolor is reproduced next to Apollinaire’s poem; here-
after cited as Klee’s Pictorial Writing.
72
Gedichte, 13. The layout used in the Gedichte does not conform to Klee’s manu-
script version, which is written out on a scrap of discolored paper and inserted at
the back of the notebook of “Geduchte.” The manuscript layout is reproduced in
Vogel (Zwischen Wort und Bild, 17) and also here. The layout in the Gedichte
approximates the verticality of Apollinaire’s calligramme and the visual effect of
Schwitters’s “Regen” (1944). For Apollinaire’s “Il Pleut,” see his Oeuvres com-
plètes, 3:192; for Schwitters’s “Regen,” see Lyrik, 142.
73
On the invention of the cubist collage, see Christine Poggi, In Defiance of
Painting: Cubism, Futurism, and the Invention of Collage (New Haven, CT: Yale
UP, 1992), 1–29.
74
On the etymology of the word “script,” see J. Hillis Miller, Ariadne’s Thread:
Story Lines (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1992), 6.
75
Although Felix Klee does not include “Einst dem Grau der Nacht enttaucht” in the
collected Gedichte, he does quote the text in a note in which he observes that it is
probably a poem by Klee (Gedichte, 128). For an extensive bibliography of this work,
see Catalogue raisonné, 2:440. In-depth analyses are found in: Jürgen Glaesemer,
Paul Klee: The Colored Works in the Kunstmuseum Bern, trans. Renate Franciscono
(Bern: Kunstmuseum and Kornfeld, 1979), 45–47 (hereafter cited as Colored Works);
Joseph Leo Koerner, “Paul Klee and the Image of the Book,” in Paul Klee: Legends
of the Sign, by Rainer Crone and Joseph Leo Koerner (New York: Columbia UP,
1991), 56–64; Katja Schenker, “Titel-Bild-Gedicht. Paul Klee, ‘Einst dem Grau der
Nacht enttaucht, 1918.17,’ in Georges-Bloch-Jahrbuch des Kunsthistorischen Instituts
der Universität Zürich 5 (1998): 137–55 (hereafter cited as “Titel-Bild-Gedicht); and
Claude Frontisi, Paul Klee, La Création et sa parabole poétique: Théorie et pratique en
peinture (Annecy, France: La Petite École, 1999). For aspects of Once Emerged from
the Gray of Night, not discussed here, see Klee’s Pictorial Writing, 73–78.
76
Briefe, vol. 2, 14 October 1917, 882.
77
This translation is a variant of the one published in Klee’s Pictorial Writing, 75.
78
Christian Morgenstern, Alle Galgenlieder: Galgenlieder, Palmström, Palma
Kunkel, Gingganz (Wiesbaden: Insel, 1950), 19; hereafter cited as Alle
Galgenlieder. Translation by Fritz Janschka.
79
German and English texts are quoted from Georg Trakl, Poems, trans. Lucia
Getsi (Athens, OH: Mundus Artium Press, 1973), 20–23. Werckmeister discusses
the juxtaposition of Klee’s lithograph Death for the Idea (Der Tod für die Idee,
1915/1) and Trakl’s poem “Nacht” in the December 1914 issue of Zeit-Echo
(Klee’s Career, 30–32).
80
Hermann von Helmholtz, Handbuch der physiologischen Optik (Hamburg and
Leipzig: Leopold Voss, 1896), 317.
81
Handbuch der physiologischen Optik, 311.
82
See The Thinking Eye, vol. 1 of Paul Klee Notebooks, ed. Jürg Spiller, trans. Ralph
Manheim (New York: Wittenborn, 1961), 479–80 (hereafter cited as Spiller, ed., The
Thinking Eye); Paul Klee: Das bildnerische Denken: Schriften zur Form- und
Gestaltungslehre, ed. Jürg Spiller (Basel: Schwabe, 1956), 479–80 (hereafter cited as
Spiller, ed., Paul Klee: Das bildnerische Denken); and Paul Klee, Beiträge zur bildner-
ischen Formlehre: faksimilierte Ausgabe des Originalmanuskripts von Paul Klees erstem
Vortragszyklus am Staatlichen Bauhaus Weimar 1921/22, ed. Jürgen Glaesemer
(Basel: Schwabe, 1979), 165–66 (hereafter cited as Klee, Beiträge zur bildnerischen
Formlehre). Klee’s 190-page manuscript of the Beiträge zur bildnerischen Formlehre
is incorporated in its entirety in the second part of The Thinking Eye, where it is sup-
plemented by selections from Klee’s lecture notes from later years of teaching. I use
double citations, as here, to distinguish between material in the Beiträge zur bild-
nerischen Formlehre and material interpolated by the editor from other manuscripts.
83
Spiller, ed., The Thinking Eye, 499 (Spiller, ed., Paul Klee: Das bildnerische
Denken, 499), and Klee, Beiträge zur bildnerischen Formlehre, 184–85.
84
For a detailed analysis of Klee’s working process and materials, see Schenker,
“Titel-Bild-Gedicht,” 142–45, 151.
85
See Joseph Viscomi, Blake and the Idea of the Book (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP,
1993), 30.
86
Among the many studies of Blake’s illuminated books, see, e.g., Michael Phillips,
William Blake: The Creation of the Songs, From Manuscript to Illuminated Printing
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2000).
87
The location of a copy of Songs of Innocence in Munich is documented in Blake,
Songs of Innocence and of Experience, vol. 2 of Blake’s Illuminated Books, ed.
Andrew Lincoln (Princeton, NJ: William Blake Trust and Princeton UP, 1991), 9.
88
Tagebücher #578, September 1904, 194 (Diaries, 158). Klee may have been
referring to Richard Garnett’s William Blake, Painter and Poet (London and New
York: Seeley / Macmillan, 1895).
89
This information is supplied by Glaesemer, Colored Works, 38. At some point
Klee must have lost Heilmann’s anthology, for it is no longer listed in the checklist
of the Klee library. For a discussion of this anthology as it relates to Klee’s work,
see also Constance Naubert-Riser, “Paul Klee et la Chine,” Revue de l’art 63
(1984): 47–56.
90
Hans Heilmann, Chinesische Lyrik vom 12. Jahrhundert v. Chr. bis zur Gegenwart
(Munich: R. Piper, 1905), xxx.
91
Jonathan Chaves traces the history of the Chinese poem-painting in the exhib-
ition catalogue The Chinese Painter as Poet (New York: China Institute Gallery and
Art Media Resources, 2000), 19–131.
92
Frontisi notes that Klee would have been aware of the Chinese tradition of
painting and writing coexisting on the same surface. (La Création et sa parabole
poétique, 25).
93
This is the only example of Klee’s poems in a pictorial setting that he also tran-
scribed in the notebook of “Geduchte” (p. 13). The translation is by Fred
Chappell; a more literal translation would preserve neither the rhyme nor the impli-
cations of the syntax.
94
For a discussion and a reproduction of memorial sheets as they relate to this
work, see Werckmeister, Klee’s Career, 139–42.
95
Jim Jordan notes that Klee flattened the perspective “by his usual Cubist means”
in Paul Klee and Cubism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1984), 181. Alain
Bonfand notes that Klee’s perspective reads like the “anatomy of a space” in Paul
Klee, l’oeil en trop (Paris: Editions de la différence, 1988), 69.
96
Briefe, vol. 2, 19 November 1918, 944; and Tagebücher #1132, November
1918, 470 (Diaries, 408).
97
Schwitters, “Konsequente Dichtung” (1924), in Manifeste und Kritische Prosa, 190.
98
For a group that advocated the destabilization of tradition and purported to
celebrate nonsense, dada artists were obsessed with staking claims to history in the
making. On conflicting claims about sound poems, see Hans Kleinschmidt’s
introduction to Huelsenbeck’s edited volume Memoirs of a Dada Drummer,

xxvii–xxviii.
99
On Ball’s title, which honors the Hungarian choreographer Rudolf von Laban,
see Erdmute Wenzel White, The Magic Bishop: Hugo Ball, Dada Poet (Columbia,
SC: Camden House, 1998), 104–5, 131. The translation of the title is taken from
this study. For a reproduction of Klee’s Inscription in Clouds, see Catalogue
raisonné, 3:129.
100
Hugo Ball, Flight Out of Time: A Dada Diary, trans. Ann Raimes, ed. John
Elderfield, Documents of 20th-Century Art (New York: Viking, 1974), 67 (here-
after cited as Flight Out of Time); idem, Die Flucht aus der Zeit (Lucerne:
J. Stocker, 1946), 94.
101
He expressed this view in the “First Dada Manifesto” (1916), reproduced in the
appendix of Flight Out of Time, 221.
102
Flight Out of Time, 70 (Die Flucht aus der Zeit, 98).
103
Denken, 17). The calendrical notation “25612” penciled in the lower right of
Klee’s drawing coincidentally adds a numerical dimension to the parallel between
writing and image-making.
104
For reproductions of the alphabet poems named but not illustrated here, see
Jürgen Glaesemer, Paul Klee, Handzeichnungen: 1937–1940 (Bern: Kunstmuseum,
1979), 3:69 (Beginning of a Poem, #53), 71 (Alphabet WE, #59).
105
Dutch scholar Karel Citroen has identified the source of this line in correspon-
dence with me; documentation of his discovery is forthcoming in Word & Image.
106
Dick Higgins identifies puzzle poems as analogues of pattern poems in Pattern
Poetry: Guide to an Unknown Literature (Albany: State U of New York P, 1987), 184.
107
Cocteau’s remark was made to Charles Peignot. See William Gardner, Alphabet
at Work (New York: St. Martin’s, 1982), viii.
108
Velimir Khlebnikov, “The Word as Such,” in Letters and Theoretical Writings,
vol. 1 of Collected Works, trans. Paul Schmidt, ed. Charlotte Douglas (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard UP, 1987), 255.
109
See Jean Starobinski, Words upon Words: The Anagrams of Ferdinand de
Saussure, trans. Olivia Emmet (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1979), 15–24; originally
published as Les Mots sous les mots: Les Anagrammes de Ferdinand de Saussure (Paris:
Gallimard, 1971).
110
The acrostic cited here is found in the “Ballade pour Prier Notre Dame,”
inserted between stanzas 89 and 90 of Le Testament. See François Villon, Poésies,
ed. Jean Dufournet (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), 98.
111
Unpublished postcard to Bloesch dated 28 April 1901; quoted in Vogel,
Zwischen Wort und Bild, 81, 113 n. 3.
2: The Poetic and the Pictorial
B Y THE END OF 1901 KLEE SEEMS to have given up any hope of making
a name for himself as a poet, but he was still looking to poetry as
inspiration for his visual work. Early in 1902 he admitted to painting “with
venomous pleasure on themes from a German sentimental poet” (“mal ich
mit giftiger Lust an einem deutsch sentimentalen Poeten”).1 Later that
same year Klee wrote a letter to Lily Stumpf in which he reflected on what
he had accomplished since his student years. He acknowledged that his
early efforts in the visual arts were poetic (“rein poëtisch”) rather than pic-
torial (“malerisch”).2 At about the same time he vowed in a diary entry to
relinquish his poetic proclivities and focus his attention on the formal
elements of visual art.3 When asked in 1919 and again in 1920 to supply
autobiographical notes for Wilhelm Hausenstein and Leopold Zahn, both
of whom were preparing publications on his work, he revised diary entry
#429, in each case labeling the passage a retrospective assessment.
Summarizing what he judged in hindsight to be an objective that had
shaped his artistic identity, Klee pointed out to Hausenstein that even in
the early years of his artistic practice he had sought a “union of the poetic
and the pictorial” (“Versuch der ‘Verbindung von Dichterischem’ [sic] und
Bildnerischem”).4 In the set of notes assembled for Zahn, he added that
his academic training had instilled a propensity for themes that “were not
pictorial, perhaps rather poetic” (“nicht bildnerisch, vielleicht wohl dich-
terisch”).5
What Klee meant by the designation “poetic” in 1902 is not entirely
clear since he offered no explanation. His intended meaning can only be
inferred from what he did say and by comparing his words to his visual
images, as he himself did. In the letter to Lily Stumpf he remarked that the
poetic was not confined to subject matter alone,6 and in the Diaries he
noted with regret that his poetic tendencies had shifted from the lyrical to
the satirical.7 Klee’s choice of the terms “lyrical” and “satirical” implies
that he equated the poetic with certain literary genres and their pictorial
counterparts. His early works support this supposition. His atmospheric
landscapes dating from 1899 can be described as lyrical, while some of his
drawings from 1902 foreshadow the satirical Inventions on which he began
work in 1903.8 Despite variations in phrasing, the letter to Lily Stumpf and
the three versions of diary entry #429 imply that in 1902 Klee viewed
poetic painting as similar to poetry in its subject matter and also in the way
it communicates meaning.
66 THE POETIC AND THE PICTORIAL
By 1919 and 1920 — when Klee used the 1902 letter to draft the
autobiographical statements for Hausenstein and Zahn — he would have
been familiar with modernist variants on the term “poetic,” but he
retained the contrast between the poetic and the pictorial in his notes.
Presumably he did so not only in the interest of preserving chronological
consistency but also out of a desire to establish a historical record of his
dual allegiances to the poetic and the pictorial. However, looking at his
visual production from the second decade of the twentieth century, it is
clear that Klee had processed the vocabulary of early modernist theory and
criticism. His own experiments with pictorial abstraction leave no doubt
that he understood the shift in critical thinking that reframed the poetic-
pictorial opposition as a contrast between visual representation that was lit-
erary, or literally descriptive, and painting that Apollinaire deemed poetic
because it did not attempt to imitate observable reality. Even after Klee had
embraced Apollinaire’s concept of poetic painting, he never renounced his
affinity for images and themes that were common to poetry. There is evi-
dence throughout his creative practice that he referred to poetic texts —
contemporary as well as canonical — not only for subject matter but also
for devices that he adapted to the process of transferring poetic figures
from textual to pictorial settings. As Klee negotiated the transfer, he sub-
mitted his figurative vocabulary to the reductive process of abstraction,
making his images poetic in the way that modernists used the term.
Representative examples of Klee’s war images from 1913 to 1916 sup-
port the speculation that he began the process of imposing his own visual
signature on Apollinaire’s concept of poetic painting by experimenting
with visual images and compositional structures that parallel the full spec-
trum of poetry dating from the First World War. Klee was not drafted until
March 1916. Knowing that conscription was only a matter of time, he
took full advantage of the reprieve to pursue his studio work. With few
exceptions, Klee’s images of war date from this time. Since he had seen no
military action at first hand, his war imagery must have been derived from
sources that substituted for lived experience. As he waited for the
inevitable, he kept informed of developments on the front lines by absorb-
ing accounts that were as ostensibly objective as newspaper reports illus-
trated with military maps and as personal as conversations with soldiers on
leave from active duty, including his friend Marc. He would also have had
access to the war poetry published in periodicals such as Der Sturm and
Die Aktion. Not all of Germany’s poets were obsessed with the war, but
few ignored it altogether. There were those who wrote about war from the
relative comfort of their ivory towers, while others were drafted and sent
into battle. Their perspectives on the war therefore ranged from that of
remote spectator to shell-shocked combatant. Klee’s visual images of war
span the same emotional range, in part because he so successfully internal-
ized the imagery and technical devices of contemporary war poetry.9
THE POETIC AND THE PICTORIAL 67
Disclaimer:

Fig. 16: Paul Klee, The War Strides over a Village (1914/179). Watercolor on paper
mounted on cardboard, 17.4 ⫻ 10.5 cm. Private collection, Germany. © 2006 Artists
Zentrum Paul Klee.
As Patrick Bridgwater observes in an important study of German

poetry of the First World War, one of the most memorable poems about
war from this period is Georg Heym’s “The War” (“Der Krieg”).10 Written
early in 1911, long before the declaration of war but just a year before
Heym’s accidental death by drowning, this poem evokes a prophetic vision
of horrors the poet himself would never witness. Although personified as a
menacing presence with a black hand and head, Heym’s vision of war is also
a conceptual abstraction characterized by analogies, one of which is a tower
(“einem Turm gleich tritt er”). Not only did Klee insert a visual form of the
same analogy in The War Strides over a Village (D. Krieg schreitet üb. e.
Ortschaft, 1914/179) (fig. 16) but he activated his image by replicating
one of Heym’s most effective poetic strategies. Beginning with the fifth
stanza, Heym structured his verbal images so that they seem to detonate
and implode, evoking the craters of destruction left in the wake of war:
Eine grosse Stadt versank in gelbem A great city sank in yellow
Rauch, smoke,
Warf sich lautlos in des Abgrunds Threw itself soundlessly
Bauch. into the belly of the abyss.11
Klee spatialized this device in The War Strides over a Village. Using the
visual vocabulary stockpiled for a series of watercolors begun during a trip
Disclaimer:

Fig. 17: Paul Klee, View of the Severely Threatened City of Pinz (1915/187). China
ink and watercolor on paper mounted on cardboard, 14 ⫻ 21.7 cm. Foundation Dieter
Scharf Collection in memory of Otto Gerstenberg (Kat. 126), Kupferstichkabinett,
Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Germany. © 2006 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
/ VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Photograph by Joerg P. Anders; Bildarchiv Preussischer
Kulturbesitz / Art Resource, New York.
to Tunisia in 1914, he defined multiple points of convergence and con-

structed clusters of visual abstractions that verge on collapse like the bibli-
cal Gomorrah that is the last word in Heym’s poem (“Pech und Feuer
träufet unten auf Gomorrh”).
In his visual practice, as in his writing, Klee selectively appropriated the
formal strategies of German expressionist poets. His View of the Severely
Threatened City of Pinz (Ansicht der schwer bedrohten Stadt Pinz,
1915/187) (fig. 17) parallels Wilhelm Klemm’s “Rethel” in terms of its
spatial structure and light effects. Published in Die Aktion on 21 November
1914, Klemm’s “Rethel” is the word picture of a town in the Ardennes he
had marched through and described in a prose sketch, which he subse-
quently reworked into a three-stanza poem.12 Klemm’s poetic cityscape is
at once vividly evocative and eerily unreal. To give his short poem the
sensory impact of visual representation, he skillfully manipulated figurative
language, color references, and perspective. Klee’s drawing with watercolor

makes reference to Klemm’s visual cues, the most obvious being his shift-
ing point of view. Utilizing a few well-chosen words, Klemm began by
sketching the contours of distant ruins (“Feierlich ragen die riesigen,
nächtlichen Schlote”), abruptly zoomed in to focus on a dark street (“Eine
pechschwarze Gasse verschlingt die Kolonne”), then pulled back again to a
panoramic perspective (“Und nun blankt totenweiss die Trümmerstadt”).
Klee recreated these shifts with a composite view that combines bird’s-eye
perspective with legible street signage and multiple points of convergence,
which he would subsequently describe in his notes on perspective as
deviations from central perspective using variable viewpoints.13 Like
Klemm, Klee cast the visual evidence of warfare in a paradoxically seductive
light. His image of the city of Pinz is bathed in a pallid watercolor wash that
is as strangely beautiful as Klemm’s image of moonlight strutting “pinkly”
over piles of debris (“Prahlt rosa auf Backsteinbergen”).
Despite similarities of perspective and lighting, Klee’s View of the
Severely Threatened City of Pinz does not literally illustrate Klemm’s
“Rethel,” which was not Klee’s intention. On the contrary, by 1915 he was
experimenting with ways in which the metaphorical language of poetry
could be adapted to pictorial images that are poetic in the sense that
Apollinaire used the term, namely, as a synonym for visual vocabulary that
challenges the mimetic tradition. To transform Klemm’s Rethel into his
own fictional city of Pinz, Klee freely interpreted the catalogue of verbal
imagery in the first stanza of the poem. Retaining only visual allusions to
the “nocturnal chimneys” (“nächtliche Schlote”) in the first line, he
reduced Klemm’s “pyramids of rubble” (“Pyramiden von Schutt”) and
“mountains of bricks” (“Backsteinberge”) to a staggered succession of
overlapping triangles, stripping down the “burned-out factories” (“ver-
brannte Fabriken”) of Rethel to outlined forms that resemble negative
transparencies. The dark center of the painting is defined by a concentra-
tion of scribbled and crosshatched linear patterns that substitute one of
Klee’s own metaphors for Klemm’s poetic imagery. At the beginning of
1915 Klee invoked the horrors of war in a passage from the Diaries that
articulates his concept of pictorial abstraction. Reflecting philosophically on
the correlation between disorder in the world and abstraction in art, he
envisioned the vocabulary of abstraction as a cavernous pit of fragmented
forms (“In der grossen Formgrube liegen Trümmer”).14 It is this metaphor
that is given visual form in View of the Severely Threatened City of Pinz.
The controlled geometric abstraction that characterizes works such as
View of the Severely Threatened City of Pinz was occasionally enlivened by
the satirical humor Klee never entirely suppressed in either his poetry or
his visual images. This facet of his sensibility would have resonated with
the acerbic predictions spewed out in staccato rhythms by Alfred
Lichtenstein in the summer of 1914. Like Lichtenstein, Klee harbored no
Disclaimer:

Fig. 18: Paul Klee, When I Was a Recruit (1916/81). Pen on paper mounted on
cardboard, 17.3 ⫻11 cm. Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, Livia Klee donation. © 2006 Artists
Zentrum Paul Klee.
illusions about the heroism of combat. Shortly before being sent to the
front lines, Lichtenstein penned “Leaving for the Front” (“Abschied”), a
pessimistic but prescient testament to the probability that he would
not return:
Wir ziehn zum Krieg. Der Tod is We are going off to war. Death is
unser Kitt. our bond.
O, heulte mir doch die Geliebte nit. Oh, if only my girlfriend would stop
howling.15
Lichtenstein’s colloquial language, short sentences, and end rhymes inject

his parting poetic gesture with wry humor. Klee used similar means to
achieve much the same effect in When I Was a Recruit (Als ich Rekrut war,
1916/81) (fig. 18), one of only a few drawings that document his actual
military experience. Compared to the complexity and technical virtuosity of
View of the Severely Threatened City of Pinz, When I Was a Recruit is self-
consciously awkward in its spatial relationships, obsessive cross-hatching,
and visual rhyming. Although the soldiers depicted in Klee’s drawing are
decked out in uniform and stand at attention, they hardly seem prepared for
warfare, let alone eager to take up arms. Their caricatured facial features and
dazed expressions subversively belie any patriotic promise of glory in battle.
Disclaimer:

Fig. 19: Paul Klee, ab ovo (1917/130). Watercolor on primed gauze on paper mounted
on cardboard, 14.9 ⫻ 26.6 cm. Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern. © 2006 Artists Rights Society
Klee.
Because Klee was not assigned to front-line duty, there were stretches
of time during the war years when he could focus his attention on the pro-
fession he hoped to resume. In his Diaries he crafted some of the quotable
aphorisms about the creative process that he would reiterate and reformu-
late over the next decade. The creative process was also a recurring theme
in his visual production, an example being ab ovo, 1917/130 (fig. 19). The
title of Klee’s painting is a phrase quoted from Horace, who used it in his
Satires and in the Ars Poetica, a treatise on the art of poetry written in
poetic form.16 One section of the Ars Poetica is devoted to an argument in
defense of balancing historical facts with poetic invention. To illustrate the
effectiveness of this kind of balance, Horace cited the Iliad, noting that
Homer refrained from indulging in wordy descriptions of all the events
leading up to the Trojan War, beginning with the complications surround-
ing the birth of Helen of Troy. Horace himself followed the example set
by Homer, substituting the words “ab ovo” for a lengthy exposé of Leda’s
double egg and Helen’s twin birth (“nec gemino bellum Troianum orditur
ab ovo”).17 With its two ovoid shapes, one in the center of a horizontal
composition, the other to the right of center, Klee’s ab ovo visually config-
ures Horace’s mythological allusion. If this were the only level of meaning
implicit in Klee’s title and its analogous visual image, the subject of the
painting would conform to the expectations of the ut pictura poesis trad-

ition as it had been practiced for centuries. The fact that Klee’s formal
vocabulary falls outside the parameters of that tradition indicates his inten-
tion to reinterpret the oft-quoted phrase from Horace’s Ars Poetica.
The phrase ut pictura poesis occurs in the section of Horace’s treatise
devoted to the calling and training of a poet. It introduces a passage com-
menting on the circumstances of perception as a determining factor in
judging the relative merits of both painting and poetry.18 From a contem-
porary perspective, it is not difficult to imagine how Horace’s observations
could be applied to a reception theory. Historically, however, the term ut
pictura poesis was excerpted from its original context and applied to a the-
ory of painting that posits parallels between painting and poetry. In return-
ing to the source of the term ut pictura poesis, Klee would have discovered
that even though Horace mentioned painting only briefly, he did offer
advice and axioms that are as applicable to painting as they are to poetry.
For example, Horace could state with authority that familiar subjects pose
the most formidable challenge to a poet’s capacity for invention (“difficile
est proprie communia dicere”)19 because he himself had taken on just such
a subject in his Ars Poetica. Klee rose to the same challenge in ab ovo, using
Horace’s poem on the art of poetry as his model for a picture about the
art of painting and the poetic figure “ab ovo” as his prototype for a visual
metaphor of the creative process.
By quoting Horace’s “ab ovo” as his title, Klee provided a verbal aid
to reading his visual image and pointed to a poetic context for construct-
ing meaning. The title identifies the two ovoid shapes as eggs, here lodged
in nests of watercolor, gauze, and chalk.20 Given the source of the title, the
eggs no doubt allude to Leda’s biological anomaly, but they are no more
literally descriptive than Horace’s verbal image. Just as Horace conceived
the phrase “ab ovo” to condense a complex set of narrative circumstances
into a concise figure of speech, so Klee reduced what could have been an
illustrative image to a richly suggestive pictorial metaphor. In applying
Horace’s ideas and example to visual imagery, he began to revise the ut pic-
tura poesis paradigm from a modernist perspective. Even without benefit of
the title, it is readily apparent that the smaller ovals within the two eggs —
one pale violet, the other blue — represent points of formal genesis.
Emerging from these germinating points is a heart, and farther to the left
is an arrowhead. Not coincidentally, the heart and the arrow are both sym-
bols Klee subsequently used to illustrate his theories of pictorial construc-
tion.21 Alternatively, the oval forms could be interpreted as abstractions of
human ovaries, in which case the adjacent arrowhead would logically be
understood as a phallic symbol. These disembodied anatomical parts
assume symbolic coherence in the context of an entry in Klee’s Diaries that
refers to the “primitive female and male” (“urweiblich [und] urmännlich”)
components of a visual image.22 Whatever figurative analogies and
Disclaimer:

Fig. 20: Paul Klee, Flower Myth (1918/82). Watercolor on primed gauze on paper
mounted on cardboard, 29 ⫻ 15.8 cm. Sprengel Museum, Hannover, Sprengel
Collection. © 2006 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.
Photograph courtesy of the Sprengel Museum.
metaphorical connotations are encoded in Klee’s painting, its constituent

parts can also be read as dynamically calibrated pairs of formal opposites:
curves and angles, light and dark tones, warm and cool colors.23 Given that
these formal elements are visual metaphors that independently communi-
cate and reinforce the symbolic connotations of the title and imagery, ab
ovo is a poetic painting in the modernist sense.
Klee pursued his experiments with a modernist concept of poetic paint-
ing in Flower Myth (Blumenmythos, 1918/82) (fig. 20). In this work he
manipulated figure/ground relationships to generate an image that is
intended to be perceived simultaneously as a rainbow-hued landscape and
a dismembered female torso anchored in place by a crescent-shaped
flower.24 Strategically placed above a graphically rendered female puden-
dum, the bulb of the flower corresponds anatomically to a womb, while the
stem, blossom, and stamen double as a substitute phallus, a role that is rein-
forced by the single-minded bird. Flower Myth perpetuates the historically
gendered stereotypes that figure in literary and visual metaphors of the

creative process. The literary history of these figures is played out in a range
of genres, from Ovid’s lyric poetry to Renaissance treatises on aesthetics, as
well as in Jules Michelet’s oddly rhapsodic social studies of gendered iden-
tity.25 In Flower Myth Klee transformed an eclectic mix of literary figures
into pictorial metaphors of the opposing generative forces that exist in
nature and art. The central motif is a blue flower, which visually configures
the elusive symbol envisioned by Friedrich von Hardenberg, better known
as Novalis. Recontextualized in Klee’s painting, the flower from Novalis’s
Heinrich von Ofterdingen gives concrete form to Goethe’s “Urpflanze,” a
term describing a conceptual image that symbolizes the cyclical process of
organic growth.26 Just as Goethe’s “Urpflanze” is an archetypal symbol
rather than the verbal image of any particular flower, so Klee’s painting is
not simply a pictorial reflection on the germination and growth of a single
flower or a single picture but rather visual affirmation of the theory that art
imitates nature. In linking the process of artistic creation to human sexual-
ity and to the larger scheme of nature’s reproductive systems, Klee gave
multiple levels of meaning to his assertion that “art is a metaphor for cre-
ation” (“Kunst verhält sich zur Schöpfung gleichnisartig”).27
Flower Myth is a pictorial amplification of an idea formulated in Klee’s
Diaries:
A picture representing a “naked person” must not be created by
the laws of anatomy, but only by those of compositional anatomy.
First one builds an armature on which the picture is to be constructed.
How far one goes beyond this armature is a matter of choice.
[Ein Bild mit dem Gegenstand: “nackter Mensch” ist nicht menschen-
anatomisch, sondern bild-anatomisch zu gestalten. Man konstruiert
fürs erste ein Gerüst der zu bauenden Malerei. Wie weit man über dieses
Gerüst hinausgeht ist frei.]28
The armature on which Klee constructed Flower Myth is a female torso,

abstracted and fragmented almost beyond recognition. With the addition of
a flat field of warm pink, sprinkled with elegantly refined botanical and celes-
tial imagery, he transformed the female anatomy into the compositional
anatomy of an imaginary landscape. Although the additions reconfigure and
add symbolic value to a partial figure that would otherwise resemble an
ancient sculptural fragment, they do not disguise the fact that the female
body is dismembered. Cut off at the shoulders, biceps, and upper thighs, the
torso all but fills a rectangular frame. The bulging curves of the torso and
the angular inserts that wedge it into a shallow pictorial space generate the
same dynamic interplay of formal contrasts that informs ab ovo.
A similar play of binary oppositions is found in Grosz’s John, the
Woman Killer (John, Der Frauenmörder). Like Flower Myth, Grosz’s painting
dates from 1918. Both works exemplify what Maria Tatar has characterized
as murderous sexuality in the guise of modernist aesthetic practice, which

developed in a culture that had a morbid fascination with sexual violence.29
Sexual allusion had become more explicit in the half century that separates
Klee’s painting from Nietzsche’s image of nature as a feminine presence
that must “sigh over her dismemberment into individuals” (“über ihre
Zerstückelung in Individuen zu seufzen habe”).30 Like Nietzsche’s trope,
Klee’s partial female figure is a symbol of fertility, and like the female figure
in Grosz’s painting, she is a victim of dismemberment. In his depiction of
John, the Woman Killer, Grosz took on the role of “Jackt the Ripper,” [sic]
one of the shady characters who stalk and strut through the poem he enti-
tled “Berlin 1917.”31 Klee, too, activated the same destructive instincts in
Flower Myth, directing his experience with composing by editing and cut-
ting into a form of vicarious violence.
Placed in the context of the cultural discourse that dominated the early
Weimar Republic, the disfiguring process of fragmentation evident in both
Klee’s and Grosz’s images can be seen as a covert form of violence against
women, whose erotic energy posed as much of a threat in the domestic
arena as the victorious enemy had posed on the battlefronts of the war.32
On the surface Klee’s wartime experience and personal relationships would
not seem to constitute a convincing rationale for such passive, self-
consciously disguised aggression. Although Klee served in the German
military until the end of the war, his assignments as repairman, transport
courier, and office clerk would have been considered cushy by Grosz and
other artists more directly exposed to frontline combat. Moreover, any
delays Klee experienced in establishing his professional reputation were
decidedly insignificant compared to the tragic deaths of his friends and fel-
low soldiers August Macke and Franz Marc. As for any suppressed anger
toward women, only circumstantial evidence hints at a personal dimension
to the contemporary complexes about female sexuality.33 One explanation
for Klee’s participation in the widespread sanctioning of vicarious violence
is to postulate an inchoate desire to avenge the creative potential lost in the
war and, more particularly, to memorialize Marc.
In support of this conjecture, Flower Myth can be seen as a pictorial
text that parallels the ideas articulated in a diary entry in which Klee retro-
spectively analyzed his relationship to Marc. Klee set the mood for his mus-
ing on the differences between Marc and himself with a descriptive passage
similar in its imagery to the landscape in Flower Myth:
During the day magnificent midsummer flora made things unusually

colorful, and late at night and before dawn, a firmament unfolded
before me that lured my soul into vast expanses.
[Tags stimmte eine fabelhafte Hoch-sommerflora [sic] ausserdem noch
besonders farbig und nachts und vor Sonnenaufgang spannte sich über
mir und vor mir ein Firmament das die Seele in grosse Räume dahinzog.]34
This passage reads like a prose sketch not only for Flower Myth but also for
some of Klee’s poems, including the one from 1917 beginning “Because I
came, blossoms opened.”35 As such, it references the two spheres of Klee’s
creative activity. Given this double allusion to the creative process, it comes
as no surprise that Klee concluded his diary entry with the observation that
“art is like creation” (“Kunst ist wie Schöpfung”), a theoretical summation
that is rephrased and expanded upon in the “Creative Credo” and other
writings.36 Klee’s descriptive prose and pithy aphorism frame a carefully
worded memorial to Marc that both contextualizes the gendered imagery
of Flower Myth and lends credence to a second conjecture about the use of
vicarious violence. In the context of this memorial tribute, the female torso
doubling as a fertile landscape setting could represent what Klee perceived
as Marc’s feminine urge to give and to bond with the earth, while the
doubly gendered flower symbolizes Klee’s aspiration to be in harmony
with the divine and, by implication, to achieve the status of independent,
self-sufficient creator.37 Klee’s reductive figuration would be consistent
with the speculative assumption that pictorial violence against women and
abstraction of their images were successive steps in their eventual elimina-
tion, thus allowing for the appropriation of their biological role in the cre-
ative process.38 It is surely no coincidence that Klee’s strategy of formal
reduction resulted in a constellation of imagery in which the dominant
image and only active agent is the central flower, which becomes a symbol
of his own artistic autogamy.
In Flower Myth, as in ab ovo, Klee distilled a creation myth into a mul-
tilayered symbolic abstraction. Using a different formal vocabulary, he
continued to probe the potential of symbolic language during the twen-
ties in works such as Cathedral (Kathedrale, 1924/138) (fig. 21). This
painting contains a poetic figure of flight, although that realization
becomes apparent only in the temporal process of analysis. Klee’s title is
descriptive yet nonspecific. The cathedrals of medieval Europe survived in
the culture of modernism as useful symbols invoked across artistic media.
In the first of three “cathedral poems” published in the 1907 edition of
New Poetry (Neue Gedichte), Rainer Maria Rilke anthropomorphized the
cathedral as a towering presence “in dem alten / Faltenmantel ihrer
Contreforts / dasteht” (“wearing the folds of its grey buttresses / like
some old coat”).39 In the second poem he compared a cathedral portal to
a natural rock formation left behind by a retreating tide.40 Rilke’s water
imagery was transferred to another medium in Claude Debussy’s musical
composition La Cathédrale engloutie, a 1910 piano prelude that plumbs
the murky depths of Breton legend. The curious title alludes to the cathe-
dral of Ys, which was purportedly engulfed by the sea in the fourth or fifth
century and periodically reappears at sunrise. Using a melodic line sup-
ported by chordal structures with chromatic value, Debussy attempted to
evoke a visual mirage through sound.41 This impressionistic exercise in
Disclaimer:

Fig. 21: Paul Klee, Cathedral (1924/138). Watercolor and oil on paper mounted on
cardboard, mounted on wood panel, 29.845 ⫻ 35.2425 cm. The Phillips Collection,
Washington, DC, acquired 1942. © 2006 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG
Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Photograph courtesy of The Phillips Collection.
musical imagism is altogether different in spirit from Lyonel Feininger’s

1919 woodcut, originally entitled Cathedral (fig. 22). Designed as the
title page for the program announcement of the Weimar Bauhaus,
Feininger’s cubistic gloss on architectural historicism gives visual form to
director Walter Gropius’s “crystalline symbol of a new faith” (“als kristal-
lenes Sinnbild eines neuen kommenden Glaubens”).42 In predictably
provocative fashion, Schwitters appropriated Feininger’s title for his 1920
portfolio of lithographs, which suggest an alternative approach to
Gropius’s call for a new social and aesthetic order.43 Variants of the word
“Kathedrale” and its corresponding image are also found in two poems by
Schwitters that provide useful points of comparison in analyzing Klee’s
visual image.
Gropius recruited Klee to join the Bauhaus, where he taught from
1921 to 1931, first in Weimar and then in Dessau following the 1925
move. Like many of the experimental works that date from Klee’s Bauhaus
Disclaimer:

Fig. 22: Lyonel Feininger, Cathedral, 1919. Woodcut, II proof, work number 1923, 305 x
189 mm. The Cleveland Museum of Art, gift of The Print Club of Cleveland (1952.24).
© 2006 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Photograph
courtesy of The Cleveland Museum of Art.
years, Cathedral combines the graphic precision of drawing with the color
and texture of painting. This technical hybrid is also a doubly coded image
that requires two modes of perception and comprehension. The cathedral
is visually perceived, yet the individual signs that configure the image are
arranged like the signs of a verbal text. Individually the signs function
either descriptively (the arched windows) or symbolically (the “X” that sig-
nifies structural support). Collectively they represent the form of a cathe-
dral, which is set off against a field of mottled color. The structural
relationship between line and color in Klee’s Cathedral had a precedent in
Schwitters’s “Simultaneous Poem” (“Simultangedicht / kaa gee dee”), a
1919 experiment in dada sound poetry written for three voices. The prin-
cipal voice articulates combinations of phonetic fragments from the nouns
“Kathedrale” and “Gedicht,” intoning a text that is projected against a
background chorus of alliterative, plosive sounds:
kaa gee dee takepak tapekek

katedraale take tape
draale takepak kek kek
kaa tee dee takepak tapekek
kateedraale take tape
draale takepak kek kek44
Disclaimer:

Fig. 23: Kurt Schwitters, “Doof,” 1922. © 2006 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New
York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. © 1973 DuMont Literatur und Kunst Verlag.
Enunciated simultaneously as related refrains, the sounds of the second

and third voices establish a contrapuntal relationship with the principal
voice. Like Schwitters’s poem, Klee’s Cathedral layers the clearly articu-
lated image of a cathedral over a nonrepresentational yet subtly differenti-
ated background.
Another poem by Schwitters anticipated Klee’s delineation of figura-
tive imagery with signs arranged in such a manner that they obviate the
traditional distinctions between poetic and pictorial syntax. In “Doof,”
dating from 1922 (fig. 23) words and syllabic fragments are stacked into a
shape that resembles a cathedral tower. Were it not for his title,
Schwitters’s poem might reasonably be interpreted as an homage to
Apollinaire’s calligrammes, which were highly regarded in critical circles
sympathetic to modernism.45 Although Apollinaire’s name is never men-
tioned in Schwitters’s voluminous critical writing, a title that translates as
“Dumb” would hardly suggest an intention to emulate. Regardless of
Schwitters’s opinion of Apollinaire’s calligrammes, his own “Doof” is a
neatly turned exercise in spatializing linguistic signs so that they represent
visually as well as verbally. Like the linguistic units in Schwitters’s classic
example of shaped poetry, the individual signs in Klee’s Cathedral are
horizontally aligned; they also accumulate vertically into a visual image
occupying a space that is indeterminate because it is both textual and pic-
torial. Even though Klee’s signs are visual rather than verbal, he did intro-
duce a verbal substitute for a visual image, thereby inverting Schwitters’s
process of making a visual form with verbal signs.
At first glance the verbal sign incorporated into the spatial structure of
Cathedral appears to be accidental. Closer scrutiny reveals that Klee iso-
lated and subtly reinforced the partial watermark of the French paper man-
ufacturer Canson et Montgolfier. The embossed names, an imprimatur of
high quality, are visible in a number of Klee’s works on paper. Cut off
either by chance or design, in Cathedral they are in the upper left corner
and read as ON & MONTGOLFIER. At some point in the application of
ground and paint layers, Klee appropriated the cropped embossment, evi-
dently with the intention of incorporating it into his visual image. As a syl-
labic fragment, ON assumes a much broader range of referential
possibilities than the full name CANSON. It is nevertheless linked by the
ampersand to the name MONTGOLFIER, which establishes a primary frame
of reference.46
Jacques-Étienne and Joseph-Michel Montgolfier were eighteenth-cen-
tury French inventors who financed their scientific experiments with
income from the family’s successful paper manufacturing firm.47 The
Montgolfier brothers engineered the first untethered, manned flight in a
hot-air balloon, which wafted over Paris for a scant twenty-five minutes on
21 November 1783, capturing the attention of the scientific community
and the popular imagination alike. In celebration of their feat, the press
dubbed their heat-powered balloon the “montgolfière,” an etymological
derivation that would still have had common currency in the early twenti-
eth century. Read as another fragment, like ON, the name MONTGOLFIER
becomes the linguistic substitute for the displaced image of a “mont-
golfière.” Assuming this to be the case, the substitution raises the question
of why Klee would have used a word fragment instead of the image of a
hot-air balloon. Historical circumstance provides one possible explanation.
The most literal-minded viewers in the twenties might have linked the
image of a balloon to the scientific experiments of the physicist and bal-
loon pilot Auguste Piccard, their contemporary and a Montgolfier succes-
sor. Such an association would have doomed Klee’s landscape to the
illustrative status of the popular prints produced to document the “mont-
golfière’s” inaugural flight over the Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris.48 In
choosing to use the image of an unidentified cathedral as the visual foil for
a verbal symbol, Klee set himself the challenge of turning a merely pic-
turesque image into a poetic one.
In what appears to have been a deliberate act of poetic intervention,
Klee capitalized on the fragmented indeterminacy of a partial watermark to
experiment with poetic devices in a pictorial setting. Placed in a linguistic
context, the German word “Ballon” has a rhymed as well as an ortho-
graphic relationship to the syllabic fragment ON. By substituting the word
MONTGOLFIER for the image of a “Ballon,” Klee in effect replaced end
rhyme with internal assonance. The substitution also gave him license to
introduce verbal figures of speech into his vocabulary of visual symbols.
Read as a synonym for the image of a balloon, the word MONTGOLFIER

functions metonymically. As a metonymic substitute with biographical, his-
torical, and commercial associations, it exemplifies Klee’s use of verbal
abstractions as a means of expanding the frame of reference for his visual
abstractions. As a symbol of flight, it adds an experimental dimension to
an idea that recurs throughout Klee’s visual production as well as in his
writing.
Like Odilon Redon, who preceded him with The Eye, Like a Strange
Balloon, Moves Toward Infinity (L’Oeil comme un ballon bizarre se dirige
vers l’infini, 1882), and Albert Lamorisse, who followed suit with The Red
Balloon (Le Ballon rouge, 1956), Klee often invoked the balloon as a multi-
dimensional symbol of flight. Klee’s balloon image proliferates in postwar
landscapes such as B.(Delicate Landscape) (B.[zarte Landschaft],
1918/69) and With the Balloon (Mit d. Luft Ballon, 1918/112), then
recurs with some frequency between 1922 and 1929, notably in Red
Balloon (Roter Ballon, 1922/179) and The Balloon (Der Luftballon,
1926/153).49 As Sara Lynn Henry has shown, the hot-air balloon illus-
trating Klee’s Gymnasium physics book would have provided a handy
visual reference for the shape and trappings of a vintage gas balloon.50 The
fact that Klee usually eliminated the quaint historical details in his pictor-
ial images suggests that he was less interested in the cultural history of bal-
looning than in the potential value of the balloon motif in visualizing the
symbolic implications of flight.
Klee occasionally cited the mechanics of flight, as in a lecture given at
the Bauhaus on 29 February 1924, in which he related the physics of flight
to the principles of movement in a work of art.51 More typically his refer-
ences to flight figure in descriptions of dream imagery, where they take on
metaphysical connotations. An oft-quoted entry from the Diaries begins:
“Dream. I flew home, where the beginning lies” (“Traum / Ich flog nach
Haus, wo der Anfang ist”).52 During the early years of the war Klee
invoked flight as a metaphor for the strategies he devised to distance him-
self and his pictorial vocabulary from the realities of the external world, as
in the following: “And to work my way out of my ruins, I had to fly. And
I flew” (“Um mich aus meinen Trümmern herauszuarbeiten musste ich
fliegen. Und ich flog”).53 The romantic sensibility that engendered these
escapist fantasies shifts from the domain of the personal to the theoretical
in a passage from the lecture Klee delivered at the Jena Kunstverein on 26
January 1924. Reflecting on the frustrations inherent in what he deemed
to be “Romanticism . . . in its crassly pathetic phase” (“die Romantik in
ihre besonders krasse pathetische Phase”), Klee observed that this form of
expression “tries convulsively to fly from the earth” (“diese Gebärde will
in Stössen von der Erde weg”).54 Not surprisingly, Klee couched his assess-
ment of the historical phase of Romanticism in a trope that was common
to the tradition itself. In Romantic poetry from the nineteenth to the early
twentieth century, there are literally hundreds of figurative images of flight,

among them Klee’s own Woe Is Me in the Gale Wind (fig. 8). As he con-
structed the image he entitled Cathedral, Klee discovered another such
poetic figure in the name MONTGOLFIER. Whether Klee’s verbal images of
flight are couched in confessional or theoretical terms, they are always
charged with personal meaning. The same is true of his verbal substitute
for a pictorial image of flight. As if to underscore his intention, he signed
Cathedral in the upper left corner, just above the fragmented watermark,
thus associating his own name with the multiple connotations of the name
MONTGOLFIER.
Throughout the twenties and into the early thirties Klee continued to
experiment with a range of graphic media and techniques as vehicles for
visualizing poetic ideas. Not long after he left Germany in 1933 and reset-
tled in Bern, he began to feel the physical effects of scleroderma, the debil-
itating condition that would claim his life in the summer of 1940. During
the last two years of Klee’s artistic practice, drawing was a principal means
of expression. In line drawings that are as expressive as they are econom-
ical he composed visual codas to some of the poetic texts that had stimu-
lated his imagination for almost forty years. Foremost among these are the
sixteen drawings that envision Dante’s Inferno as The Infernal Park (Der
Inferner Park). Klee’s fourteen Urchs drawings dating from 1939–40 like-
wise allude to poetry, albeit poetry that is entirely different in spirit.55 In
this series of drawings Klee transformed the traditional bestiary into a
multi-referential commentary on the language of poetry — visual as well
as verbal.
For any modernist intent on contemporizing the meaning of “poetic”
as it applied to painting and drawing, the bestiary posed a particularly ten-
acious challenge to entrenched tradition. From its classical origins the bes-
tiary evolved into a collection of moralizing tales featuring both real and
imaginary animals. Illustrated versions proliferated in medieval manu-
scripts and early printed books, managed to survive in the literary and
visual culture of early modern Europe, finally experiencing a resurgence in
popularity during the twentieth century. The genre was revived in poetic
form by Apollinaire, a voracious reader whose eclectic tastes included
medieval bestiaries. His Bestiary or Parade of Orpheus (Le Bestiaire ou,
Cortège d’Orphée) comprises thirty poems. Eighteen were published in the
journal La Phalange in 1908 and the entire collection appeared three years
later in a limited edition of 120 copies.56 The rhymed verses, four to six
lines in length, are traditional in form but not in content. Leavening a con-
ventional mix of classical lore and biblical allusion with ironic inversion and
a good measure of bawdy wit, Apollinaire concocted a sequence of pithy
verbal portraits. Given that there are four poems dedicated to the mythical
poet Orpheus interspersed throughout Apollinaire’s bestiary, it should come
as no surprise that virtually all the poems are in some way autobiographical.
A typical example is “The Octopus” (“Le Poulpe”), which substitutes

modern metaphor for anachronistic allegory and self-reflexive commentary
on the art of writing poetry for medieval morality:
Jetant son encre vers les cieux, Flinging his ink toward the heavens,
Suçant le sang de ce qu’il aime Sucking the blood from all he loves
Et le trouvant délicieux, And finding it delicious,
Ce monstre inhumain, c’est This inhuman monster is myself.57
moi-même.
Evidently Apollinaire had an illustrated bestiary in mind from the
inception of the project. He may well have hoped for illustrations from
Pablo Picasso, but in the end he engaged Raoul Dufy, then a struggling
artist who had no experience with illustration. Won over by Apollinaire’s
confident predictions of fame and fortune, Dufy rose to the occasion
by imposing a modern design sensibility on traditional techniques of
woodblock printing.58 He and Apollinaire were surely disappointed by
their skimpy financial returns, but they must have been pleased with the
book. The poems and illustrations complement each other in their visual
properties as well as their finesse with figurative imagery. The layout fol-
lows a format typical of early printed bestiaries. Each page is headed by the
title of the poem, with Dufy’s framed image occupying the center, fol-
lowed by Apollinaire’s printed text. The distribution of text and image
establishes a pattern of inversions in the relationship between positive and
negative spaces, whereby the contrast between light and dark in the wood-
block prints is in inverse proportion to the contrast between the typeset
lettering and the expanse of the white page. This pattern of inversions is
the unifying visual principle of an exceptionally handsome livre d’artiste.
With very few exceptions, artists’ books from the early twentieth century
pair texts with visual images that are unapologetically — even convention-
ally — illustrative, which accurately describes Dufy’s woodcuts. As a poet
Apollinaire had taken considerable liberties with the traditional bestiary,
but when it came to selecting visual parallels to his poetry, he apparently
preferred imagery that was not poetic in the way he himself would define
the term in his article “Die moderne Malerei.”
By the time Klee took on the bestiary theme in the late thirties, his
own experience with book illustration was two decades behind him.59 In
the intervening years he had come to understand how poetry could spawn
visual images that are poetic as opposed to illustrative. He was also using
the term “poetic” to specify metaphorical language rather than subject
matter that was either borrowed directly from a literary text or was liter-
ally representational. This was what he meant when he urged his students
to consider “the poetic, not the literary.”60 He demonstrated this distinc-
tion in his Urchs drawings. The titles describe a range of actions (URCHS
horchend [eavesdropping], 1939/1031, fliehender URCHS [fleeing],
Disclaimer:

Fig. 24: Paul Klee, ORCHS, as Relative (1940/61). Chalk on paper mounted on
cardboard, 20.5 ⫻ 29.6 cm. Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern. © 2006 Artists Rights Society
Klee.
1939/1080), attitudes (URCHS, unschlüssig [indecisive], 1939/1030,

URCHS ärgerlich [annoyed], 1939/1052), and identities (URCHSen-
Paar [partners], 1939/1082, URCHS und Nachwuchs [parents],
1939/1056). Another title, which incorporates a verbal hybrid of Urchs
and the noun “Ochse,” suggests a relationship between an Urchs and the
familiar ox: ORCHS, as Relative (ORCHS, als Anverwandter, 1940/61)
(fig. 24).61 Given that verbal suggestion is supported by visual evidence,
most Klee scholars concur that the beast depicted in the Urchs drawings
is a derivative of the long extinct but once terrifying aurochs, the primal
ancestor of the domesticated ox.62 Visual sources cited as inspiration for
Klee’s drawings are more varied, chronologically spanning the five cen-
turies that separate the Renaissance tradition of the Madonna and child
from Picasso’s minotaurs.63 A number of poetic sources can be added to
the long list of possibilities.
One readily available poetic model is an untitled poem by Klee

recorded in a 1933 pocket diary. The poem is a self-contained bestiary of
verbal inventions:
Elephantastisch Elephantastic
Mammutig Mammouthy
Marabulistisch Marabullish
Giganthologie Giantology
Kentauerochs Centaurox
Herculinarisch Herculinear64
Klee appears to have rewritten Apollinaire’s Bestiary in the spirit of dada
and the language of Morgenstern. He retained variants of Apollinaire’s end
rhymes and short verses but reduced the poet’s six-line stanza form to a list
of compound modifiers and nouns that add to the list of twenty hybrids
grafted by Morgenstern in his “New Creations Proposed to Mother
Nature” (“Neue Bildungen, der Natur vorgeschlagen”). Among these new
creations are an oxsparrow and a peafowlox (“Der Ochsenspatz . . . Der
Pfauenochs”).65 Yet another fantastical ox makes a solo appearance in the
Gallows Songs, where the beast named in the title “Der Steinochs” taunts
the reader with its legendary invincibility.66 Drawing on his seemingly
inexhaustible capacity for wordplay, Morgenstern substituted a physical
property (stone) for an attribute (strength), thereby transforming the
cliché “strong as an ox” into an imaginary beast with implicit genealogical
origins in the paleolithic past. The “Kentauerochs” in the fifth line of
Klee’s poem extends the pedigree of Morgenstern’s poetic invention to
include Greek mythology. Like all Klee’s word combinations, this one
could be rearranged within its original setting or even removed and placed
in another context without losing its poetic value. In fact, Klee knew that
another context would only multiply its potential for generating new forms
and new meanings. This was a lesson he had learned from Ovid.
In the opening line of the Metamorphoses Ovid stated that his inten-
tion was “to tell of forms changed to other bodies.”67 The last work Ovid
completed before being exiled from Rome by Emperor Augustus in 8 C.E.,
the Metamorphoses is a vast historical saga that recounts episodes from
Greek mythology, Roman legend, and current events in the thematic con-
text of transformation. As Ovid’s annotators have long recognized, meta-
morphosis was not only the subject of Ovid’s epic but also the creative
principle that shaped both the language and the narrative structure of the
poem. As the twelve thousand-line poem unfolds, it becomes increasingly
obvious that the omniscient poet is the agent of transformation. Ovid’s
dominant presence, whether as third-person narrator or in symbolic guise
as the poet Orpheus, introduces the probability that the Metamorphoses is
on one level a self-reflexive narrative about how stories are created from
other stories and how poems are constructed by transforming existing
poems.68 Klee owned a bilingual edition of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and cited

it as a rich source of information about the subject of his etching Aged
Phoenix (Greiser Phönix, 1905/36).69 Although he expressed reservations
about the aptness of Ovid’s style for interpreting the unique life span of the
phoenix, he must have responded more positively to the theme of meta-
morphosis, which he appropriated as a unifying subtext of the etched
Inventions from 1903–5 that constitute his Opus One. Transformation
also proved to be a useful principle in Klee’s pedagogical practice during
the twenties and remained a constant source of creative ideas as well. The
short poem dating from 1933 quoted above is a case in point. It combines
allusions to classical mythology with the vocabulary of evolutionary natural
history, whose proponents — including Charles Darwin — were initially
known as transformationists.70 Klee applied poetic license to transform-
ationist theory in constructing the verbal derivatives that make up his
poem. Leaving aside the question of his other possible models, the six-line
poem represents an exercise in transforming literary texts as well as ety-
mological units and in this respect can be characterized as a very con-
densed version of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Klee’s Urchs drawings represent
yet another stage in the ongoing process of transformation.
Klee continued a double-centered process of reduction and metamor-
phosis in naming the subject of the Urchs drawings, the name being a con-
traction of the “Kentauerochs” in his poem. He had applied the same
strategy when he excerpted fragments from five lines of what was presum-
ably a longer poem and used different combinations as both the title and
a mirror-written text in the drawing Eternity for Little People (Ewigkeit für
kleine Leute, 1939/30).71 Like the title Eternity for Little People, the word
Urchs has an element of poetic indeterminacy because it is a fragment. In
keeping with the principle of change, the Urchs drawings reverse the
reductive process in that they represent an elaboration of one poetic figure
embedded in the text of Klee’s 1933 poem. The drawings are clearly not
literal depictions of a “Kentauerochs,” any more than the drawing entitled
Ovidian (Ovidisch, 1939/26) is an illustration of a specific passage from
Ovid’s Metamorphoses.72 Nor was Klee’s poetic bestiary conceived as a
verbal sketch for visual images, although any line could have served this
purpose after the fact, which seems to have been the case with
“Kentauerochs.” In transforming his own verbal invention into visual
images that correspond to the transformations indicated in the titles of his
Urchs drawings, Klee created a new, doubly coded text. The fourteen
Urchs drawings constitute a bestiary that features a single beast and
reverses the customary relationship between word and image in other illus-
trated bestiaries, including the Apollinaire/ Dufy collaboration.
In contrast to the pairing of Apollinaire’s poetic text and Dufy’s illus-
trative visual images, Klee’s Urchs drawings are extended visual metaphors
with titles that serve as short, descriptive legends. The legends function
singly and collectively as verbal signifiers of transformation. The principle

of transformation operates on several levels in ORCHS, as Relative. Klee’s
Urchs in a state of transition has a bulky body and a large head shown from
two points of view to delineate the aurochs’s distinctive horns and curled
snout. Layered into this composite view of an aurochs’s head are shapes
that resemble an ox’s long snout and nostrils. By using the cubists’ repre-
sentational device of superimposed, integrated views, Klee implied an evo-
lutionary link between the aurochs and the ox. In doing so he was no
doubt conscious of transforming the double-headed Janus from Roman
mythology and Ovid’s Metamorphoses into a visual symbol of biological
evolution. Klee used line in much the same way Ovid used his story line,
namely, as both a vehicle of metamorphosis and a context for self-reflection.
As Klee’s line becomes a metaphor of phylogenetic lineage, it also delin-
eates a context for reflecting on the poetic nature of pictorial language.
Like so many of Klee’s late drawings, ORCHS, as Relative ruminates on
the capacity of line to transform rather than represent. Like his
“Kentauerochs,” Klee’s Urchs and the Urchs becoming an Orchs do not
represent a beast in any known animal kingdom. The Urchs is a visual
invention that is differently configured from one drawing to the next, each
rendered in language that is as poetic in its own way as the verbal inven-
tion in Klee’s poem, the figures of speech in Apollinaire’s Bestiary, or the
epic voice of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
Notes
1
Tagebücher #371, January–February 1902, 112 (Diaries, 89).
2
Briefe, vol. 1, 11 July 1902, 254. Marcel Franciscono observes that Heinrich
Knirr, with whom Klee studied drawing in Munich, may have convinced him that
the poetic was not incompatible with the painterly, and that his poetic proclivities
could be developed by studying with Franz von Stuck, a well-known
“Künstlerpoet” who taught at the Munich Academy. Franciscono also notes von
Stuck’s influence on Klee’s work dating from the early 1900s. See Franciscono’s
Paul Klee: His Work and Thought (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991), 31; hereafter
cited as Klee.
3
Tagebücher #429, July 1902, 155. In the English edition of the Diaries this entry
is edited to include sections from the notes written for Hausenstein and Zahn,
cited in notes 4 and 5 (see Diaries, 125).
4
Tagebücher #429, July 1902, 488.
5
Tagebücher #429, July 1902, 521.
6
Briefe, vol. 1, 11 July 1902, 254.
7
See Tagebücher #429, July 1902, 155, 488, 521 (Diaries, 125). In my paraphrase
of Klee’s words I use adjectives instead of the nouns “Lyrik” and “Satire.”
8
There is a reference to a group of experimental drawings characterized as “poetic
(satirical) conceits” in the notes composed for Zahn and interpolated into the
English-language edition of the Diaries. These drawings may have been studies for
the etched Inventions; see Tagebücher # 507, 522 (Diaries, 141). For reproduc-
tions of the “lyrical” landscapes dating from 1899, see Catalogue raisonné, 1:157.
For the etchings grouped under Inventions and Opus One, see Eberhard W.
Kornfeld, Verzeichnis des graphischen Werkes von Paul Klee (Bern: Kornfeld und
Klipstein, 1963), nos. 3–18.
9
For comprehensive surveys of Klee’s war imagery, see: Michele Vishny, “Paul
Klee and War: A Stance of Aloofness,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 120 (December
1978): 233–43; Werckmeister, Klee’s Career, 15–34, 51–56, 65–66; Franciscono,
Klee, 205–11; and Regine Prange, “Hinüberbauen in eine jenseitige Gegend: Paul
Klees Lithographie ‘Der Tod für die Idee’ und die Genese der Abstraktion,”
Wallraf-Richartz-Jahrbuch 54 (1993): 281–314. A number of exhibitions and
accompanying catalogues also document Klee’s war experiences, including Paul
Klee in Gersthofen (Gersthofen: Paul-Klee-Gymnasium, 1992) and Paul Klee in
Schleissheim (Munich: Deutsches Museum and Bruckmann, 1997).
10
Patrick Bridgwater, The German Poets of the First World War (New York: St.
Martin’s, 1985), 21; hereafter cited as German Poets. Bridgwater quotes German
texts in full and includes English translations in an appendix. For Heym’s poem
“Der Krieg,” see 21–22, 37, and 168–69 — the source of all my quotations from
the poem. Bridgwater discusses “Der Krieg” at greater length in a later study of
Heym’s life and works, citing the graphic work of Alfred Kubin and Francisco de
Goya as visual sources of the poem. See his Poet of Expressionist Berlin: The Life and
Work of Georg Heym (London: Libris, 1991), 188–90.
11
As an example, I quote the first two lines of the ninth stanza as published in
Bridgwater, German Poets, 22, 168.
12
Wilhelm Klemm, “Rethel,” translated in Bridgwater, German Poets, 179–80;
originally published in Die Aktion, 21 November 1914 872–73, which is the
source of the German quotations.
13
Spiller, ed., The Thinking Eye, 155–57 (Spiller, ed., Paul Klee: Das bildnerische
Denken, 155–57).
14
Tagebücher #951, 1915, 365 (Diaries, 313).
15
Lichtenstein’s “Abschied,” in Bridgwater, German Poets, 65, 173–74; originally
published in Der Krieg: Ein Flugblatt (Berlin-Wilmersdorf: A. R. Meyer, 1914).
16
At the conclusion of one of the most extensive analyses of ab ovo in the Klee lit-
erature, Richard Verdi proposes that Klee’s title originated in Horace’s Satires (“ab
ovo usque ad mala”/ “from the egg to the fruit”); see his book Klee and Nature
(New York: Rizzoli, 1985), 210; hereafter cited as Klee and Nature.
17
Horace, The Art of Poetry, line 147, 35.
18
19
20
For an in-depth analysis of the material structure of ab ovo, see Nathalie
Bäschlin, Béatrice Ilg, and Patrizia Zeppetella, “Beiträge zur Maltechnik von Paul
Klee,” in Paul Klee: Kunst und Karriere, Beiträge des internationalen Symposiums
in Bern, ed. Oskar Bätschmann and Josef Helfenstein (Bern: Stämpfli, 2000),
185–88; hereafter cited as Paul Klee: Kunst und Karriere.
21
See Spiller, ed., The Thinking Eye, 355, 403–23 (Spiller, ed., Paul Klee: Das bild-
nerische Denken, 355, 403–23), and Klee, Beiträge zur bildnerischen Formlehre,
93–94, 123–39.
22
Tagebücher #943, 1914, 363 (Diaries, 310). Klee reiterated this idea in other
writings. See: “Creative Credo,” sec. 5, 185 (Schriften, 121); Spiller, ed., The
Thinking Eye, 351–52 (Spiller, ed., Paul Klee: Das bildnerische Denken, 351–52);
and Beiträge zur bildnerischen Formlehre, 92. Numerous scholars link ab ovo to
diary entry #943; see, e.g., Marianne L. Teuber, “Zwei frühe Quellen zu Paul Klees
Theorie der Form: Eine Dokumentation,” in Das Frühwerk, 278. The
sexual/reproductive implications of Klee’s imagery have been noted by many schol-
ars; see, in addition to Verdi, Susanna Partsch, Paul Klee, 1879–1940 (Cologne:
Benedikt Taschen, 1990), 42; and Glaesemer, Colored Works, 41, who places the
work in the broader context of Klee’s pedagogical writings.
23
For a more extensive formal analysis, see, in addition to Verdi, Constance
Naubert-Riser, Klee, trans. John Greaves (New York: Portland House, 1988), 56.
24
In contrast to my interpretation of the metaphorical implications of Klee’s
Flower Myth, Félix Thürlemann submits Klee’s imagery and figure/ground rela-
tionships to a semiotic analysis in Paul Klee: Analyse sémiotique de trois peintures
(Lausanne: Editions l’Âge d’homme, 1982), 17–40, 122–23.
25
Jules Michelet’s La Femme was published in multiple editions from the mid-
nineteenth through the early twentieth century, the fifteenth edition being issued
in 1885 by the Paris-based publisher Calmann-Lévy. For modern publications that
address the specific aspects of gendered types cited in my text, see: Sharon L.
James, Learned Girls and Male Persuasion: Gender and Reading in Roman Love
Elegy (Berkeley: U of California P, 2003); and Elizabeth Cropper, “On Beautiful
Women, Parmigianino, Petrarchismo, and the Vernacular Style,” Art Bulletin 58
(September 1976): 374–94.
26
I address these and other sources of Klee’s imagery in a previously published
article: “Paul Klee’s Flower Myth: Themes from German Romanticism
Reinterpreted,” Source 8 (spring 1989): 16–21. For the Novalis reference, see
Friedrich von Hardenberg, Henry von Ofterdingen, trans. Palmer Hilty (New York:
F. Ungar, 1964), 17. The copy of this work in the Klee library is in vol. 2 of
Novalis’ Werke in vier Teilen, ed. Hermann Friedmann (Berlin: Deutsches
Verlaghaus Bong, n.d.). Goethe wrote about the archetypal plant in letters from
Italy in 1787 and used the term “Urpflanze” in his Italienische Reise, which Klee
mentioned having taken with him to Italy in 1901–2; see Briefe, 1:169, 175. See
also J. W. von Goethe, Italian Journey, 1786–1788, trans. W. H. Auden and
Elizabeth Mayer (San Francisco: North Point, 1982), 251.
27
This quotation is taken from Klee’s “Graphic Art”; see Schriften, plate 57, and
“Thoughts on Graphic Art,” 10. See Werckmeister’s analysis of the first draft in
Klee’s Career, 131–36. Verdi traces Klee’s analogy to Aristotle’s De generatione
animalium, I, 20–21, in Klee and Nature, 197, 249 n. 12.
28
Tagebücher #840, October 1908, 280 (Diaries, 231). The idea is paraphrased
and expanded in a 1922 summer-course lecture at the Bauhaus (Spiller, ed., The
Thinking Eye; Spiller, ed., Paul Klee: Das bildnerische Denken, 449; Klee, Beiträge
zur bildnerischen Formlehre, 149). A more narrowly focused study of this idea as it
relates to Klee’s depiction of the female anatomy is that of Claude Frontisi, Klee:
Anatomie d’Aphrodite, le polyptyque démembré (Paris: Adam Biro, 1990).
29
Maria Tatar, Lustmord: Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany (Princeton:
Princeton UP, 1995), 6, 126; hereafter cited as Lustmord. Werckmeister pairs
Grosz’s John, the Woman Killer with one of Klee’s illustrations to Curt Corinth’s
Potsdamer Platz; see Klee’s Career, 153–56.
30
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. William A. Haussmann
(London: George Allen & Unwin, 1923), 31; Die Geburt der Tragödie, vol. 1. of
Werke, ed. Karl Schlechta (Frankfurt: Ullstein, 1984), 28. Nietzsche invoked this
figure of speech in his discussion of the evolution of Dionysian rituals.
31
George Grosz, “Berlin 1917,” in “Ach knallige Welt,” 32.
32
Tatar, Lustmord, 68, 128. See also Carol Duncan, “Virility and Domination in
Early Twentieth-Century Vanguard Painting,” in Feminism and Art History:
Questioning the Litany, ed. Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard (New York:
Harper & Row, 1982), 290–313.
33
Vishny explores this aspect of Klee’s life and work in “Klee’s Self-Images,” 53–54.
34
Tagebücher #1008, July-August 1916, 400 (Diaries, 343). For an in-depth
analysis of this passage and Klee’s relationship to Marc, see Werckmeister, Klee’s
Career, 56–62, 76–80.
35
This poem, which is discussed at length in chapter 1 and illustrated in figure 7,
was recorded in Tagebücher #1081 A, August 1917, 442 (Diaries, 375).
36
Tagebücher #1008, July-August 1916, 402 (Diaries, 344). See also “Creative
Credo,” sec. 7, 186 (Schriften, 122).
37
Tagebücher #1008, 402 (Diaries, 344).
38
See Tatar, Lustmord, 178–80, for an interpretation and reproduction of another
work by Klee entitled Dogmatic Composition (Dogmatische Komposition, 1918/74).
39
Rainer Maria Rilke, “The Cathedral” (“Die Kathedrale”), in Neue Gedichte /
New Poems, trans. Stephen Cohn (Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1998), 48–49.
40
Rilke, “The Cathedral Porch” (“Das Portal”), in Neue Gedichte, 50–51.
41
On Debussy’s Cathédrale engloutie, see Siglind Bruhn, Images and Ideas in Modern
French Piano Music: The Extra-Musical Subtext in Piano Works by Ravel, Debussy, and
Messiaen, Aesthetics in Music, no. 6 (Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon, 1997), 41–44.
42
Walter Gropius, “Program of the Staatliche Bauhaus in Weimar” (April 1919),
in Hans M. Wingler, The Bauhaus: Weimar, Dessau, Berlin, Chicago, ed. Joseph
Stein, trans. Wolfgang Jabs and Basil Gilbert (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969),
31; see also Hans M. Wingler, Das Bauhaus, 1919–1933 (Bramsche: Gebr. Rasch,
1962), 39; hereafter cited as Wingler, Das Bauhaus. For reproductions of all proofs
and states of Feininger’s woodcut, see Leona E. Prasse, Lyonel Feininger: A
Definitive Catalogue of His Graphic Work, Etchings, Lithographs, Woodcuts
(Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1972), 182–84.
43
On Schwitters’s Die Kathedrale and its relationship to Gropius’s socialist ideal, see
also John Elderfield, Kurt Schwitters (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1985), 115.
44
For the complete text, see Schwitters, Lyrik, 198. This poem was printed from
a typescript dated 5 December 1919; it was thus not published at the time it was
written. Klee, however, could have heard the poem read or performed.
45
“Doof” appears in Schwitters, Lyrik, 202; it was originally published, along with
“Cigarren,” in Elementar. Die Blume Anna, 1922, 28. On critical responses to
Apollinaire’s calligrammes, see chap. 1, n. 70.
46
Mark Rosenthal also points to the prominence of the name Montgolfier, refer-
ring to it as a play on the watermark and a northern Algerian town; see his Paul
Klee, ed. Martha Carey (Washington, DC: Phillips Collection, 1981), unpag.
47
On the Montgolfier paper-manufacturing firm, see Leonard N. Rosenband,
Papermaking in Eighteenth-Century France: Management, Labor, and Revolution
at the Montgolfier Mill, 1761–1805 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 2000).
48
For a checklist and selected reproductions of the popular prints that proliferated
after the Montgolfiers’ successful experiments with flight, see the exhibition cata-
logue by Roger Pineau, Ballooning, 1782–1972 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian
Institution Press, 1972), 10–15.
49
For reproductions of these works, see the following volumes of the Catalogue
raisonné: B.(delicate Landscape), 2:481; With the Balloon, 2:495; Red Balloon,
3:446; The Balloon, 4:476.
50
Sara Lynn Henry, “Paul Klee’s Pictorial Mechanics from Physics to the Picture
Plane,” Pantheon 47 (1989): 160. On other images of flight in Klee’s work, see
Mark Rosenthal, “The Myth of Flight in the Art of Paul Klee,” Arts Magazine 55
(September 1980): 90–94.
51
The manuscript of this lecture is cited by Henry in “Paul Klee’s Pictorial
Mechanics,” 160, 162, 165; Klee left this and other lectures delivered between 29
February 1924 and 2 July 1924 in manuscript form, grouping them under the title
“Bildnerische Mechanik oder Stillehre.”
52
Tagebücher #748, January 1906, 234 (Diaries, 194).
53
Tagebücher, #952, 1915, 366 (Diaries, 315).
54
Klee, “On Modern Art,” in Modern Artists on Art: Ten Unabridged Essays, ed.
Robert L. Herbert (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1964), 86; see also the
German text in Spiller, ed. Paul Klee: Das bildnerische Denken, 92.
55
For reproductions of The Infernal Park, see Catalogue raisonné, 8:142–46. For
a list of the fourteen Urchs drawings and one painting entitled Red Urchs (Roturchs
1940/246), see Felix Klee, ed., Paul Klee: His Life and Work in Documents, trans.
Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Braziller, 1962), 196; hereafter cited as
F. Klee, ed., Klee. For reproductions and complete documentation, see Catalogue
raisonné, 8:-455–57, 463–65, 471–73; 9:81, 167.
56
See Guillaume Apollinaire and Raoul Dufy, Le Bestiaire ou, Cortège d’Orphée,
trans. Lauren Shakely (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1977), unpag. The
foreword to this facsimile of the 1911 Delaplanche edition is the source of the fac-
tual information about the original publication contained in this and the following
paragraph. Two of Dufy’s prints are reproduced as a double-page spread, without

the poetic text, in Cahiers d’art 1 (1926): 202–3. Klee’s Scanty Words of the Thrifty
Man (Karge Worte des Sparsamen 1924/249) is reproduced in the same issue.
57
Le Bestiaire. The English translation is the one contained in this publication.
58
Le Bestiaire.
59
Klee’s illustrations for Voltaire’s Candide and Curt Corrinth’s Potsdamer Platz
both appeared in editions published in 1920. See Voltaire, Kandide, oder, die beste
Welt (Munich: Kurt Wolff, 1920), and Curt Corrinth, Potsdamer Platz: oder, die
Nächte des neuen Messias: Ekstatische Visionen (Munich: Georg Müller, 1920).
60
Petitpierre, Aus der Malklasse von Paul Klee, 32. See also my introduction.
61
Klee clearly linked this title to the other Urchs drawings from 1939 by adding
“Urchse” in pencil to the cardboard frame of the drawing.
62
See, e.g., Glaesemer, Handzeichnungen, 3:45. Another ur-ox, this one associ-
ated with Zoroastrian mythology, is cited as a possible source by Mark Luprecht in
Of Angels, Things, and Death: Paul Klee’s Last Painting in Context, Hermeneutics
of Art, 9 (New York: Peter Lang, 1999), 107–8.
63
See Glaesemer, Handzeichnungen, 3:45, and Verdi, Klee and Nature, 46.
64
Gedichte, 121 and Briefe, vol. 2, 1245; here reproduced as recorded in a 1933
pocket diary.
65
Morgenstern, Alle Galgenlieder, 35.
66
Morgenstern, Palma Kunkel, 35. In Klee’s copy of this volume the page with
“Der Steinochs” is marked with the slash and X-marks, as are others.
67
Ovid, The Metamorphoses of Ovid, trans. Michael Simpson (Amherst: U of
Massachusetts P, 2001), 9.
68
Simpson, introduction to Metamorphoses, 5.
69
Tagebücher #602, 20 March 1905, 206 (Diaries, 168). The edition to which Klee
referred is still in the Klee library, stamped with his name: Des Publius Ovidius Naso
Verwandlungen, 2 vols. (Berlin: August Mylius, 1816). The implicit link between
Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Klee’s Urchs drawings does not have the negative con-
notations that Werckmeister attributes to five of Klee’s titles (dating from 1937–40)
that incorporate the word “Metamorphoses.” See Otto Karl Werckmeister, “Ob ich
je eine Pallas hervorbringe?!”/ “Will I Ever Bring Forth a Pallas?!,” in Paul Klee: In
der Maske des Mythos, ed. Pamela Kort (Cologne: DuMont, 1999), 148–49. This
bilingual catalogue accompanied an exhibition held in Munich at the Haus der
Kunst and in Rotterdam at the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen. For a reproduc-
tion of the Aged Phoenix, see Catalogue raisonné, 1:203.
70
Information concerning Darwin was supplied by Kenneth Caneva, historian of
science and professor of history at the University of North Carolina Greensboro.
71
The mirror-written text in this drawing reads as follows: “Die Ewigkeit /
Kommt mit der Zeit. . . . Lass sie tanzen / Sind kleine Leute / (nicht Leutchen).”
The title excerpts and combines three words from this text. For a reproduction of
the drawing, see Catalogue raisonné, 8:48.
72
See Catalogue raisonné, 8:47, for a reproduction of Ovidian.
3: A Poetic-Personal Idea of Landscape
I F ONE SUBJECT CAN BE SAID TO DOMINATE Klee’s writing and his visual
production, it is the landscape. Recalling an illness he suffered in 1898
(his last year at Gymnasium), he projected his physical malaise onto his sur-
roundings, observing that “the landscape was just as sick, but magnificent”
(“ebenso krank war die Landschaft, aber prachtvoll”).1 Around this time he
began to identify himself as a landscape painter, which is entirely reasonable
given the number of landscape drawings in his early sketchbooks.2 It is also
possible that Klee’s claim to a familiar domain of the visual arts was made,
in part, to calm the anxiety of his parents, who were understandably dubi-
ous about his decision to pursue a profession for which he had no formal
training. Having studied in Munich with Heinrich Knirr, by 1900 Klee had
produced additional sketches from nature as well as studies of the figure.
While spending the summer of 1900 in Bern, he wrote: “The comparison
of my soul with the various moods of the countryside frequently returns as
a motif. My poetic-personal idea of landscape lies at the root of this” (“Der
Vergleich meiner Seele mit den verschiedenen Stimmungen der Landschaft
kehrt häufig wieder als Motiv. Meine dichterisch-persönliche Auffassung
der Landschaft liegt dem zu Grund”). As if to underscore his observation
with an example, he added in quotes, “Autumn is here. The current of my
soul is followed by stealthy fogs” (“Es ist Herbst. Dem Strom meiner Seele
schleichen Nebel nach”).3 In 1920, while composing the autobiographical
statement for Leopold Zahn, Klee again reflected on his propensity for
identifying with nature: “In earlier days (even as a child), the beauty of
landscapes was quite clear to me. A background for the soul’s moods”
(“Früher [schon als Kind] war mir die Landschaft[liche] [Schönheit] ganz
eindeutig. Eine Scenerie [sic] für Stimmungen der Seele”).4 The ideas
encapsulated in Klee’s neatly turned phrases locate his thinking in the his-
torical continuum that links German Romantic thought with modernist
concepts of abstraction.5 A brief survey of this theoretical tradition defines
a context for Klee’s ongoing efforts to renew his “poetic-personal idea of
landscape” and rethink his approach to landscape painting, which remained
a constant theme in the course of his forty-year career.
Like Klee, the writers who framed the theoretical structure of German
Romanticism established a reciprocal relationship between nature as cat-
alyst and landscape as subject matter. Alluding by inference to Horace,
Friedrich von Schelling noted that the plastic arts were historically defined
as “wordless poetry.” To contemporize his paraphrase of the ut pictura
poesis paradigm, Schelling interpreted the analogy to mean that the visual
94 A POETIC-PERSONAL IDEA OF LANDSCAPE
arts should express ideas whose “source is the soul.”6 Schelling’s contem-
porary Heinrich von Kleist reiterated this objective in his “Letter from a
Young Poet to a Young Painter,” counseling the recipient not to let the
pedagogical practice of copying from historical masters deter him from the
loftier goal of visualizing his deepest and most sincere ideas and feelings.7
The idea that a landscape vista can provoke feelings, which in turn can be
reflected in a work of art, survived among subsequent generations of the-
orists, notably Friedrich Theodor Vischer and his son, Robert Vischer. It
was the younger Vischer who introduced the concept of empathy into
modern aesthetic theory.8 Anticipating Klee’s notion of landscape as a
“background for the soul’s moods,” Vischer conceived of empathy as a
conflation of external phenomena and internal mood.9
Klee’s concept of a “poetic-personal idea of landscape” had historical
precedents in the practice as well as the theory of landscape painting. With
its asymmetrical composition and expressive brushwork, his untitled 1899
painting of a copse of trees10 conforms to the conventions observed by Carl
Blechen and Johann Christian Dahl, whose works mark the transition from
Romanticism to naturalism in the manner of some of the Dachau colony
painters who worked in and around Munich at the turn of the century. In
the 1899 painting as well as other visual exercises from his classes with Knirr,
Klee avoided the onus of allegory that weighed heavily on the reputation of
Caspar David Friedrich, whose works Klee would have seen at the National
Gallery in Berlin in 1906, when he attended the centennial exhibition
(1775–1875) of German painting.11 In the exhibition catalogue Friedrich is
well represented by thirty-eight entries, including the once controversial
altarpiece entitled Cross in the Mountains (Das Kreuz im Gebirge [Tetschener
Altar, 1808–9]). The layers of luminous paint had not yet dried on Cross in
the Mountains when detractors began to criticize it. Claiming that Friedrich
had indulged in religious allegory at the expense of such technical and for-
mal conventions of landscape painting as perspective, Friedrich Ramdohr
exhorted other artists not to confuse the desirable quality of expressiveness
with the unsuitable veneer of allegory.12 Presciently, albeit unwittingly,
Ramdohr identified the very aspect of Friedrich’s painting that gave his work
currency among the early modern painters whose works exemplify a new
approach to landscape painting. Modernists like Klee would have attributed
Friedrich’s poetic invention in part to his circumvention of the traditional
pictorial conventions of linear and atmospheric perspective.
Although not referring to any specific painting, Karl Ludwig Fernow,
Ramdohr’s contemporary, allowed that the poetic mood of a landscape
might sanction certain degrees of what he called “contingency and arbit-
rariness.”13 Like Fernow, the painter-theorist Carl Gustav Carus associated
poetry in painting with a process of selection dictated by the artist’s sub-
jective response to nature. In his Nine Letters on Landscape Painting (Neun
Briefe über Landschaftsmalerei, geschrieben in den Jahren 1815 bis 1824)
A POETIC-PERSONAL IDEA OF LANDSCAPE 95
Carus localized the poetry of a painting in correspondences between the

affective life of the artist and the ineffable life of nature. The representation
of such a correspondence, he asserted, required a willingness to engage in
“abstraction and self-renunciation.” Although couched in the rhetoric of
Romanticism, Carus’s professed belief in abstraction and self-renunciation
as strategies for aspiring to the “language of God” would eventually be
absorbed into modernist ideas about the purity of abstract forms.14 The
development of these ideas can be traced in the writings of such later the-
orists as Adolf von Hildebrand and Wilhelm Worringer, both of whom had
a profound influence on the thought and practice of early modern artists.
Hildebrand identified “actual forms” as unchanging abstractions distinct
from the variable, changing appearances of “perceptual forms.”15 In
Worringer’s influential Abstraction and Empathy (Abstraktion und
Einfühlung), abstraction is attributed to a penchant for regularity, naturalism
to the antithetical desire for empathy. While polarizing abstraction and empa-
thy, Worringer conceded that “the history of art represents an unceasing dis-
putation between the two tendencies.”16 In 1912, just a few years after the
appearance of Worringer’s study, Kandinsky published On the Spiritual in Art
(Über das Geistige in der Kunst). This treatise defines form as the external
expression of inner meaning (“die Form ist also die Äusserung des inneren
Inhaltes”) and underscores the importance of the “principle of inner neces-
sity” (“das Prinzip der inneren Notwendigkeit”), thus reviving the variable of
personality common to the aesthetics of Romanticism. Kandinsky reframed
the theoretical polarities cited by Hildebrand and Worringer in terms of a
spectrum defined by “absolute realism” (“reine Realistik”) at one end and
“pure abstraction” (“reine Abstraktion”) at the other. Although he acknowl-
edged a range of possibilities between these two polarities, his own work
implies a value judgment in favor of abstraction as a means of communicat-
ing inner necessity.17 Publications by Hildebrand, Worringer, Kandinsky, and
others contributed to an intellectual climate receptive to ideas about abstrac-
tion exported to Germany by Apollinaire, who proposed that modern paint-
ing was poetic precisely because it was not imitative, substituting the abstract,
independently expressive language of line and color for mimetic imagery.
Although the theoretical foundations of Klee’s “poetic-personal idea of
landscape” were compatible with a modernist aesthetic, he knew that to be
modern and to paint landscapes meant challenging a long tradition of con-
ventions and expectations. His own most unforgiving critic, Klee must have
realized that the technically competent but unremarkable 1899 painting of
trees would not earn him the reputation of his teachers, let alone set him
apart as an innovator. Beginning in 1900, he methodically pursued a variety
of experimental approaches to painting from nature. An untitled, five-panel
screen (1900) depicting landscape vistas along the Aare River, which mean-
ders around Bern, reduces natural forms to expanses of color and art
nouveau arabesques. The decorative simplification of the screen painting
Disclaimer:

Fig. 25: Paul Klee, Landscape with Gallows (1919/115). Oil and pen on primed
gauze mounted on cardboard, 36 ⫻ 46 cm. Collection of David M. Solinger. © 2006
Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Photograph courtesy
of the Zentrum Paul Klee.
takes another form in Well-Tended Forest Path, Waldegg near Bern (Gepflegter
Waldweg, Waldegg b. Bern, 1909/16), where vegetation proliferates into the
kind of dense, decorative patterning typical of Gustav Klimt’s landscapes.
What is noteworthy is that Klee managed to achieve this degree of decora-
tive richness not with vividly colored oil paints but by means of watercolor
and ink on glass. Tree-Lined Street, Georgenschweige (Strasse unter Bäumen,
1908/65) was also painted on glass in a monochromatic palette calculated
to generate the visual equivalents of white “energy.”18 Although Tree-Lined
Street retains the compositional diagonals and broad brushwork of the 1899
landscape, forms are minimally delineated in a manner that anticipates the
sketchily defined cityscape set against a deep blue and yellow-green ground
in Red Church and White Panel (Rote Kirche u. weisse Tafel, 1912/15). Even
before traveling to Tunisia, where by his own account he finally mastered
color, Klee had the satisfaction of capping a decade of experimentation with
Houses in the Outskirts (Häuser an der Peripherie, 1913/137). This small
Disclaimer:

Fig. 26: Carl Blechen, Gallows Hill under Storm Clouds, c. 1835. Oil on paper
mounted on cardboard, 29.5 ⫻ 46 cm. Galerie Neue Meister, Staatliche
Kunstsammlung Dresden, Gal. Nr. 2637. Photograph: Deutsche Fotothek Dresden.
watercolor brings together the color fields, repetitive patterning, and skeletal
contours found in various permutations in his earlier landscapes.19
During the months following his return from Tunisia in late April
1914, Klee’s landscapes began to assume the formal abstraction of
Apollinaire’s “poetic painting.” Not yet ready to abandon the rhetoric of
Romanticism, Klee defined abstraction as a “cool Romanticism” that dif-
fered from its nineteenth-century predecessor in being a “style without
pathos” (“die kühle Romantik dieses Stils ohne Pathos”).20 It is no coinci-
dence that Klee’s choice of the term “cool Romanticism” establishes theo-
retical continuity between his “poetic-personal idea of landscape” and his
no less personal theory of abstraction. The seemingly contradictory phrase
“cool Romanticism” aptly characterizes the readily apparent but easily rec-
oncilable oppositions inherent in his postwar landscapes, which were still
conceived as “backgrounds of the soul’s moods” even though they staked
a claim to the pictorial vocabulary of modernism. Comparisons between his
Landscape with Gallows (Landschaft m. d. Galgen, 1919/115) (fig. 25) and
selected historical precedents reveal how Klee acknowledged the past while
simultaneously critiquing the conventions of traditional landscape painting.
Because of the curiosity value of its subject matter, Landscape with
Gallows stands out among the nocturnal scenes that recur in Klee’s post-
war production. Looming at the top of Klee’s painting is Gallows Hill,
identified as such by the gibbet, which stands next to a cross. The viewer
negotiates Klee’s compressed pictorial space by following the diagonal
lines of the ladders, which indicate directional movement through a hilly
terrain dotted with the skeletal frames of buildings and leafless tress. Many
of the visual particulars of Klee’s painting seem to have been borrowed

from Pieter Bruegel’s Landscape with the Magpie on the Gallows (1568),
the most famous historical precedent of any landscape with gallows. Even
if Klee referred to Bruegel’s painting or to some other pictorial inventory
of landscape motifs, he deftly avoided pastiche by self-consciously engag-
ing in the transformational process of parody. Linda Hutcheon points to
parody as a major mode of formal and thematic construction in twentieth-
century art across disciplines. Many of the examples of modernist parody
that she analyzes involve multiple layers of intertextual allusion.21 Klee’s
Landscape with Gallows is yet another example.
The German Romantic tradition could arguably have provided Klee
with models of parodic construction as well as targets of visual parody.
Despite the Romantic cult of originality, numerous examples of parodic imi-
tation can be found in the visual as well as literary arts of the Romantic trad-
ition. A case in point is the work of Blechen, whose early career was not
unlike Klee’s. After acquiring the fundamentals of landscape painting during
a brief period of academic training, Blechen continued his studies during the
requisite “Wanderjahr” in Italy, just as Klee would do several generations
later. Although Blechen’s facile technique and dramatic flair assured him
steady employment as a painter of stage scenery, he had higher ambitions to
become a serious landscape painter. Responding to Goethe’s criticism of the
theatrical effects of his landscapes,22 Blechen adopted parody as a visual strat-
egy. His bleak, windswept Gallows Hill under Storm Clouds (Galgenberg bei
Gewitterstimmung) dating from around 1835 (fig. 26) parodically subverts
the stylistic conventions of the “terrifying” landscape by substituting breadth
of handling for specificity of bizarre detail. Any historical survey of parody
confirms that parodic transformation is not confined to intertextual rela-
tionships within a single art form. Thus, William Vaughan convincingly sur-
mises that Blechen’s pictorial parodies are informed as much by Heine’s
parodies of lyric poetry as by visual references.23 Parodic transformation
across media is also common to Klee’s Landscape with Gallows.
In keeping with the idea that modernist parody involves both oblique
homage and critical distance, Klee’s Landscape with Gallows can be read as
a parody of landscape painting in the style of Friedrich. The latter’s critics
had denounced him for compromising the conventions of illusionistic
landscape painting. Klee consciously took even greater liberties with these
pictorial conventions in the compressed spatial structure and arbitrary
color scheme of Landscape with Gallows. Evidence of the historic con-
sciousness that links Klee’s painting to allegorical landscapes in the
German Romantic tradition extends to the relationship of objects in space.
According to Ramdohr, Friedrich’s allegorical content is visually manifested
in a strange relationship between the appearances of actual objects and how
they are represented within a picture.24 Ramdohr’s critique could have
been written about Landscape with Gallows, although Klee self-consciously
renounced allegorical symbolism in favor of a new vocabulary of signs. His

mixed sign system includes, in addition to recognizable landscape motifs,
letters of the alphabet and what appear to be pictographic characters.
Those signs with linguistic value exemplify the ironic inversion that
Hutcheon cites as a characteristic feature of parody.25 By replacing allegor-
ical symbols with signs from the language of literature, Klee established a
critical distance between his symbolic vocabulary and the literary symbol-
ism of Friedrich, Philipp Otto Runge, and other Romantics.
Although the symbolic code of Landscape with Gallows is not literary
in the traditional sense, this does not preclude a literary frame of reference.
In combination with the visual image of the gallows, the letters generate a
chain of references that links Klee’s painting to Morgenstern’s Gallows
Songs. Klee was not alone among his contemporaries in laying claim to an
affinity with Morgenstern’s subject matter. Ball’s poem “The Hangman”
(“Der Henker,” 1913) and Johannes R. Becher’s “To the Hangmen”
(“An die Henker,” 1916) attest to a fascination with the theme of hang-
ing in the generation of poets that followed Morgenstern. As for Klee, at
least two of his drawings — The Hanged Ones (Die Gehängten, 1913/107)
and Gallows Humor (Galgenhumor, 1919/26) — could be included in an
illustrated edition of the Gallows Songs.26 By contrast, the relationship
between Landscape with Gallows and Morgenstern’s popular collection of
poetry is less illustrative than formal, having more to do with poetic form
than poetic images. Again, examples of literary parody provide models.
Morgenstern’s Gallows Songs and Ezra Pound’s “A Villonaud. Ballad
of the Gibbet, Or the Song of the Sixth Companion” (1908) are case stud-
ies in Hutcheon’s concept of parodic double coding,27 for both allude to
Villon’s Testament, which in turn parodies the conventional medieval bal-
lad. Whereas Morgenstern’s objective was to internalize and contemporize
Villon’s ironic voice, Pound targeted Villon’s ballad form with its pre-
scribed rhyme scheme and four-line “envoie.” Although Klee’s Landscape
with Gallows parallels Pound’s “Villonaud” in that it parodies conventional
form, its specific point of reference is one of Morgenstern’s Gallows Songs.
“The Moon” (“Der Mond”) is unusual among the Gallows Songs in that it
includes single letters as discrete verbal signs:
Als Gott den lieben Mond erschuf, When God the moon created,
gab er ihm folgenden Beruf: he had him clearly dedicated:
Beim Zu- sowohl wie beim Abnehmen To wax and wane, like ‘ab’ and ‘zu’,
sich deutschen Lesern zu bequemen, what every German reader knew,
ein a formierend und ein z — forming an a, also a z —
dass keiner gross zu denken hätt. simpler it could never be.
Befolgend dies, ward der Trabant Obeying this was his delight,
ein völlig deutscher Gegenstand. a perfect German satellite.28
In recontextualizing Morgenstern’s idiosyncratic use of letters, Klee

painted a landscape that literally incorporates the language of poetry. By
1915 Klee had begun to appropriate letter forms as a way of expanding the
vocabulary of pictorial abstraction to include signs that refuse to relinquish
the possibility of extrapictorial reference, even if they have no readily iden-
tifiable referent. That is precisely the role of the letters in Landscape with
Gallows. To borrow the terminology Klee used in his “Creative Credo,”
the letters encode references to “latent realities” that are not visible in the
external world. Within their pictorial setting the letters are paired with
visual images that have the once-upon-a-time specificity of a story.
Coincidentally, this implied narrative context is common to both the visual
and the poetic traditions that the painting references. More important, it
situates the painting within the framework of Klee’s modernist narrative of
process.29
Painted the year Klee resumed full-time studio work after almost three
years of military service, Landscape with Gallows is one of numerous pictor-
ial experiments with what he called “abstract things such as . . . letters”
(“abstrakte Dingen wie . . . Buchstaben”).30 Four letter signs scattered
throughout the landscape are clearly legible: on the left are an uppercase
T and V, and on the right an initial E, followed by a period, with a slightly
smaller Z below. The letters hover somewhere between the landscape setting
and an implied typographic space on the surface of the painting. Occupying
the same spatial limbo are other signs, most of which are not clearly distin-
guishable as either alphabetic or pictorial. Similar signs can be found in any
number of the illustrated historical narratives that purported to trace the
evolution of alphabetic writing from pictorial origins. A typical example is
Antoine Court de Gébelin’s illustrated Histoire naturelle de la parole (1816)
(fig. 27).31 The tradition of historical narration represented by this study was
perpetuated in Klee’s personal narrative of process, which likewise explored
visual correlations between alphabetic characters, hieroglyphic signs, and
Chinese pictographs. To be sure, Klee’s paintings are not formulaic like the
charts that illustrate the Histoire naturelle de la parole, but some of the signs
in Landscape with Gallows bear a striking resemblance to the Chinese char-
acters Court de Gébelin identified as the pictorial roots of the letters H and
M. It seems that as early as 1919 Klee had settled on at least two of the signs
that would ultimately find a place in the lexicon of the language system with
which he would compose his later poems in pictorial script.
One of the signs that entered Klee’s standard repertoire of pictorial
characters is the window. Not coincidentally, the window also proved to be a
particularly useful and fluid point of comparison in articulating a modernist
aesthetic. From the early teens, when it became a fixture in Delaunay’s paint-
ing, to the mid-twenties, when Breton and Magritte adopted it in the inter-
est of surrealism, the window was invoked as both a visual and a verbal
metaphor.32 One source of Delaunay’s metaphorical usage is a passage from
Disclaimer:

Fig. 27: Antoine Court de Gébelin, Illustration from Histoire naturelle de la parole,
1816. Digital image by Dan Smith.
Leonardo da Vinci’s Paragone in which the artist’s eye is compared to a

“window of the soul” (une “fenêtre de l’âme”).33 Delaunay cited this anal-
ogy in his notes on Leonardo’s treatise and appropriated it in his own essay,
“La Lumière,” to introduce the idea that the perception of external reality
is filtered through an internal or conceptual reality.34 Transferred to his stu-
dio practice, the trope figured prominently in Delaunay’s experiments with
the multifaceted concept of simultaneity. In his Window series a casement
window serves multiple functions, providing both an internal pictorial frame
and a reflective surface on which light is refracted into prismatic color pat-
terns. The viewer thus simultaneously registers objects in the external world
and the constituent colors of the light that makes them perceptible.
Delaunay was at work on the Window paintings when Klee visited him in his
studio on the morning of 11 April 1912. There Klee would have seen paint-
ings in which windows are visual signs of a new artistic vision.
Up to that point Klee himself had used the window only as an architec-
tural element in a pictorial setting. Seen from the inside in The Draughtsman
at the Window (Der Zeichner am Fenster, 1909/70), it separates an undiffer-
entiated but brightly illuminated exterior space from a dimly lit interior. View
onto a Square (Blick auf einen Platz, 1912/10), very likely painted before
Klee’s trip to Paris, depicts the fenestrated facades of city buildings that would
assume an almost ominous appearance in Klee’s postwar paintings, where the
window functions as both an architectural motif and a pictorial metonym that
signifies a new way of looking at the external world. By the time Klee visited
Tunisia in 1914, the window had been schematized into line drawings that
hover on the surface of watercolors such as Window and Palms (Fenster u.
Disclaimer:

Fig. 28: Paul Klee, View from a Window (1920/27). Oil on primed paper, 42 ⫻ 32.7
cm. Private collection, Germany. © 2006 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG
Palmen, 1914/59). In 1915 Klee transposed the patterns of broken forms

and refracted light from Delaunay’s window paintings to his own Reflecting
Window (Spiegelndes Fenster, 1915/211). With the addition of a swagged
curtain, he conflated interior and exterior points of view, and in works such
as Window in the Garden (Fenster im Garten, 1918/2), the window becomes
a sign of spatial ambiguity. Klee scholars are in general agreement that
Composition with Windows (Komposition mit Fenstern, 1919/156) marks a
crucial step in Klee’s ongoing effort to internalize Delaunay’s theoretical and
visual ideas.35 In 1920 Klee took stock of the metamorphosis of his window
motif, cataloguing the changes that had occurred over eight years in Rhythm
of the Windows (Rhythmus der Fenster, 1920/20) and View from a Window
(Fensterausblick, 1920/27) (fig. 28).36 Both the appearance and function of
the window in these works reflect a conscious decision on Klee’s part to make
a definitive break with the landscape tradition exemplified in some of
Hermann Hesse’s poems and paintings.
The German-born Hesse moved to Klee’s native city of Bern in 1912,

securing safe haven in Switzerland during the war years and becoming a
Swiss national in 1924. There is no record that the two men ever met,
although they had a mutual friend in the artist Louis Moilliet, who accom-
panied Klee to Tunisia in 1914. Klee mentioned Hesse only once in his
published correspondence, alluding to the author’s friendship with
Moilliet.37 Given the terseness of this single reference, it can be inferred
that Klee chose to distance himself from Hesse. Klee’s seeming coolness
was evidently not mutual. In fact, Hesse cast Klee as one of the travelers in
his 1932 novel The Journey to the East (Die Morgenlandfahrt).38 Inscribed
on a talismanic object unearthed by the narrator of The Journey to the East
is a rhymed couplet that is as memorable for its wit as for its brevity:
So blau wie Schnee, As blue as snow
So Paul wie Klee. Paul to Klee is so.39
Hesse’s poetic quip would have appealed to Klee’s propensity for wordplay;
indeed, Klee may well have felt a tinge of regret at not having penned the
lines himself. Nevertheless, they elicited no response from Klee — or at least
none that is recorded. Nor did he mention Hesse’s Poems of the Painter
(Gedichte des Malers), a volume consisting of ten poems issued in 1920 by
the Bern publisher Seldwyla. Each poem is paired with a colored drawing
by the author. Both the imagery and the style of Hesse’s landscape views
are derivative. Some resemble the early landscapes of Die Brücke painters,
notably Max Pechstein and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, whereas others reflect
the influence of August Macke, who traveled with Klee and Moilliet to
Tunisia in 1914, shortly before he was drafted and killed in action. At least
one — the visual parallel to “Winter Day” (“Wintertag”) — bears compar-
ison with Klee’s A 1 Lower Stockhornsee (Unterer Stockhornsee, 1915/164)
and A 2 Upper Stockhornsee (Oberer Stockhornsee, 1915/165).40
Whatever Klee may have thought of Hesse as a poet, he would have
recognized in Poems of the Painter a sensibility akin to his own “poetic-per-
sonal idea of landscape.” A typical example of these poems is “Houses,
Fields, Garden Fence” (“Häuser, Felder, Gartenzaun”), which clings to a
late-Romantic aesthetic in the tendency to identify with the natural world,
only to find that it is less sympathetic than cautionary. The objects named
in the poem are as sharply delineated and as vividly colored as the corre-
sponding motifs in the accompanying visual image:
Baum, du Freund, wirst denn auch Tree, friend, will you also turn
du zu Staub, to dust,
Fensterladen grün und rote Dächer? Window-lattice green and red roofs?41
Elliptical phrasing gives this verbal evocation of a landscape the same
degree of abstraction as its visual counterpart, yet when considered
together Hesse’s words and images have the perceptual logic and visual
coherence of description based on direct observation from nature. This is

also true of Klee’s early landscapes and even some of his post-Tunisian
watercolors, such as Upper Stockhornsee and Lower Stockhornsee. By con-
trast, View from a Window conforms to another standard of logic and
coherence — a conceptually based standard established by Apollinaire in
his poetic and critical responses to Delaunay’s Window paintings.
Sometime in late November or early December 1912, Apollinaire
agreed to write a preface to the catalogue of an exhibition at the Sturm
Gallery featuring Delaunay’s Window paintings. Instead of the customary
accolades, Apollinaire composed “The Windows” (“Les Fenêtres”), a
poem that was published in an album of images produced to coincide with
the exhibition. At the opening in January 1913, Apollinaire delivered the
lecture that was subsequently published in Der Sturm as “Die moderne
Malerei.” It was in this essay that he predicted the emergence of poetic
painting that does not literally record observable phenomena. Klee’s View
from a Window is just such a painting. Both the imagery and the pictorial
syntax indicate that Klee had read Apollinaire’s poem “The Windows” as
well as his essay on modern painting.
By his own account “The Windows” was one of Apollinaire’s favorite
poems. He called it a “conversation poem,” although what he meant by that
is not absolutely certain.42 The poem is usually described as a verbal collage of
speech fragments — an explanation that is given credence by the absence of
punctuation marks and abrupt shifts in semantic units. According to one
of his literary friends, Apollinaire improvised conversational discourse by jux-
taposing snippets of dialogue overheard in a café.43 This particular set of cir-
cumstances was called into question by Robert and Sonia Delaunay, who
claimed that Apollinaire wrote the poem in their studio.44 Wherever
Apollinaire was when he actually composed the poem, it clearly incorporates
references to conversational exchanges with Delaunay. The opening line,
“Du rouge au vert tout le jaune se meurt” (“From red to green all the yel-
low dies”) imposes poetic syntax on the vocabulary of Delaunay’s color the-
ory, and the last two lines, “La fenêtre s’ouvre comme une orange / Le beau
fruit de la lumière” (“The window opens like an orange / the lovely fruit of
light”) were the source of Delaunay’s remark that color is the “fruit of
light.”45 Mindful that “The Windows” was to be published as an introduc-
tion to reproductions of Delaunay’s paintings, Apollinaire made an effort to
incorporate the poetic counterpart of Delaunay’s pictorial simultaneity.
Although the term itself is not invoked in “The Windows,” the concept
informs every aspect of the poem, from the technique of verbal collage to
the construction of meaning on the part of the viewer.
Given Apollinaire’s title, the reader anticipates that windows will be
dominant figurative motifs. Even a cursory reading reveals the extent to
which the window motif also introduces and sustains the concept of simul-
taneity. The title refers not only to the imagery and picture titles of
Delaunay’s Window series but also to the three times the singular form of
the word appears in the body of the poem. Used twice at the ends of lines
and once at the beginning, “la fenêtre” is one of several nouns and names
that are strategically placed such that sequential repetitions call attention
to the poem’s spatial layout. The window motif also afforded Apollinaire
the opportunity to incorporate multiple spatial perspectives. When the
window is cited as an architectural element (“Une vieille paire de chaus-
sures jaunes devant la fenêtre” [“An old pair of yellow boots in front of the
window”]),46 it specifies an interior space. Conversely, when it is invoked
figuratively, as it is in the last lines of the poem, it implies an exterior point
of view. These changes in spatial orientation have temporal parallels in
Apollinaire’s consistent shifts in verb tenses. Nowhere is this more evident
than in the following three lines:
Tu soulèveras le rideau You’ll raise the curtain
Et maintenant voilà que s’ouvre And now see the window
la fenêtre opening
Araignées quand les mains tissaient Spiders when hands wove the
la lumière light.47
A comparison of these lines with Klee’s View from a Window, reveals a
striking similarity between Apollinaire’s verbal imagery and Klee’s visual
imagery. This alone would support the conjecture that Apollinaire’s poem
“The Windows” contributed to Klee’s changing views of “the poetic.”
Not so obvious but even more significant are analogies that extend beyond
figurative imagery to the process of fragmentation and the concept of
simultaneity.
Although not literally a collage, View from a Window is yet another
example of Klee’s technique of composing by cutting. An insert that corres-
ponds in its placement to the lower half of a double-paned window disrupts
the visual continuity of the view from an interior space looking out. Images
of a flower in a vase, a tree, a window, and a hip-roofed tower are as self-
contained as Apollinaire’s fragments of conversation or the fragments of
landscape in Klee’s own poem “(help build).”48 Klee’s visual fragments are
framed by curtains that incorporate a brick foundation, roof tiles, and vari-
ations on the schematic window signs in Rhythm of the Windows, as well as
sections of the patterned ironwork from Delaunay’s representations of the
Eiffel Tower. View from a Window does not conform to the logic of picto-
rial perspective but instead intentionally challenges that logic by juxtapos-
ing image fragments represented in different scales. Like the curtains, the
landscape imagery is delineated in white paint layered over patches of color.
Line and color are perceived simultaneously, even though they function
independently, with color having no more representational value than it
does in Apollinaire’s evocations of color (“Beauté pâleur insondables vio-
lets” [“Beauty paleness fathomless violets”]).49 As in Apollinaire’s poem,
the window is a figurative motif that indicates shifts in spatial orientation.

Beginning in 1918, the window in Klee’s work becomes increasingly
schematic and repetitious. Although it reemerges as both an internal frame
and an independent pictorial motif in View from a Window, the window is
also repeated in patterns that generate structural rhythms. In this capacity
it functions temporally, like the structural rhythms of poetry, unifying dis-
parate objects in a nonillusionistic spatial setting.
By the mid-twenties Klee had reduced the window motif to a sign that
is all but absorbed into the surface patterns of his pictographic paintings,
such as Cathedral. In these later works Klee arranged pictographic signs
linguistically, in effect obviating any vestiges of difference between spatial
and temporal structures. At the same time, he began to design geometric
configurations with dense concentrations of parallel lines. He pursued this
experimental direction in a suite of drawings initiated by Classical Garden
(Klassischer Garten, 1926/1), his first dated work in 1926. The suite
consists of no fewer than twelve drawings, most of which combine linear
patterns with watercolor grounds. The drawings are linked thematically by
titles that evoke classical architecture in garden settings and stylistically by
a common visual vocabulary of parallel lines that define forms and the pic-
torial settings they occupy. Examples include A Garden for Orpheus (Ein
Garten für Orpheus, 1926/3) (fig. 29), Ruins of Oi . . . (Ruinen von
Oi . . ., 1926/14), View of a Mountain Sanctuary (Ansicht eines Berg-
Heiligtums, 1926/18), and Temple of Bj. (Tempel von Bj., 1926/59).50 The
stylistic shift evident in these drawings could have been precipitated by one
of the exercises Klee devised for his students at the Bauhaus.51 This kind of
reciprocity between Klee’s pedagogical and studio practice was not
unusual. It is equally plausible that the parallel line drawings from 1926
were modeled on one or more external sources. Klee scholars have pro-
posed numerous possibilities.
Citing similarities between the linear configurations of the 1926 draw-
ings and patterns common to weaving, Werner Haftmann has suggested
that Klee may have been looking at the plaited ornamentation of Viking
decorative arts.52 More recently the curators of an exhibition on ornament
and abstraction placed examples of Klee’s parallel line drawings in the con-
text of “reversible abstraction,” or the figuration of the abstract that is
common to some forms of ornamentation.53 Other scholars have detected
musical analogies in Klee’s parallel linear patterns. Will Grohmann found
the tightly structured composition of A Garden for Orpheus reminiscent of
“the stringent conventions of ancient tragedies or the musical style of
Gluck’s Greek operas.”54 Indeed, the imitative linear rhythms of Klee’s
Garden for Orpheus are not unlike the controlled musical lines of
Christoph Willibald Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice. Although analogies such as
these are useful in analyzing the stylistic features of A Garden for Orpheus,
they do not account for the fact that this drawing is one in a series that
Disclaimer:

Fig. 29: Paul Klee, A Garden for Orpheus (1926/3). Pen and watercolor on paper
mounted on cardboard, 47 ⫻ 32/32.5 cm. Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern. © 2006 Artists
Zentrum Paul Klee.
develops a common theme. In this respect Klee’s parallel line drawings

have more in common with Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus (Die Sonette an
Orpheus), a sonnet sequence composed in 1922 and published a year later.
Klee’s documented references to Rilke are more frankly effusive and
admiring than his single guarded mention of Hesse. An entry in the
Diaries records the circumstances of Klee’s first meeting with Rilke. At the
urging of Hermann Probst, who had purchased several of his watercolors,
Klee sent a selection of works on paper to Rilke. Much to Klee’s delight,
the poet returned the works in person. After reading passages from the
Book of Images (Buch der Bilder) and The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
(Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge), Klee concluded that
Rilke’s sensibility was very similar to his own.55 Rilke’s name surfaces again
in Klee’s catalogue of the artists and writers who belonged to his intellectual
circle in Munich.56 There is no record of any contact between the two dur-
ing the war, when both men were drafted into military service. In the post-
war years Klee eagerly resumed work, whereas Rilke sunk into a depression
precipitated by the psychic traumas of the war. By most accounts, Rilke’s

Sonnets to Orpheus and the Duino Elegies (Duineser Elegien) were com-
pleted in a creative frenzy after a fallow period of recovery. Both collections
of poetry met with popular as well as critical acclaim, so it is not surprising
that the Klees acquired copies shortly after they were published.57
Grohmann has speculated as to the possible referential relationship
between Klee’s late drawings of angels and the Duino Elegies. Similarly,
Geelhaar has cited “Orpheus, Eurydice, Hermes” from Rilke’s New Poetry
in commenting on the symbolic implications of A Garden for Orpheus.58
Following their examples, I shall explore other parallels between Klee’s
drawing and Rilke’s poetry.
Apparently Klee was partial to A Garden for Orpheus, which he
decided to keep after initially offering it up for sale.59 An analysis of this
drawing suggests that he might well have singled it out as a particularly
successful example of transcontextualizing poetry, specifically Rilke’s
Sonnets to Orpheus. The sonnet sequence or cycle has been described as a
major vehicle of Romantic and post-Romantic poetic construction,60 with
Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus often cited as a high point of the genre in the
modern era. Despite the occasional intrusion of the machine and other
images of modernity, Rilke’s repertoire of nature imagery is as vestigially
Romantic as the sonnet sequence itself. The “immer selig bewässerte
Gärten” (“watered, ever-blissful gardens”) in sonnet #17, part 2, and the
gardens “wie in Glas / eingegossene” (“like those poured in glass”) from
sonnet #21, part 2,61 resonate in the lush but chiseled vegetation of the
landscape Klee designed for the mythological Orpheus. Even isolated
images such as the “Bienensaug” (“blossoming nettles”) featured in son-
net #10, part 1, and the “Blütenstern” (“blossom-star”) that emerges
from sonnet #5, part 2,62 have their visual counterparts in A Garden for
Orpheus and other drawings in the series of landscapes dating from early
1926. In addition to the compound nouns and simile cited here, Rilke
employed a variety of other poetic figures, creating complex patterns of
imagery that are simultaneously dense and lucid. Klee achieved the same
combination of density and transparency in A Garden for Orpheus by lay-
ering closely spaced lines over cream-colored paper stained with a mot-
tled, pale-gold wash. Less readily apparent are analogies that extend
beyond subject matter and imagery to include compositional form and
structural devices.
A Garden for Orpheus and the other landscapes from early 1926 are
not grouped under a single title, nor do the catalogue numbers follow an
unbroken sequence, like the drawings that make up The Infernal Park
(1939/238–253). In both respects the parallel line drawings are compara-
ble to the etched Inventions that constitute Klee’s Opus One. Very likely
Klee did not intend to produce a series any more than Rilke set out to
write a sequence. Instead, Klee’s series, like Rilke’s sequence, evolved in
the process of experimenting with a prescribed compositional form. For

Rilke that form was the rhymed sonnet; for Klee it was the traditionally
structured landscape. In writing the Sonnets to Orpheus, Rilke adhered to
the fourteen-line sonnet form, but he varied line lengths and rhyme
schemes, often challenging the regularity of the rhythmic patterns and end
rhymes by introducing ellipses, abrupt transitions, and enjambments.
Similarly, Klee never tired of investigating new ways to deconstruct and
reconstruct landscapes in which the illusion of three-dimensionality is
imposed by the conventions of perspective and modeling. In A Garden for
Orpheus he replaced the traditionally integrated foreground, middle
ground, and background with superimposed horizontal registers that cor-
respond to the four-part stanzaic structure of Rilke’s sonnets. Moreover,
just as each stanza of a sonnet has its linear structure, so, too, do Klee’s
compositional units. The parallel lines that delineate compositional regis-
ters stretch horizontally across the surface of the drawing. In contrast, the
linear patterns that define discrete motifs within the layered composition
appear to converge toward multiple vanishing points in an indeterminate
pictorial space. Thus, A Garden for Orpheus concedes to the expectations
of spatial recession but does so with linear patterns that defy the conven-
tions of linear perspective. Klee’s linear patterns also challenge another tra-
ditional device for achieving pictorial illusionism. Graphic artists of the past
would have used parallel lines to indicate shading, thus creating the illu-
sion of three-dimensional forms. The fact that Klee used parallel lines to
achieve the opposite effect is yet another indication that he consulted a
structural prototype outside the parameters of the visual arts.
In pursuing the comparison with Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus, it would
be pushing the point to claim that the configurations of parallel lines in
A Garden for Orpheus are literal transcriptions of the figurative patterns in
any particular poem or group of poems. It is nevertheless true that parallel
constructions are far more prevalent in poetry than in the visual arts.
Although not grammatically restricted to verse, parallelism is a common
form of poetic syntax. Parallel syntactic patterns can operate at the level of
single phrases, like Klee’s own “Weh mir” (“Woe is me”) (fig. 8), or
throughout an entire poem or sequence of poems. Rilke’s Sonnets to
Orpheus offers a full range of examples, from the apostrophic “O” to binary
pairings that connect the two parts of the sequence. The most striking —
because it combines a verb with a quite unexpected object — is “Tanzt die
Orange” (“Dance the orange”), which begins the second and third stanzas
of sonnet #15, part 1.63 In this instance the parallel construction shapes an
extended figure of speech and unifies the verse structure of a sonnet in
which lines do not consistently correspond to either syntactical or semantic
units. Other examples of parallelism — including recurring references to
fruit and invocations of Orpheus — function thematically, unifying the fifty-
five sonnets within a cycle that celebrates a synesthetic response to nature.
Klee’s parallel-line constructions likewise give shape to individual motifs

and serve as unifying elements not only within each drawing but also within
a series, albeit a loosely structured one.
A Garden for Orpheus and other parallel-line drawings present com-
pelling evidence to support the theory that poetry served as a model for
Klee’s modernist challenges to the conventions of landscape painting. Since
the Renaissance, shading has traditionally been used to define forms, and lin-
ear perspective has been a principal means of unifying a coherently struc-
tured pictorial space. In A Garden for Orpheus these traditional functions of
line are served by linear patterns that seem to have originated in poetic rather
than pictorial syntax. By appropriating a structural device from the domain
of poetry, Klee added to his catalogue of linear inventions designed to break
down traditional distinctions between the spatial and temporal arts.
As with virtually all of his pictorial experiments, Klee did not abandon
parallel-line constructions once he had solved the challenge he posed
for himself. Later variations include paintings such as Gate in the Garden
(Tor im Garten, 1926/81) — in which forms are defined with thickly
applied, parallel strokes of oil paint — and Rock Cut Temple (Felsentempel,
1927/61) — a variation on drawings of the same motif dating from 1925
and 1926.64 Klee’s penchant for retrieving and reworking successful picto-
rial experiments is nowhere more evident than in his periodic return to the
palimpsest, a compositional technique that he undoubtedly discovered by
chance when he first began working over recycled paper supports. An early
example is the Striding Figure (Ausschreitende Figur, 1915/75), which
layers the drawing of a figure over the verso of a commercially printed
handbill, with its Gothic type visible through the thin paper. More subtle
is the late landscape Klee entitled Park Near Lu (Park bei Lu, 1938/129)
(fig. 30), which is painted over a barely visible newspaper support. As early
as 1917 Hugo Ball described Klee’s works as palimpsests.65 There is no rea-
son to assume that Ball knew the Striding Figure when he used this term
in the diaries published as Flight Out of Time (Die Flucht aus der Zeit), so
he may well have used it metaphorically rather than literally. In either case
he was obviously familiar with the prevalence of the palimpsest as a com-
positional strategy in modern art.
In its earliest manifestations, the palimpsest is a handwritten text lay-
ered over the partially obliterated remnants of a previously recorded text.
Although the palimpsest probably originated for reasons of economy, there
would always have been a value judgment attached to the decision that one
text is more worthy of a stone surface or a parchment support than
another. In the history of literature the palimpsest as a vehicle of cultural
continuity has become a model of writing by editing, critiquing, or other-
wise commenting on earlier texts. Thus, while one group of literary the-
orists referred to the palimpsest as “a master metaphor,”66 another scholar
used the term as a synonym for what he called “literature in the second
Disclaimer:

Fig. 30: Paul Klee, Park Near Lu (1938/129). Oil and colored paste on newspaper
on burlap, with original frame. 100 ⫻ 70 cm. Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern. © 2006
Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Photograph courtesy
of the Zentrum Paul Klee.
degree.”67 The history of the palimpsest in visual culture can be traced

from prehistoric cave paintings to contemporary art practice, with a par-
ticularly rich trove of examples available from the twentieth century.
Ranging chronologically from the verbal puns of the cubist collages to the
postmodern defacing of Arnulf Rainer’s self-portraits, the palimpsest flour-
ished throughout the twentieth century. A common denominator of the
modernist and postmodern palimpsest is a high degree of self-conscious-
ness about the integration of process and meaning. Like his modernist
contemporaries, Marcel Duchamp, Miró, and Schwitters, Klee exploited
the full range of possibilities offered by the multilayered palimpsest.
Whether painting over one of his own discarded sketches or working
over a newspaper support, Klee made conscious decisions about how much
of the original text to reveal. The letters in Alphabet I (1938/187) and
Alphabet II (1938/188) are layered over clearly legible pages from daily
newspapers, which establish contextual grounds for the alphabetic over-
lays. In contrast, the oil paint and black paste on the surface of Insula
Dulcamara (1938/481) covers an underlying newspaper support,

concealing a printed text that might encode the kind of autobiographical
information Klee was loathe to make available for public scrutiny.68 If the
alphabet drawings and Insula Dulcamara represent the polar opposites of
transparency and obscurity, respectively, Park Near Lu can be placed at a
midpoint on the spectrum. Here landscape motifs are drawn in thick black
paste and framed by organically shaped fields of colored pigment. Each
black form is separated from its colored backdrop by a negative contour
that recalls Klee’s earlier experiments with “white energy” on a dark
ground. In this case the white contours were neither added to the surface
nor scratched out of it. Rather, they were delineated by leaving a space
between the top layer of oil paint and the white ground. Beneath the
exposed, transparent ground are fragments of a printed text that are visi-
ble though not legible. As in all of Klee’s palimpsests, this residue of an
underlying text is an integral part of the structure and content of Park
Near Lu.
The term “palimpsest” applies figuratively as well as literally to Park
Near Lu. Klee’s works are often reiterations of familiar subjects, motifs,
and experimental methods.69 Such is the case with Park Near Lu, which is
one among literally hundreds of memory images of parks and gardens that
give thematic continuity to Klee’s oeuvre.70 More often than not, these
landscapes filter perceptual experience through remembered imagery. The
tree forms in Park Near Lu have their origin in a series of ten penmanship
exercises dating from 1892, each of which pairs an initial letter with a text
copied out in a different script. The trompe l’oeil twigs that shape the ini-
tial F and the leafy curves of the illuminated I and R are grafted together
in Park Near Lu to form a composite sign that can simultaneously be read
as an uppercase L and a stylized tree.71 As in Landscape with Gallows and
other paintings that contain alphabetic signs, the letter forms are visual
abstractions that retain the possibility of linguistic reference. Klee himself
provided just such a reference with the fragment “Lu,” which is actually
written out in his oeuvre catalogue as “L(uzern).” Many scholars connect
this place reference to the fact that Lily Klee periodically retreated to a
health resort near Lucerne during the thirties.72 Such a circumstantial allu-
sion merits further consideration because it brings Klee’s Park Near Lu full
circle, back to the “poetic-personal idea of landscape” that informs his
early artistic practice.
According to Klee’s published correspondence with family members,
Lily Klee was initially in residence at Sonnmatt, near Lucerne, from late
March to early October 1930. This prolonged stay was followed by shorter
visits in the fall of 1933 and again in the spring of 1939. Presumably the
establishment, variously described as a sanatorium and a resort hotel, was
the Kurhaus Sonnmatt, which specialized in diet and physical culture.73
A 1930 photograph of the Klees in an outdoor setting at Sonnmatt shows
a serene, smiling Lily next to her husband, whose facial expression could
be described as either grimly serious or stubbornly petulant.74 Whatever his
mood, Klee seems to have been determined to maintain a cheerful facade
in his letters, writing at length about his activities and the weather, allud-
ing to his wife’s health regime only briefly and reassuringly. There are,
however, occasional hints of strain, as in Klee’s awkward effort at light-
hearted banter about who should be congratulated on the occasion of the
couple’s twenty-fourth wedding anniversary, which the two spent apart.75
Lily Klee’s subsequent stay at Sonnmatt in 1933 seems to have been
arranged to coincide with her husband’s Mediterranean holiday. His
breezy notes to her enroute to Port Cros again allude only briefly to the
state of her health, and they make no mention of the increasingly hostile
political climate that would force the Klees to leave Germany in December
1933, just two months after Lily’s return from Sonnmatt.76 Two years after
returning to Bern, Klee began to suffer from the early symptoms of scle-
roderma. He alluded to his own illness by way of explaining to his wife why
he was not up to visiting her in Sonnmatt in May 1939.77 There is no way
of knowing exactly when Lily Klee began making plans for her return to
Sonnmatt in April 1939 or when Klee began painting Park Near Lu the
year before. It can only be speculated that the anticipation of her return
visit was the catalyst that triggered the memory image externalized in Park
Near Lu.
In one of those ironies that retrospection often reveals, when he
painted Park Near Lu in 1938, Klee could look back wistfully to the visit
with his spouse in Sonnmatt eight years earlier. His visual reminiscence of
an autumnal landscape is rich in hue, subdued in tone, and graceful in its
linear rhythms. It has been described by one Klee scholar as melodious and
by another as lyrical.78 Both of these descriptive modifiers suggest a paral-
lel to poetry — specifically to lyric poetry, which originated in music.
Although definitions of lyric poetry have been modified over time, the one
constant feature is a structural form based on its melodic origins. In add-
ition, modern usage displays a pronounced tendency toward subjectivity in
the choice of subject and imagery. Given this combination of structural
and thematic elements, it is not surprising that lyric poetry lends itself to
both musical and visual settings. By integrating spectral fragments of a
printed text into the linear structure of his painting, Klee seems to have
invited speculation concerning the relationship between his image and its
textual support. Yet he intentionally obscured the specific identity of the
text, implying either that he had no particular text in mind or that the spe-
cific content was not as important as its linguistic structure. Parallels
between Park Near Lu and the first movement of composer Max Reger’s
Romantic Suite (Eine romantische Suite) support the speculation that
Klee’s palimpsest was conceived as a visual gloss on the structural and the-
matic features of lyric poetry in the Romantic tradition.
In 1912 Reger premiered A Romantic Suite, program music for orches-

tra based on poems by Joseph von Eichendorff. At the time, Klee was living
in Munich and attended a performance. Although he mentioned it only
briefly in a review he wrote for Die Alpen,79 his practice as a poet and musi-
cian would have given him a particularly keen insight into Reger’s treatment
of Eichendorff’s poetry. A Romantic Suite is technically identified as such
because of its three movements, yet each movement closely corresponds to
a specific poem printed in the score and therefore assumes the character of
an individual tone poem. “Notturno,” the first movement of the suite, was
written to Eichendorff’s “Night Magic” (“Nachtzauber”), a pensive, deeply
personal evocation of sensory responses to nightfall in a mountain landscape.
Reger’s symphonic interpretation of Eichendorff’s nocturnal theme begins
with a plaintive melody, wistfully articulated by strings. As the orchestral sup-
port expands, chromatic harmony and tonal color create heightened emo-
tional intensity. At a point in the movement that corresponds to the
midpoint of Eichendorff’s ten-line poem, the orchestral volume diminishes
as the melodic line descends:
Von den Bergen sacht hernieder, Softly coming down the mountains,
Weckend die uralten Lieder, Awakening the ancient songs,
Steigt die wunderbare Nacht The wondrous night descends.80
Klee may or may not have recalled hearing Reger’s Romantic Suite, but his
Park Near Lu is similarly Romantic in mood and lyrical in its linear struc-
ture. As in the past, Klee envisioned the landscape as a “background for
the soul’s moods,” in this case one of melancholic nostalgia. A palette-
dominated by blues, pale violet, burnt umber, and yellow ochre conveys a
resiliency of spirit that is perceptibly tempered by a muted, crepuscular
light. Line in Klee’s painting is no more literally descriptive than color. Its
primary function corresponds to the function of line in lyric poetry, which
is to impose a melodic, rhythmic structure. Just as the linear patterns of a
lyric poem give form to the words and the images they evoke, the linear
rhythms of Park Near Lu define forms that are both linguistic and pictor-
ial, thereby reinforcing the possibility that a remembered poetic text
underlies Klee’s painted palimpsest.
Even as Klee resigned himself to the inevitability of his own end, he
could celebrate the cyclical continuity of nature in a painting that revives
and reinvents a concept of landscape painting that had its origins in the
theory and practice of Romanticism across artistic media. His “poetic-
personal idea of landscape” is Romantic in its affirmation of human feeling
and its implicit understanding of nature as a site of introspective rumina-
tion.81 Just as his concept of the poetic changed over time, merging with
his allegiance to pictorial abstraction, so did his “poetic-personal idea
of landscape,” although his landscape painting remained a vehicle for
expressing moods and feelings. Klee’s measured moves toward abstraction
coincided with what he identified in his “Creative Credo” as one of the

seismic shifts of modernism, namely, from recording the visible to making
the invisible visible. No doubt because the tradition of landscape painting
is intrinsically associated with the representation of visible reality, he looked
to poetry as an alternative source of imagery and formal structure. In
experimenting with the visual equivalents of these aspects of poetry, Klee
developed a personal vocabulary of forms and an equally personal style of
expression. Not coincidentally, he also discovered the rhythmic patterns
that he characterized as “architectonic” or structural.
Notes
1
Tagebücher #56, 31 January 1898, 24 (Diaries, 16).
2
Tagebücher, #63, 1898, 28 (Diaries, 21). The early sketchbooks are reproduced
in the Catalogue raisonné, 1:59–120.
3
Tagebücher, #109, 1900, 50 (Diaries, 39).
4
Tagebücher, #421 in the text for Zahn, 1920, 520. In writing the text for Zahn,
Klee retained the numbered diary entries but made substantive changes and refine-
ments. This is one of many instances where a passage from one of three autobio-
graphical texts is incorporated into the English translation (Diaries, 122).
5
Scholarly assessments of Klee’s relationship to the German Romantic tradition
range from firm conviction (Glaesemer, “Paul Klee and German Romanticism,”
65–81) to concurrence with a note of caution (Franciscono, Klee, 2–4).
6
Friedrich von Schelling, “Concerning the Relation of the Plastic Arts to Nature”
[“Über das Verhältnis der bildenden Kunst zu der Natur,”1807], trans. Michael
Bullock, in The True Voice of Feeling: Studies in English Romantic Poetry, ed.
Herbert Edward Read (New York: Patheon, 1953), 324.
7
Heinrich von Kleist, “Brief eines Jungen Dichters an einen Jungen Maler,” in
Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, ed. Helmut Sembdner (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1961),
2:336–37. This essay was first published in epistolary form in November 1810.
8
This observation is made in Art in Theory, 1815–1900: An Anthology of Changing
Ideas, ed. Charles Harrison, Paul Wood, and Jason Gaiger (Oxford: Blackwell,
1998), 690.
9
See Robert Vischer, “On the Optical Sense of Form: A Contribution to
Aesthetics,” in Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics,
1873–1893, trans. Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou (Santa
Monica, CA: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1994),
102–9.
10
For a color reproduction of this untitled work, see Catalogue raisonné, 1:147.
11
A comprehensive list of exhibiting artists is contained in the catalogue
Ausstellung deutscher Kunst aus der Zeit von 1775–1875. Gemälde: Königliche
Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Januar bis Mai 1906. Klee recorded his visit to this exhi-
bition in the Diaries, listing Anselm Feuerbach, Adolph Menzel, and Max Liebermann
among those artists to whom he devoted the most attention (Tagebücher #765, 11
April 1906, 239; Diaries, 200). Although he did not name Friedrich here or in
his correspondence, at some point Klee acquired a pamphlet with color rep-
roductions of his work now in the Klee library (Caspar David Friedrich, Acht far-
bige Wiedergaben nach seinen Bildern (Leipzig: E. A. Seemans Künstlermappen,
#74, n.d.).
12
See Friedrich Ramdohr, “Über ein zum Altarblatte bestimmtes
Landschaftsgemälde von Herrn Friedrich in Dresden, und über Landschaftsmalerei,
Allegorie und Mystizismus überhaupt,” in Caspar David Friedrich in Briefen und
Bekenntnissen, ed. Sigrid Hinz (Munich: Rogner & Bernhard, 1974), 134–51.
13
Karl Ludwig Fernow, “On Landscape Painting” [“Über die Landschaftsmalerei,”
1803], in Art in Theory, 1648–1815: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. Charles
Harrison, Paul Wood, and Jason Gaiger (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 1069.
14
Carl Gustav Carus, Neun Briefe über Landschaftsmalerei, geschrieben in den
Jahren 1815 bis 1824, ed. Kurt Gerstenberg (Dresden: W. Jess, n.d.), #5, 96–97. On
purity and modern art, see Mark A. Cheetham, The Rhetoric of Purity: Essentialist
Theory and the Advent of Abstract Painting (New York: Cambridge UP, 1991).
15
Adolf von Hildebrand, The Problem of Form in Painting and Sculpture, trans.
and ed. Max Meyer and Robert Morris Ogden (New York: G. E. Stechert, 1907),
36.
16
Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology
of Style, trans. Michael Bullock (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1997), 45; originally pub-
lished as Abstraktion und Einfühlung: Ein Beitrag zur Stilpsychologie (Munich: R.
Piper, 1908). A 1918 edition of this publication is in the Klee library. Numerous
scholars link Klee’s theories to this publication. See Carol Ann Lees, “Klee and
Worringer: Elective Affinities in an Aesthetic Partnership” (M.A. thesis, McGill
University, 1991). See also Jenny Anger, Paul Klee and the Decorative in Modern
Art (New York: Cambridge UP, 2004), 25–27; hereafter cited as Klee and the
Decorative.
17
Wassily Kandinsky, On the Spiritual in Art, ed. and trans. Hilla Rebay (New
York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1946), 47, 54–55, 88; Über das
Geistige in der Kunst, with an introd. by Max Bill (Bern: Benteli, 1952), 69,
78–79, 127. For Worringer’s influence on both Kandinsky and Klee, see Mark
Roskill, Klee, Kandinsky, and the Thought of Their Time: A Critical Perspective
(Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1992), 14; hereafter cited as Klee, Kandinsky.
18
For an analysis of Klee’s references to energy, see my essay “Paul Klee and the
Energetics-Atomistics Controversy,” Leonardo 26 (1993): 311.
19
Many scholars have written extensively about Klee’s early landscapes. See, e.g.,
Franciscono, Klee, 24–31, and Glaesemer, Colored Works, 12–23. For reproduc-
tions of the works cited in this paragraph, see the following volumes of
the Catalogue raisonné: untitled screen, 1:170; Well-Tended Forest Path, 1:289;
Tree Lined Street, 1:261; Red Church and White Panel, 1:419; Houses in the
Outskirts, 2:95.
20
Tagebücher #951, 1915, 365 (Diaries, 313). For a detailed study of Klee’s con-
cept of Romanticism, see Glaesemer, “Klee and German Romanticism,” 65–81.
21
Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art
Forms (New York: Methuen, 1985), 1–29; hereafter cited as Theory of Parody.
22
Goethe’s critique, contained in an 1826 letter to F. Förster, is cited in William
Vaughan, German Romantic Painting (New Haven: Yale UP, 1980), 137.
23
Vaughan, German Romantic Painting, 133, 154–56.
24
Ramdohr, “Über ein zum Altarblatte bestimmtes Landschaftsgemälde,” 147.
25
Hutcheon, Theory of Parody, 6. Although not in the spirit of parody, Glaesemer
compares Klee’s Mural from the Temple of Longing “Over There” (Wandbild aus
dem Tempel der Sehnsucht “dorthin,” 1922/30) with Friedrich’s Wanderer over a
Sea of Fog, c. 1818 (“Klee and German Romanticism,” 67–69).
26
For reproductions of these works, see the following volumes in the Catalogue
raisonné: The Hanged Ones, 2:85; Gallows Humor, 3:45.
27
Hutcheon introduces this concept in Theory of Parody (14), although she uses
examples other than those cited here. Pound scholar Gail McDonald of the
University of North Carolina Greensboro informed me that Pound added another
layer of parodic coding in writing an opera entitled Le Testament de Villon.
28
Morgenstern, Galgenlieder, 41. Translation by Fritz Janschka. I again cite the
copy in the Klee library, in which this poem, like others, is marked with a red ‘X’
next to the title.
29
On references to Klee’s narrative of process, which I compare to the process nar-
ratives of contemporary writers, see the index to my book Klee’s Pictorial Writing,
242.
30
31
For a historical analysis of this study, see Johanna Drucker, The Alphabetic
Labyrinth: The Letters in History and Imagination (New York: Thames and
Hudson, 1995), 221–25.
32
For surrealist analogies between a painting and a window, see André Breton,
“Le Surréalisme et la peinture,” La Révolution surréaliste, no. 4 (1925): 27. Cf.
Magritte’s painting The Human Condition (La Condition humaine) of 1933.
33
Cited by Delaunay in “De Leonardo da Vinci,” Du Cubisme à l’art abstrait,
175. Delaunay’s annotations may pertain to the following French edition of
Leonardo’s writings: “Parallèle entre la peinture et la poésie,” #73, Traité de la
peinture (Paris: Libraire Ch. Delagrave, 1910), 33.
34
Delaunay, “La Lumière,” in Du Cubisme à l’art abstrait, 146.
35
See, e.g., Glaesemer, Colored Works, 50; Jordan, Klee and Cubism, 170–71; and
my “Paul Klee’s Composition with Windows: An Homage and an Elegy,” Word &
Image Interactions (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998), 2:109–20. For documentation
and analysis of Delaunay’s influence in Germany, see the exhibition catalogue
Delaunay und Deutschland, ed. Peter-Klaus Schuster (Munich: Staatsgalerie
Moderner Kunst / Cologne: DuMont, 1985).
36
Wolfgang Kersten places View from a Window in the context of other works that
incorporate the window motif; see his essay “Hoch taxiert: Paul Klees Ölbild
Bühnenlandschaft 1922/178. Versuch einer historischen Einordnung,” in 9
Gemälde des Deutschen Expressionismus, vol. 1 of Meisterwerke (Munich: Galerie
Thomas, 1995), 112–21. For reproductions of the works cited in this paragraph,
see the following volumes in the Catalogue raisonné: The Draughtsman at the
Window, 1:308; View onto a Square, 1:417; Window and Palms, 2:162; Reflecting
Window, 2:310; Window in the Garden, 2:435; Composition with Window, 3:111;
Rhythm of the Windows, 3:159.
37
Briefe, vol. 2, 2 July 1919, 958. Klee mentioned that Moilliet was in Ticino with
Hesse at the time. Although Felix Klee informed Verdi that his father knew Hesse’s
work (Verdi, Klee and Nature, 251 n. 90), Klee never mentioned any of Hesse’s
publications, nor are any listed in the inventory of the Klee library.
38
For an extensive discussion of Klee and Hesse, see Verdi, Klee and Nature, 233–37.
39
Hermann Hesse, Die Morgenlandfahrt (Zurich: Fretz und Wasmuth, 1932), 94;
also cited in Verdi, Klee and Nature, 233. Translation by Fritz Janschka.
40
For a reproduction of Hesse’s work, see Hermann Hesse, Gedichte des Malers:
Zehn Gedichte mit Farbigen Zeichnungen (1920; reprint, Freiburg: Kirchhoff,
1954), 20; hereafter cited as Gedichte des Malers. Compare it to Klee’s two paint-
ings, both reproduced in the Catalogue raisonné, 2:295.
41
Hesse, “Häuser, Felder, Gartenzaun,” Gedichte des Malers, 10–11.
42
Quoted in Apollinaire, Calligrammes: Poems of Peace and War (1913–1916),
trans. Ann Hyde Greet, with an introd. by S. I. Lockerbie (Los Angeles: U of
California P, 1980), 4; hereafter cited as Caligrammes.
43
Caligrammes, 349.
44
Caligrammes., 349.
45
For the English translation cited here see Caligrammes, 27, 29; for the full text
see Apollinaire, “Les Fenêtres,” in Oeuvres complètes, 3:160–61. The Delaunay ref-
erence is to Du Cubisme à l’art abstrait, 60.
46
Apollinaire, “Les Fenêtres,” 160.
47
48
This poem, which I quoted and discussed in chapter 1, was recorded in the
notebook of “Geduchte” in the mid-twenties and probably postdates View from a
Window. For an analysis of this painting, see Kersten and Okuda, Im Zeichen der
Teilung, 75.
49
50
For comprehensive documentation of these and related works dating from
1925–26, see Catalogue raisonné, 4:394–419. For reproductions, see: Classical
Garden, 4:399; Ruins of Oi . . ., 4:404; View of a Mountain Sanctuary, 4:405;
Temple of Bj., 4:419.
51
Geelhaar notes that the parallel line drawings of 1926 mark a shift from the sta-
tic to the dynamic; see his Paul Klee and the Bauhaus (Greenwich, CT: New York
Graphic Society, 1973), 100; hereafter cited as Klee and the Bauhaus. Kersten and
Okuda discuss A Garden for Orpheus in the context of the principle of “cardinal
progression”; see Im Zeichen der Teilung, 192.
52
Werner Haftmann, The Mind and Work of Paul Klee (New York: Praeger, 1954),
175–76; this is a translation of his Wege bildnerischen Denkens.
53
The quotation is from Markus Brüderlin, “Die Einheit in der Differenz: Die
Bedeutung des Ornaments für die Abstrakte Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts, von
Philipp Otto Runge bis Frank Stella” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wuppertal, 1995),
which is cited by Philippe Büttner in the catalogue essay, “In the Beginning Was
the Ornament: From the Arabesque to Modernism’s Abstract Line,” in Ornament
and Abstraction: The Dialogue between Non-Western, Modern and Contemporary
Art, ed. Markus Brüderlin (Basel: Fondation Beyeler / Cologne: DuMont, 2001),
100; hereafter cited as Brüderlin, ed., Ornament and Abstraction. For an in-depth
analysis of the complexities related to ornament and abstraction in Klee’s work, see
Anger, Klee and the Decorative.
54
Will Grohmann, Paul Klee (New York: Abrams, n.d.), 87, 260; hereafter cited
as Klee. Max Huggler pursued the musical analogy in Paul Klee: Die Malerei als
Blick in den Kosmos (Frauenfeld: Huber, 1969), 94–95; hereafter cited as Die
Malerei als Blick in den Kosmos. See also my “Paul Klee’s Operatic Themes and
Variations,” Art Bulletin 68 (September 1986): 452–53; hereafter cited as “Paul
Klee’s Operatic Themes.”
55
Tagebücher #959, 1915, 369 (Diaries, 317).
56
Tagebücher, #963, summer 1915, 373–74 (Diaries, 322). On Rilke’s relation-
ships with Klee and other artists, see Gisela Götte, Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker, and
Ursel Berger, eds., Rainer Maria Rilke und die bildende Kunst seiner Zeit (Munich:
Prestel, 1996).
57
The copy of Rilke’s Sonette an Orpheus (Leipzig: Insel-Verlag, 1923) in the Klee
library is signed and dated Lily Klee, 24.XII.23. This is one of eleven volumes of
Rilke’s poetry and letters owned by the Klees. The probability that Klee read these
sonnets is also noted by Kathryn Elaine Kramer in her “Mythopoetic Politics and
the Transformation of the Classical Underworld Myth in the Late Work of Paul
Klee” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1993), 42.
58
Grohmann, Klee, 350, 357; Geelhaar, Klee and the Bauhaus, 106.
59
See Glaesemer, Handzeichnungen, 2:99. See also Christian Rümelin, “Klee’s
Interaction with His Own Oeuvre,” in Paul Klee: Selected by Genius, 1917–
1933, ed. Roland Doschka, trans. Elizabeth Schwaiger (New York: Prestel, 2001),
35.
60
See Roland Greene, “Sonnet Sequence,” in The New Princeton Handbook of
Poetic Terms, ed. T. V. F. Brogan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1994), 279.
61
Rilke, sonnet #17, part 2, and sonnet #21, part 2, in Sonnets to Orpheus, trans.
David Young (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 1987), 88–89 and 96–97, resp.
62
Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus, sonnet #10, part 1, 20–21; sonnet #5, part 2, 64–65.
63
Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus, sonnet #15, part 1, 30–31.
64
For reproductions of these works, see the following volumes in the Catalogue
raisonné: Gate in the Garden, 4:450; Rock Cut Temple, 5:81.
65
Ball, Flight Out of Time, 103.
66
George Bornstein, introduction to Palimpsest: Editorial Theory in the
Humanities, ed. George Bornstein and Ralph G. Williams (Ann Arbor: U of
Michigan P, 1993), 5.
67
See the title page of Gérard Genette’s Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree,
trans. Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1997).
68
This point is made about another work by Klee in an interview with Antoinette
King, formerly director of conservation at the Museum of Modern Art, which is
reprinted in Holland Cotter’s “The Gentle Art of Those Who Preserve Art,”
New York Times, 17 October 1994, sec. C. For reproductions of works cited, see
Catalogue raisonné, Alphabet I and Alphabet II, 7:392; Insula Dulcamara, 7:420.
69
On Klee’s pictorial reiterations from an earlier period, see Osamu Okuda,
“Erinnerungsblick und Revision: Über den Werkprozess Paul Klees in den Jahren
1919–1923,” in Paul Klee: Kunst und Karriere, 159–72. It is interesting to spec-
ulate on Klee’s choice of the fragment Lu in his title. Mount Lu, or Lushan, located
in southeast China, is a famous site that is often invoked in Chinese poem-paintings.
This introduces the possibility that the title links Park Near Lu to the earlier poem-
paintings discussed in chapter 1.
70
Klee scholars generally agree that Park Near Lu marks a high point in Klee’s
garden imagery. See, e.g., Huggler, Die Malerie als Blick in den Kosmos, 180.
71
The uncatalogued studies referenced here are found in one of the many school
notebooks Klee kept, now housed in the archives of the Zentrum Paul Klee. I am
here referring to the Schulheft Schreiben, IIIc, 1, 4, 7.
72
See, e.g., Glaesemer, Colored Works, 318.
73
See Karl Baedeker, Switzerland, together with Chamonix and the Italian Lakes
(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1938), 108.
74
This photograph is reproduced in F. Klee, ed., Klee, 86.
75
For examples of Klee’s letters, see Briefe, vol. 2, 15 April 1930, 1112–13; 3 May
1930, 1118; and 14 September 1930, 1140 (the last containing the wedding
anniversary reference).
76
See Briefe, vol. 2, 8–15 October 1933, 1235–37.
77
See Briefe, vol. 2, 23 May 1939, 1291. As Vishny notes (“Klee’s Self-Images,”
160), Klee cropped his own image in a painting dating from the same year entitled
Wedding Anniversary (1939/477/E17), so that he appears to be partially “out of
the picture.” In a letter to a friend, Lily Klee explained that she returned to
Sonnmatt in 1939 because of a nervous breakdown, which she attributed in part to
the strains brought on by her husband’s illness. This letter is quoted by Stefan Frey
in “Chronologische Biographie (1933–1941),” in Das Schaffen im Todesjahr, 116.
78
Grohmann, Klee, 334, and Franciscono, Klee, 289, respectively.
79
Despite the fact that Klee made no mention of Eichendorff in his Diaries or cor-
respondence, he did refer to the Eichendorff texts that accompany Reger’s music
in a review first published in Die Alpen (December 1912, 239–40) and reprinted
in Geelhaar, Schriften, 114. In this review Klee referred to the “Romantische
Serenade,” apparently confusing the title with Reger’s numerous serenades for var-
ious combinations of instruments.
80
This passage from Eichendorff’s poem is taken from the liner notes (p. 8) in
Max Reger, Music of Max Reger: Reger and Romanticism, London Philharmonic
Orchestra, Leon Botstein, compact disc, TELARC. #80589. The translation is by
Gila Fox.
81
For a discussion of eight characteristically Romantic features of modern art, see
Deniz Tekiner, Modern Art and the Romantic Vision (Lanham, MD: UP of
America, 2000), 5–26.
4: Harmonizing Architectonic and
Poetic Painting
L IKE THE TERM “POETIC,” “ARCHITECTONIC” WAS COMMON in the cul-

tural discourse of the early twentieth century. In his program
announcement for the Weimar Bauhaus, Gropius predicted that bringing
all the arts together would infuse a building with an architectonic spirit
(“mit architektonischem Geiste füllen”).1 Klee had used the term as early
as 1902 in the same letter to Lily Stumpf in which he formulated his con-
cept of a poetic-painterly opposition. When he wrote this letter he had
recently returned from an extended stay in Italy, where, by his own
account, he had acquired an understanding of the “architectonic”
(“Architektonische”). Instead of restricting the term to an architectural
context, he implied a more general definition, citing as examples rhythmi-
cal arrangements of lines and planar surfaces (“(Linien, Flächen, rhythmis-
che Anordnung)”).2 Rephrasing the letter in his autobiographical notes for
Zahn, he stated that on his return from Italy he had determined “to rec-
oncile architectonic and poetic painting, or at least to establish a harmony
between them” (“architektonische und dichterische Malerei in Einklang
oder doch in Zusammenklang zu bringen”).3 In a parenthetical aside, he
clarified the meaning of “architectonic,” noting that “today I would say
constructivist” (“heute würde ich sagen das Konstructive”).4 In 1902 he
did not elaborate on how he planned to bring the architectonic and the
poetic into harmony, no doubt because the idea was still a form of wishful
thinking. By 1920 Klee was closer to achieving this goal, and in the mid-
twenties he produced paintings that are poetic in their figurative language
and architectonic in their structural principles. By that time, however, he
himself was no longer referring to the poetic-architectonic polarity as a
guiding principle.
While teaching at the Bauhaus during the twenties, Klee gradually
substituted the term “structural” for “architectonic,” defining structure
as a system of internal relations based in part on the dynamics of duality.
In this respect, his theory of structure was a reprise of his youthful ambi-
tion to reconcile opposites (“Die Gegensätze versöhnen zu können!”).5
Even before settling into the productive routine of Bauhaus teaching,
Klee realized that what he was after was not so much a definitive recon-
ciliation of opposites as a dynamic relationship between them. Many of
the lecture notes he amassed during the Bauhaus years outline a practical
program for implementing his theory of dynamic structural relationships.
HARMONIZING ARCHITECTONIC AND POETIC PAINTING 123
Disclaimer:

Fig. 31: Paul Klee, Two-Dimensional Diagrams Illustrating Structural Rhythms in

Three- and Four-Part Time (PN5 M4/28). Colored pencil on paper, 33 21 cm.
Expanding on his earlier references to the linear and planar rhythms that
constitute the “architectonic,” he developed pedagogical exercises in
structural rhythms, some based on nature and others on the arts.6 Among
his comparative analogies between the visual arts and other art forms are
diagrams of a conductor’s baton marking two- and three-part time, and
grids that schematize stanzaic form and illustrate structural rhythms with
notations used for marking poetic meter. Read either horizontally or ver-
tically, like a word square, one such grid (fig. 31, top) visualizes three-part
time as combinations of poetic feet.7 As he devised exercises in rhythmi-
cal repetition, Klee fine-tuned the skill of visualizing commonalities in the
formal structures of poetry, music, and painting. This was a skill he
applied to his studio as well as his pedagogical practice, creating bodies of
work that usually originated as attempts to find pictorial solutions to spe-
cific formal problems and subsequently developed in different directions,
124 HARMONIZING ARCHITECTONIC AND POETIC PAINTING
often intersecting and merging with other visual explorations. Historically

Klee scholars have grouped his work into discrete categories as a way of
imposing order on the vast and richly varied oeuvre of an extraordinarily
prolific artist. Works from two of these categories reveal some of the
sources of Klee’s structural rhythms and the inventiveness with which he
integrated them. The first two works discussed in this chapter are among
Klee’s so-called lace pictures, the next two are operatic line drawings, and
the last two combine the stylistic features of the lace pictures with oper-
atic references.8
During the early twenties Klee developed a vocabulary of pictographs,
which he repeated in linear patterns that could be cut into a number of sep-
arate images. Although linguistic in their syntactical arrangements, many of
the pictographs are iconic not only in their individual forms but also in their
patterned repetitions. A similar relationship between figurative motifs and
repetitive patterning is common to many examples of the decorative arts.
Klee himself invited this analogy in using titles such as Embroidery and
Curtain. He was no doubt familiar with the kinds of mass-produced cur-
tains that would have been banned from the Bauhaus but were staples of
bourgeois decor. The most common of the machine-made curtain fabrics
was a loosely woven, gridded weave that incorporates decorative patterns
based on the European tradition of lace making, hence the euphemism
“lace curtains.” This was the type of openwork patterning that Grohmann
had in mind when he characterized a group of Klee’s works from the mid-
twenties as lace pictures. More recently other scholars have cited lace mak-
ing and other forms of decorative art in reassessing the term “abstraction”
as it applies to Klee’s art and modernism in general.9 As is evident from
Klee’s writing, he himself referred to multiple sources and resorted to many
different analogies in describing the construction of his theoretical and
practical models. I am taking this precedent as license to propose poetic
models for selected paintings that conform to the stylistic criteria of lace
pictures.
One common denominator of the lace pictures is a compositional grid.
Linear grids made tentative appearances in Klee’s art in 1913, when he
undertook his systematic investigation of cubism, and subsequently
emerged as a characteristic compositional device in the Tunisian watercol-
ors. In 1918 he cut the gridded composition of Once Emerged from the
Gray of Night into two sections and mounted them with a space in
between. When Klee initiated the technique of composing with scissors, he
seems to have cut apart drawings and paintings he deemed disproportion-
ate, lacking in compositional variety, or unresolved in some other way.10 In
a diary entry documenting some of the studio experiments he was con-
ducting during early 1911, he noted that he often applied “the basic
pseudoimpressionist principle: ‘What I don’t like, I cut away with the scis-
sors’ ” (“nach dem pseudo-impressionistischen Grundsatz ‘was mir nicht
passt schneide ich mit der Schere weg’ ”).11 Combining the practice of
composing by cutting with a conceptual form of decomposition, he next
explored cubist theory and practice from 1913 to 1915. By the twenties
he was applying the destructive principle as a constructive compositional
strategy. As documented in photographic reconstructions expressly under-
taken to illustrate this process by reversing it, in most cases works were cut
in two, although some yielded three or more related works.12 An example
is Mural (Wandbild, 1924/128) (fig. 32), the largest of six works cut from
a brush drawing layered over watercolor washes on muslin and a colored
paste ground.13
The title Mural implies a site-specific wall painting, but the compon-
ent parts and structural rhythms of the linear grid point to another frame
of comparative reference. Some of the microcosmic architectural signs in
the linear overlay are identifiable as the arched openings of Bern’s famous
arcades and the bridges spanning the Aare River. Less topographically spe-
cific are the mullioned window and Klee’s house sign, which consists of an
X encased in a rectangular frame and topped by a gabled roof. Both the
window and the X are familiar from the earlier View from a Window
(fig. 28). The sprouting bulb that figures so prominently in Flower Myth
(fig. 20) is here reduced to a generic sign of growth. By reducing archi-
tectural and natural forms to recognizable but schematized shapes, Klee
invented a pictographic language that he used in Mural to denote a
cityscape with a degree of abstraction that approaches verbal notation.
A pronounced horizontality in the arrangement of the abstract pictographic
signs further encourages a temporal reading. As the viewer assumes a tem-
poral mode of perception and begins to read Klee’s visual text, it becomes
apparent that the visual signs are repeated in structural rhythms that are
not unlike the sound and metric patterns of poetry. Given the internal evi-
dence of a rhythmic linear structure comparable to poetry, it can be argued
that the title Mural refers to a specific poetic text. A likely possibility is
Schwitters’s “Wall” (“Wand”) (fig. 33), which was written just a year
before Klee visited Schwitters in Hannover in 1923.
Klee stopped in Hannover on his return from a trip to the North Sea
island of Baltrum. Unfortunately, the visit with Schwitters is as sparingly
documented as the earlier meeting with Delaunay in Paris. Klee and
Schwitters had known each other since 1919 — if not before. Both were
associated with Walden’s journal Der Sturm and the gallery of the same
name, where they exhibited, together with Johannes Molzahn, in January
1919. Although Klee would transfer his sales relationship from Walden to
Hans Goltz later that same year, his name appears — along with those of
Kandinsky, Marc Chagall, Carlo Carrà, Gino Severini, and others — in
Schwitters’s Der Sturm, a collage from 1919 that catalogues a number of
the artists who had established the Sturm Gallery’s reputation as a magnet
for the avant-garde. During the early twenties Schwitters continued to
Disclaimer:

Fig. 32: Paul Klee, Mural (1924/128). Watercolor on primed muslin on paper mounted
on cardboard, 25.4 55 cm. Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern. © 2006 Artists Rights Society
Klee.
publish in the journal Der Sturm and participated in dada touring

performances. In 1922 he attended the dada convention in Weimar, where
Klee was teaching at the Bauhaus, so the two could have seen each other
again at that time. In any event, Klee would have seen his name on numer-
ous occasions in Schwitters’s critical writing.
Schwitters did not single Klee out for either praise or opprobrium, usu-
ally reserving the latter for critics rather than fellow artists. Typical of
Schwitters’s attitude toward critics is an article from 1926 with the provoca-
tive title “Mein Merz und / Meine Monstre Merz /
Muster Messe im Sturm.” Here he grouped Klee with Kandinsky and Oskar
Kokoschka to ridicule what he perceived as a fashion for alliteration among
unimaginative and uninformed critics.14 Schwitters’s penchant for plays on
words and letters was an intellectual proclivity he and Klee shared. Klee
acknowledged as much when he inscribed C for Schwitters (C für Schwitters,
1923/161) to his host on the occasion of their reunion in 1923.15 Since
Klee also shared Schwitters’s contempt for inanities that passed for art criti-
cism, one can assume that this was a topic of conversation during their visit.
Presumably their shoptalk touched on mutual friends in the arts as well as
bêtes noires; at some point it must have drifted into discussions of their own
work. Klee was then in his third year of teaching at the Bauhaus and was
still exhibiting at Goltz’s Neue Kunst Gallery in Munich. Schwitters had
founded Merz magazine and was beginning to construct his “Merzbau.”
Never one who needed prompting to promote his challenges to convention,
Disclaimer:

Fig. 33: Kurt Schwitters, “Wand,” 1922. © 2006 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New
York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. © 1973 DuMont Literatur und Kunst Verlag.
Schwitters might well have produced the recently published “Wand” as an

example of his experimental poetry.16
“Wand” opens with the line “Fünf Vier Drei Zwei Eins,” repeated as
an intertextual refrain from the 1922 number poem “Zwölf.” This enu-
meration corresponds to the numeric repetitions of the word “Wand” in
Schwitters’s twenty-line poem. In a tour de force that drew on his visual
sensibilities as well as his verbal dexterity, Schwitters composed a poem by
visualizing the sound values of poetry. He accomplished this by applying
compositional techniques that have been called “opto-phonetic,”17 among
them alternations of upper and lower cases, periodic shifts in point sizes,
and calculated variations in both the number of repetitions per line and the
spaces between repeated words. These constitute the visual parallels of
emphasis, volume, rhythm, and other aspects of recited poetry that
Schwitters addressed in his theoretical and critical writings. The use of a
numeric sequence and standardized variations on an architectural term can
be read as a witty reference to the numbered, prefabricated components of
wartime military installations and postwar reconstructions. Klee would
have recognized a source of Schwitters’s idea in one of the theoretical
models that shaped Gropius’s program for the Bauhaus.
Although prefabrication and mass production had precedents in nine-
teenth-century architecture, they were not widely applied until the twen-
tieth century. Gropius advocated a system of standardization utilizing
industrially produced component parts assembled according to a sequen-
tial process. In 1910 he had drafted a “Program for the Founding of a General
Housing-Construction Company Following Artistically Uniform Principles”
(“Programm zur Gründung einer allgemeinen Hausbaugesellschaft auf

künstlerisch einheitlicher Grundlage”). The idea was revived at the Bauhaus,
albeit experimentally rather than programmatically.18 Georg Muche’s
“Haus am Horn” was constructed for the 1923 Bauhaus Exhibition in
Weimar, using new construction techniques and a number of prefabricated
parts.19 In theory, Muche’s model house was a prototype for the twentieth
century’s commodification of domestic architecture. Some readers might
have predicted the same about “Wand” and twentieth-century poetic prac-
tice, but despite the use of a single component unit and repetition — the
underlying principle of prefabrication — Schwitters’s poem was not assem-
bled according to any formulaic model. Klee seems to have understood the
irony in Schwitters’s implied analogy to a prefabricated architectural struc-
ture, for his “wall painting” perfectly complements Schwitters’s “wall” in
its use of “prefabricated” units to create a unique structure.
“Wand” reads like a poem because its typographic structure imposes a
distinctive rhythm on a verbal symbol that is not in and of itself poetic. To
use Klee’s terminology, “Wand” is a single verbal unit made poetic
through the use of architectonic or structural rhythms. Structural rhythms
also characterize Mural and the works that immediately precede it in Klee’s
numerically ordered oeuvre catalogue: Structural I (1924/125),
Structural II (1924/126), and Structural Composition (Structurale
Komposition, 1924/127).20 Like other works from 1924, Mural was com-
posed by cutting into a sequence of patterns prepared in advance for use
as prefabricated design units.21 As Schwitters’s did in “Wand,” Klee used
abstractions that reference architecture. The architectural motifs that con-
stitute the component parts of Klee’s pictorial vocabulary are as repetitive
yet as subtly varied as the typographic forms that make up the verbal com-
ponents of Schwitters’s poetic text. Variations in size and spacing, for
example, are common to both. Despite these similarities, Mural is funda-
mentally different from “Wand” in ways that assert Klee’s own ideas about
structural rhythms.
Mural consists of rhythmically repetitive patterns that Klee character-
ized in his pedagogical notes as “dividual” (“Rhythmische Repetition,
dividuell”), meaning indefinitely extendable.22 One example of the con-
cept of dividual structural rhythms is the grid with notations traditionally
used to mark the metric feet of poetic verse (fig. 31). On other pages of
teaching notes he elaborated on these basic patterns and demonstrated
how they could be extended by applying the structural principles of
change, uniformity, multiplication, and displacement.23 When it came to
putting pedagogical theories to practice, Klee took the same liberties with
dividual rhythms that he did with the metric structures of his poetry. The
ballad quatrains that are the earliest surviving examples of his poetry can
be scanned, but the verses do not strictly conform to regular patterns of
stress or numbers of syllables. Similarly, the 1926 poem that he himself
scanned in the notebook of “Geduchte” (“Der Wolf spricht”) combines

trochees, iambs, and dactyls with extra syllables in irregular lines with no
prevailing meter. Close scrutiny of the rhythmic structure of Mural reveals
that the dividual units likewise contain variations in numbers and types of
signs, which break the rhythmic repetition of one pattern and signal the
beginning of another.
Changes in the structural rhythms of Mural correspond to variations
on a subtly nuanced color theme, which unfolds simultaneously in depth
and in planar rhythms that progress from burnt sienna red to pale rose,
sporadically superimposed with washes of golden yellow and light cobalt
blue. In layering his drawing over color, Klee established a parallel rela-
tionship between the temporal rhythms of his linear script and his pro-
gressive color theme. The viewer accustomed to constructing analogies
grounded in familiar imagery might compare the relationship between line
and color to a succession of poetic images evoking the fleeting temporal
transition from sunset to dusk. Klee’s Bauhaus lectures on color theory
place this frame of reference in a pedagogical context. Instructing his stu-
dents on the principles of peripheral movement, Klee demonstrated how
color movement would look if rendered in musical notation or in writ-
ing.24 Mural is a pictorial application of this exercise, with a linear overlay
of pictographic signs substituting for a written text or musical notation.
A number of years earlier, Klee had made claims for the superiority of
polyphonic painting over music because the time element is spatialized,
thereby visualizing the concept of simultaneity.25 He did not make the
same point about painting in relation to poetry, no doubt because he knew
that poetry had changed as radically as painting. Both Schwitters and Klee
succeeded in spatializing temporal rhythms, Schwitters by manipulating
typographic elements, Klee by integrating line and color to trigger the
simultaneous perception of time and space. This breakdown of the time-
space polarity places Schwitters’s “Wand” and Klee’s Mural within a mod-
ernist sphere of innovation. So, too, does each artist’s vocabulary and the
way it relates to structural rhythms. Schwitters’s “Wand” consists of typo-
graphic variants of the singular and plural forms of one word. As early as
1913 the “zaum” poets Velimir Khlebnikov and Alexei Kruchonykh had
announced not only that a work of art could consist of a single word but
“simply by a skillful alteration of that word the fullness and expressivity of
artistic form might be attained.”26 In the same essay they dismissed the
Italian futurists as self-serving imitators of their ideas. Whatever they may
have thought about Schwitters, his “Wand” conforms to their theory with-
out slavishly imitating their experimental practice. Klee’s vocabulary is
more varied, consisting of figurative abstractions combined with linguistic
and geometric signs. Individually the signs denote. Collectively they form
new visual metaphors that serve a dual function: they accrue in repetitive
patterns that generate compositional rhythms, while at the same time
Disclaimer:

Fig. 34: Paul Klee, Cathedrals (1925/65). Watercolor on paper with oil ground
mounted on cardboard, with original frame, 27.3 32 cm. Private collection, Japan.
© 2006 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Photograph
courtesy of the Zentrum Paul Klee.
taking on symbolic value as signs of growth and structure. Like

Schwitters’s “Wand,” Klee’s Mural does not describe what is visible in the
world but rather visualizes the process of making a work of art that is archi-
tectonic in its structural rhythms and poetic in its vocabulary.
Throughout the twenties Klee continued to develop the pictorial possi-
bilities inherent in layering linear scripts over colored grounds. Architecture
was a recurring theme, with titles ranging from general architectural refer-
ences to specific building types, like the 1924 Cathedral (fig. 21). In 1925
Klee quite literally multiplied his cathedral imagery. The linear patterning of
Cathedrals (Kathedralen, 1925/65) (fig. 34) can be read as multiple views
of a single cathedral or images of three or possibly four different structures,
each anchored in one quadrant of the painting. The plural form of the title
could also point to multiple frames of reference, including Klee’s own ear-
lier pictorial images of cathedrals and one of the most memorable images of
place he recorded in the Diaries. On 13 November 1916 Klee had been
Disclaimer:

Fig. 35: Ernst Stadler, “Fahrt ueber die Coelner Rheinbruecke bei Nacht,” Die Aktion,
April 23, 1913. Digital image by Dan Smith.
dispatched from his military post in Schleissheim with a shipment of air-

planes destined for a base near Cologne. Three days later, his mission accom-
plished, he anticipated a night’s rest in a comfortable hotel and a free day to
explore the city. Before setting out to see the sights of Cologne on the morn-
ing of 17 November, he wrote a letter to Lily Klee in which he described a
walk he had taken the previous night. An edited version of this letter is con-
tained in the Diaries as entry #1026. The result of his editing is a succession
of graphic images that reads less like a letter from a military transport courier
on furlough in a big city than notations of poetic imagery jotted down for
future reference. Models for Klee’s self-consciously poetic prose can be
found on the pages of Die Aktion and in the editions of war poetry that pro-
liferated during and after the war.
In addition to editorials and essays on contemporary politics and cul-
ture, Die Aktion regularly featured a section devoted to new poetry. Ernst
Stadler was a frequent contributor, first from Brussels, where he had a uni-
versity appointment, and then from the western front. “On Crossing the
Rhine Bridge at Cologne by Night” (“Fahrt ueber die Coelner
Rheinbruecke bei Nacht”) was first published in 1913 in an issue of Die
Aktion (fig. 35) and reprinted in Der Aufbruch, a collection of Stadler’s
poetry published in 1914, the same year he was killed in action.27 The
poem evokes a remembered view of Cologne, framed by the window of an
express train roaring through the night. Stadler’s journey would take him
to the same train station where Klee began his nocturnal stroll through the
city center a few years later. Impressed, as Klee would be, by flashes of illu-
mination, Stadler punctuated his visual impressions of the darkened city
with images of lights that momentarily come into view (“Nun taumeln
Lichter her”), then disappear.28 As a graphic artist Klee would have
responded to the dramatic visual effects of such imagery. By the same
token, this is precisely the kind of imagery he could have envisioned on his
own, without benefit of a literary source. It is syntax rather than imagery
that provides the most compelling evidence that Klee’s diary entry reflects
the influence of poets such as Stadler.
Stadler was known for his use of long, flowing verses that juxtapose
sentence fragments, elliptical phrases, and strings of descriptive modifiers
in carefully crafted syntactical patterns. These patterns give his poetry its
urgency and sensory impact. The impact was arguably not lost on Klee.
A comparison between his description of Cologne by night in his letter to
Lily Klee, followed by the corresponding passage from the Diaries, illus-
trates the effect of changes in syntax:
The crazy railroad station, in front of which that larger-than-life museum
piece, the cathedral, and in complete darkness, the heavily guarded
Hohenzollern Bridge. The river, and finally, the beams of four crafty
searchlights cutting through, and high above the colossal cathedral a
Zeppelin maneuvering quietly and easily.
[Der verrückte Bahnhof, davor dicht das überlebensgrosse Museumsstück,
der Dom, die im völligen Dunkel belassene, scharf bewachte
Hohenzollernbrücke. Der Strom, und zum Schluss, die Linien von vier
listigen Scheinwerfern schneidend, höchst oben über dem hypertrophis-
chen Dom in aller Ruhe und Leichtigkeit manövrierend ein Zeppelin.]29
The mad railroad station. Right in front of it, that more-than-lifesize

museum piece, the cathedral. The Hohenzollern Bridge, totally dark and
heavily guarded. The river. The sharp beams of four wily searchlights. Far
above the towers of the cathedral, the bright little bar of a Zeppelin,
maneuvering gracefully, speared by one of the beams.
[Der verrückte Bahnhof. Dicht davor das überlebensgrosse Museumsstück
der Dom. Die völlig unbeleuchtete scharf bewachte Hohenzollernbrücke.
Der Strom. Die scharfen Linien von vier listigen Scheinwerfern. Zuhöchst
oben über dem Türmen des Domes mit Grazie manövrierend das helle
Strichlein eines Zeppelins, von einer der Linien gespiesst.]30
Despite similarities in descriptive language, the differences between Klee’s

discursive letter and the more fragmented diary entry are significant. To
give the passage in his diary a sense of breathless immediacy, he made
changes in phrasing and punctuation, transforming a prosaic description
into a poetic evocation of an eerie nocturnal spectacle. The poetic syntax
gives his diary entry the staccato rhythm of front-line reportage and the
vividness of a verbal sketch.
Assuming that Cathedrals visually represents a remembered image
subjected to poetic syntax, the next step in reconstructing Klee’s process is
to determine how he effected the transition from mnemonic verbal

imagery to a painting that integrates the poetic and the structural. The
architectural structures named in the title loom close to the picture plane
and are all but absorbed into an overall linear pattern. Klee modified the
linear-patterning technique he had applied previously in Mural, using
closely spaced parallel lines. Individual forms are fused into a graphic scrim
that is worked into varnished watercolor washes unevenly absorbed into
linen-textured paper coated with a layer of oil paint. In some areas the par-
tially saturated layers of violet and rose emerge as negative spaces. These
spaces give the image a spectral presence that makes it a fitting backdrop
for the “festival of evil” (“ein wahrhaft festlicher Akt des Bösen”) Klee had
evoked as a metaphor of nocturnal Cologne.31 Indeed, it is possible to read
Klee’s drawing as a composite view of the towers and spires that define the
skyline of Cologne’s city center.
In the course of his evening stroll through the city in 1916, Klee very
likely wandered along the west bank of the Rhine River and into the
Heumarkt. Approaching the river from the railroad station, he would have
been struck by the anachronistically medieval towers framing the recently
built Hohenzollern Bridge. Looking to the west of the Heumarkt, he
would have seen the triple-towered St. Maria im Capitol, to the north the
turrets of Gross-St. Martin, and — most impressive of all — the High
Gothic cathedral with its two majestic, soaring towers. If Klee consulted
his diary entry as an aide-mémoire, he also eliminated from his painting
any visual signifiers that would imply either an illustrative relationship to a
specific textual source or an imitative relationship to any particular archi-
tectural monument.32 Just as he had reduced his epistolary prose to a
string of poetic images, so Klee edited his painting to give his visual images
the indeterminacy of poetic language. Reduced to linear abstractions, the
structures in Klee’s Cathedrals are as generic as Feininger’s Cathedral (fig.
22) and as potentially poetic in their symbolic possibilities. Because of its
original use in publicizing the goals of the Bauhaus, Feininger’s image
inevitably acquired the metaphorical status of a Cathedral of Socialism.
With characteristic verbal wit, Klee himself suggested one possible sym-
bolic reading of the architectural forms in his Cathedrals when he
described Cologne Cathedral as “that larger-than-life museum piece.”33
What distinguishes Klee’s image from Feininger’s is not the nature of their
visual language — which is symbolic in both cases — but rather a linear
structure that reinforces the poetic resonance of the imagery.
Despite differences in materials, technique, and format, Cathedrals is
reminiscent of Mural in the character and variety of the pictographic signs
and in their rhythmic repetitions, which accrue in dividual patterns. The
linear repeats of Cathedrals, like those of Mural, are textbook examples of
the dividual rhythms that Klee devised to illustrate his Bauhaus lectures on
basic structural articulation. Here the dividual structural rhythms become
“individual in a figurative sense” (“individuell im übertragenen Sinne”)

when they assume a complexity beyond repetitive, dividual rhythms.34
Seen as the vertical components of an overall grid, the linear rhythms min-
imally describe the architectural forms of cathedral towers. Seen as hori-
zontally aligned patterns, they constitute the architectonic or structural
components of an abstract painting. The subtle yet dynamic tension
between figuration and structural rhythm has analogies in Stadler’s spatial-
ized poetic texts.
Like Schwitters, Stadler was keenly aware of the relationships between
the horizontal and vertical elements of poetic form. Unlike Schwitters,
Stadler never ventured into the experimental domain of shaped poetry. His
work remained firmly grounded in traditional poetic imagery that at times
achieves an oppressive level of intensity through the accumulation of
images in relentlessly long lines. A phrase from “On Crossing the Rhine
Bridge at Cologne by Night” succinctly captures the effect his poem has
on the reader: “o ich fühl es schwer / Im Hirn” (“O heavily / I feel it
weigh on my brain”).35 Typical of Stadler’s versification are vertical layouts
counterbalanced by the pronounced horizontality of his stanzaic units.
The layout of “On Crossing the Rhine Bridge at Cologne by Night” as it
was published in Die Aktion illustrates this point. Fourteen run-on stanzas
coalesce in a format that generates a reciprocal tension between the hori-
zontal pull of the lines and the vertical orientation of the composition.
This tension is also evident in Cathedrals, where sign clusters can be read
horizontally as abstract linear rhythms and vertically as representational
signifiers. The horizontally aligned patterns of Klee’s visual signs have the
rhythmic repetition and flow of Stadler’s acoustic patterns. Moreover, per-
ceptible breaks in the patterned repetitions of Cathedrals delineate square
and rectangular units that are as densely concentrated and as metrically var-
ied as Stadler’s verse paragraphs. Stacked vertically, Klee’s aggregate of
architectural signs gives shape to the images named in his title, just as
Stadler’s formal structure shapes his accumulation of sensory impressions
into an extended poetic image of Cologne by night.
At the same time Klee was expanding the poetic vocabulary of his
rhythmical linear overlays, he was considering ways to develop the expres-
sive potential of his parallel-line drawings. Among the earliest examples of
these drawings are images that incorporate the scored lines of sheet music.
During the postwar years and throughout the twenties, Klee broadened his
experiments with pictorial abstraction to include references to music,
inherently the least mimetic of all the arts. As Klee explained to his stu-
dents at the Bauhaus during this period, music presents the opportunity to
visualize something that is at once abstract and compellingly real.36 An
accomplished violinist who continued to perform long after he abandoned
any professional ambitions as a musician, Klee was speaking from experi-
ence. Although he himself played in chamber groups or with his spouse,
Disclaimer:

Fig. 36: Paul Klee, River Spirit (1920/233). Pen on paper mounted on cardboard,
9.6 28.7 cm. Location unknown. © 2006 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG
who was a pianist, his knowledgeable, passionate interest in music encom-

passed opera as well.37 For Klee opera offered the challenge of interpreting
a musical score that is integrally related to a poetic text and a narrative con-
text. Operatic music consequently gave Klee the license to experiment with
visual equivalents of abstract melodic lines that are rhythmically structured
to support and reinforce the declamation of a poetic libretto. That was not,
however, the sole focus of his interest in opera. In addition to providing
prototypes of linear structures that parallel poetry, opera afforded Klee
ample opportunity to indulge his penchant for play. Whether paying
homage to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, his favorite composer, or having
fun with the characters of Richard Wagner’s music dramas, Klee took great
delight in reducing the ambitions of grand opera to the modest scale of
small drawings and paintings.38 Klee’s play with opera, like his play with
words, was never trivial or self-indulgent but rather purposeful, his purpose
being to experiment not to denigrate. The following examples demon-
strate how he borrowed from operatic sources to visualize temporal
rhythms that communicate poetic content.
His operatic themes and variations invariably incorporate some combi-
nation of textual fragments, musical notations, and pictorial abstractions
that include reductive figurative motifs as well as nonrepresentational signs.
Such is the case with River Spirit (Stromgeist, 1920/233) (fig. 36). Were it
not for the presence of staves, notes, and rests in a range of durational val-
ues, plus the fermata sign, the central figure could represent any river sprite.
The musical setting suggests that she is one of the Rhinemaidens, swept
along by the undulating rhythms of Wagner’s Rhinegold (Das Rheingold),
one of four music dramas that make up the operatic cycle The Ring of the
Nibelung (Der Ring des Nibelungen). The Rhinegold had its premiere in
1869 at Munich’s State Opera House. By the time Klee moved to Munich
in 1898, the opera had lost its avant-garde edge and acquired the reputa-
tion of a repertory favorite. In letters to his family Klee mentioned numer-
ous performances of The Rhinegold,39 which is usually programmed as the
prologue of the Nibelung trilogy, although parts of the score are occasion-
ally arranged for orchestra or even transcribed for solo instruments. What is
missing in any concert performance is the impact of Wagner’s
Gesamtkunstwerk, a theoretical concept that evolved from the nineteenth
century’s integrative impulse to layer music into the analogies established
by the ut pictura poesis paradigm.40 In volumes of polemical writing Wagner
advocated a synthesis of all the arts in a grand, performative totality.
Undeterred by conventional practice, he put himself in a unique position to
realize this ambitious goal by assuming the role of poet/librettist as well as
composer, and by controlling every aspect of staged productions. The
operas of the Ring cycle were his experimental testing grounds.
Wagner selected his cast of characters from the gods, goddesses,
nymphs, and gnomes of German mythology. His epic narrative, which
begins in the depths of the Rhine River and ends on the heights of
Valhalla, pits rapacious greed against selfless love. Each opera in the cycle
was conceived as an artistic synthesis in which meaning is primarily con-
veyed not by either the poetic text of the libretto or the musical score but
by a confluence of sound, visual effects, and movement. In the opening
scene of The Rhinegold the sinister Alberich precipitates the dramatic
action of the entire Ring cycle by snatching a cache of gold from the pro-
tective custody of three less than vigilant Rhinemaidens. The melodic lines
that propel the action forward are introduced successively, the first by a
single horn, the others added as the orchestral accompaniment rises to its
full volume. Invested with narrative momentum and symbolic value, these
lines recur as leitmotifs throughout the Ring. As the principal carriers of
meaning, they function like the figurative language of poetry, giving sym-
bolic form to the content of Wagner’s libretto.
Opera was one of many sources Klee tapped to devise a sign system that
could visualize conceptual abstractions without recourse to pictorial allegory.
He experimented with such a system in River Spirit. Shown clutching musi-
cal staff lines, the figure named in the title could well depict Woglinde, the
Rhinemaiden who sings the opening vocal line of The Rhinegold. She is sus-
pended between nonmimetic symbols, some derived from the conventional
symbols of musical notation, others from medieval neumes, a system of
musical shorthand that visualizes the pitch and flow of melody. The distri-
bution of symbolic signs to the left of the central figure corresponds to the
placement of notes in the ascending melodic line of the Rhine motif,
whereas those on her right can be read as a condensed notational form of
the Ring motif. Assuming that the figure doubles as an operatic character
and a personified musical phrase, she can be interpreted as both Woglinde
and a figuration of the motif of the Rhinemaidens that accompanies
Woglinde’s opening solo. If read sequentially from left to right, Klee’s

graphic symbols correspond to three of Wagner’s recurring musical motifs
and preserve their order within the melodic structure of the first scene of The
Rhinegold. Klee’s signature arrows are placed such that they graphically rein-
force the horizontal flow of Wagner’s melodic lines and point to the recur-
rence of these lines within the musical superstructure of the Ring cycle.
Arrows would feature prominently in the repertoire of symbolic forms
in motion that Klee began to develop in his Bauhaus lectures and subse-
quently incorporated into the Pedagogical Sketchbook (Pädagogisches
Skizzenbuch), published in 1925.41 Given the obvious analogy between the
temporal nature of musical notation and the visual representation of forms
in motion, it is hardly surprising that the arrow and other visual symbols
of motion often appear in musical settings such as River Spirit. Here the
musical setting is minimally indicated by staff lines. Like the lines of a text
on a printed page or the lined pages of his notebook of “Geduchte,” the
staff lines of a musical score gave Klee an experimental model for delineat-
ing a nonillusionistic pictorial space. By filling the indeterminate space with
a playful combination of figurative motifs and abstract visual notations of
temporal movement, he produced an illustrative example of the idea that
“space is a temporal concept,”42 even as he mischievously reduced
Wagner’s epic pretensions to the level of a comic interlude.
Long Hair and Soulful (Langes Haar und Seelisches, 1929/299) (fig.
37) refers to an altogether different operatic context and incorporates the
pendulum, another of Klee’s symbolic forms in motion.43 The genesis of
this drawing indicates that Klee’s sense of play enlivened his classroom
instruction as well as his studio production. To teach his Bauhaus students
how to generate movement with the graphic equivalent of a pendulum, he
invoked a nonmusical motif from Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande.
Instructing the students to “take a very long hair (one of Mélisande’s),
attach the lead weight, and let the hair hang slack” (“Nehmen wir ein sehr
langes Haar [ein Haar der Melisande] und führen wir daran das Blei mit
sensibler Lockerung”),44 he illustrated the concept of independent move-
ment and countermovement (fig. 38). Long Hair and Soulful neatly brings
this exercise in generating a symbol of movement full circle to its genesis.
With the addition of curvilinear patterns, Klee reconfigured the pendulum,
transforming it into the very head that gave the schematic symbol its orig-
inal form.
The title Long Hair and Soulful is an oblique reference to Debussy’s
heroine. Like her wide-open eyes, Mélisande’s long hair is one of the sym-
bolic motifs that are woven throughout the opera’s libretto. Adapted by the
composer from a play by Maurice Maeterlinck, the libretto is characterized by
language that is suggestive rather than explicit. Without offering any explan-
ations, the text implies that Mélisande has every reason to be soulful: she
suffers from amnesia about her identity; she is confined to a gloomy castle;
Disclaimer:

Fig. 37: Paul Klee, Long Hair and Soulful (1929/299). Pen on paper mounted on
cardboard, 28 22.5 cm. Private collection, Canada. © 2006 Artists Rights Society
Klee.
and, to make matters worse, she is in love with her brother-in-law Pelléas.
What seems to have attracted Debussy to Maeterlinck’s text was the challenge
of writing music that would convey the rich symbolism and dense mood of
the play.45 Whereas Klee’s title alludes to these features of Maeterlinck’s text
and Debussy’s score, his image draws on other aspects of the opera.
In deeming Pelléas et Mélisande the “most beautiful opera since
Wagner’s death” (“[die] schönste Oper seit Wagners Tod”), Klee acknow-
ledged the lingering influence of Wagner on Debussy’s vocal writing.46
Although Wagner’s legacy is evident in the recurrence of leitmotifs, by the
time Debussy composed his only opera, he was determined to renounce
the symphonic grandeur of Wagner’s music dramas. Pelléas et Mélisande is
a model of musical restraint and understatement. To restore the con-
trolled, parallel relationship between vocal and musical lines that existed in
the early history of opera, Debussy made a conscious effort to subordinate
his music to the structure of his libretto. Typical of the libretto is dialogue
Disclaimer:

Fig. 38: Paul Klee, Page 117, Beiträge zur bildnerischen Formlehre. Zentrum Paul
Klee, Bern. © 2006 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.
Photograph courtesy of the Zentrum Paul Klee.
constructed by means of the repetition of single words (“perdue” [lost])

and phrases (“Ne me touchez pas” [Do not touch me]).47 Repetitive
phrasing is also audible in the musical lines, which underscore the rhyth-
mic patterns of declamatory speech with unrelenting — even somniferous
— consistency. The imitative linear rhythms of Klee’s Long Hair and
Soulful recall this parallel relationship between Debussy’s score and
Maeterlinck’s text. Occasionally the sustained dramatic stasis of the opera
is broken by changes of rhythm. One such musical moment occurs in the
tower scene of the third act when Mélisande lowers her long hair to a wait-
ing Pelléas. Debussy described the movement with a surging wave of
sound that interrupts the smooth continuum of the orchestral back-
ground. Although analogies can be drawn between Debussy’s music for
the tower scene and Klee’s rippling linear rhythms, his drawing is not a lit-
eral transcription of any single passage from Debussy’s opera.
Similarly, Klee’s image of Mélisande, with her stylish marcel waves is not
a portrait of Mary Garden or any of the other famous interpreters of the role.
Klee was less interested in the cast and costumes for a specific performance
of Pelléas et Mélisande than he was in the opera’s unique symbolic and for-
mal structures. In Long Hair and Soulful he used the underlying graphic
structure of the pendulum, which he particularized as Mélisande by reiterat-
ing the repeated references to her hair and eyes, both of which are integral
to the symbolic coherence of the libretto. By delineating these symbolic
motifs with the visual analogues of Debussy’s meandering musical lines and
abruptly shifting rhythms, Klee defined poetic figures with linear rhythms.
Disclaimer:

Fig. 39: Paul Klee, Palace (1928/133). Watercolor on paper mounted on cardboard,
28.5 55 cm. Museo Frida Kahlo, Casa Azul, Mexico City. © 2006 Artists Rights
Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Photograph courtesy of the Museo
Dolores Olmedo Patiño, Mexico City, Mexico.
Klee’s parallel-line drawings are not exclusively graphic, often being

inscribed over or into colored grounds. The perforated facade of Palace
(Palast, 1928/133) (fig. 39) is a linear grid layered over pale watercolor
washes. This work revives the poetic language and structural armature of
Mural and Cathedrals while retaining the musical allusions of Klee’s oper-
atic themes and variations. The transparent architectural fantasy repre-
sented in Palace is anchored to the ground by building blocks from Klee’s
familiar repertoire of arches and rectangles, some topped with gables, oth-
ers with scallops. The roofline unfolds as a pattern book of fairy-tale archi-
tecture, beginning with double towers on the left, then morphing into a
succession of turreted, domed, and crenellated projections of varying
heights. Klee’s palace is architecturally eclectic, but it does not appear to
be particularly forbidding until the viewer discovers the words inscribed on
the first level, just to the right of center: “wer hier eintritt / kommt nicht
mehr” (“Who enters here / comes no more”). This ominous warning
introduces not only an undercurrent of unease but also the possibility of
an extrapictorial reference. Given the fact that the linear scaffolding of the
drawing resembles the staff lines of a musical score, the “here” could be a
reference to the setting of Béla Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle, which Klee had
anticipated hearing at a Dessau theater in May 1926. In a note to Lily Klee
he expressed frustration that the performance was cancelled (“Natürlich
hatte ich Aussicht, etwas Gutes am Theater zu hören, nämlich Bartók[s]

‘Blaubart,’ natürlich ist er am letzten Tag wieder abgesagt worden”). Klee
could have heard the opera on another occasion, but in any case his refer-
ence to “something good” indicates that he had at least read about the
work and was most likely familiar with the libretto and perhaps even with
the score.48 The nameless bard who intones the rhymed prologue to
Bartók’s musical drama entreats the audience to listen carefully to a tale
that is as old as the castle in which the drama unfolds:
Régi vár, régi már Old is the castle, and old the tale
Az mese, ki róla jár. that tells of it.
Tik is hallgassátok. Listen in silence.49
As a reward to those who comply, the bard holds out the promise of self-
discovery. What Klee seems to have discovered in Bartók’s opera was the
model of a graphic language that could communicate poetic content and
articulate structural form simultaneously.
Klee’s ongoing effort to reconcile the poetic and the structural was
shared by artists across disciplines, including composers such as Arnold
Schoenberg and Bartók, both of whom sought to infuse new concepts of
tonal structure with the emotional intensity of nineteenth-century music.
In early works such as Bluebeard’s Castle Bartók retained vestiges of the har-
monic and melodic vocabulary of late Romanticism as he reformulated the
traditional concept of tonal music by introducing new tonal patterns, chord
formations, and a vocal style inspired by folk songs.50 Given his subject mat-
ter, Bartók could easily have fallen prey to the seductions of “castle
Romanticism,” to borrow a phrase from the lexicon of literary criticism.51
Instead, he experimented with the relatively new conventions of “literature
opera.” As defined by Carl Dahlhaus, a literature opera is a vocal work writ-
ten to complement and reinforce the dramatic structure of a preexisting lit-
erary text.52 The libretto for Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle was written by his
friend, the writer Béla Balázs. Influenced by French Symbolist drama and
poetry, yet intent on retaining the intonations of spoken Hungarian, Balázs
transformed a perennially popular fairy tale into a one-act play. In adapting
the play as his libretto, Bartók preserved what Balázs made a point of refer-
ring to as the poetry of his text.53 Although Bartók completed the score of
Bluebeard’s Castle in 1911, it was initially dismissed as incomprehensible by
the judges of not one but two Hungarian vocal competitions. Disappointed
but undaunted, Bartók made revisions to his score between 1911 and
1917. The work was finally premiered at Budapest’s Royal Opera House in
1918, followed by a production in Germany in 1922. By the time Klee
anticipated attending a performance of the opera in the mid-twenties, he
had heard and visually interpreted other literature operas, including Richard
Strauss’s Salome.54 He would therefore have had a keen appreciation of the
skill and imagination with which Bartók achieved dramatic tension and
coherence by layering a tightly structured libretto over a loosely articulated

musical score.
Following the bard’s prologue, the enigmatic Bluebeard and his new
bride, Judith, appear in front of the first of seven locked doors within his
castle. At Judith’s increasingly assertive and alarmed insistence, Bluebeard
successively turns the seven keys over to her. Behind each door are tainted
treasures not fully visible to the audience, but verbal allusions and lighting
effects hint that they are clues to the fate of Bluebeard’s former wives.
Once the fifth door is opened, the denouement of Bluebeard’s Castle seems
inevitable, and with the opening of the seventh door, the drama reaches its
chilling climax. In Palace, as in his other operatic themes and variations,
Klee recontextualized elements of both the score and the story line of
Bluebeard’s Castle. The horizontal linear supports of Klee’s open-work
structure are left unframed at either end, suggesting the possibility that
they correspond to the unbroken musical continuum Bartók composed to
serve as the background of his musically contiguous scenes. Scene shifts are
indicated not by breaks in the action or by musical interludes but by shifts
of rhythm and changes in musical motifs. Similarly, Klee’s intricately
wrought linear patterns change perceptibly from left to right with the
introduction of different signs and rhythmical patterns. These changes in
repetitive patterning divide the palace facade into unequal sections that
parallel the differences of temporal duration in Bartók’s scenic divisions.
If the delineation of structural rhythms in Palace visually parallels
aspects of Bartók’s score, other correspondences are suggested by Klee’s
use of color. Just as the symbolic implications of the story line of Bluebeard’s
Castle are elucidated in performance by flashes of orchestral color and a
spectrum of variously tinted stage lighting, Klee’s linear patterns are
invested with meanings implicit in his symbolically charged color accents.
The red watercolor wash that bleeds into the upper right corner of the
drawing evokes not only the recurring blood motif in Bartók’s score but
also the reddish glow that floods the stage set, staining all of Bluebeard’s
possessions with the color of blood. In subtle contrast, the drawing’s under-
lying support and internal frame are washed with a watery blue — the col-
oristic equivalent of the moisture that seeps from the stones of Bluebeard’s
dank castle, filling the lake of tears behind the sixth door. Clearly, the
touches of watercolor in Palace are not gratuitous, even though the eco-
nomy with which color is used relegates it to a subordinate position in rela-
tion to line. Here, too, a parallel can be found in the structural relationship
of music to libretto in the Bartók/Balázs literature opera, where the super-
structure is defined by the poetic text rather than the musical score.
The structural function of Balázs’s text is reinforced by the stage setting,
with its seven doors that visually articulate the scenic structure of Bluebeard’s
Castle. Adapting this peculiar relationship of text and stage scenery, Klee
imposed pictorial structure with signs that are read simultaneously as the
visual analogues of a poetic text and the structural elements of a graphically

rendered palace that could have served as a design for a stage set. By inserting
vertical projections at irregular intervals into the horizontal linear rhythms of
his drawing, Klee divided the palace facade into seven subtly differentiated
sections that visually echo the sectional divisions of the opera. Woven into
Klee’s progressive architectural notations like a thematic subtext are torsos,
some with clearly delineated breasts, others surmounted by phalluses. Seen
as isolated ornamental motifs, these architectural curiosities can be read as a
doubly gendered version of Max Ernst’s “phallustrade.”55 In the context of
their rhythmically structured palatial setting, they become visible signs of the
sexual dynamics between Bluebeard and Judith.56 In much the same way
that Balázs’s poetry dictates the structure of Bluebeard’s Castle, Klee’s
graphic symbols assume a structural dimension as they accrue in repetitive
patterns. Poetic signs are once again dynamically integrated into the struc-
tural rhythms of Klee’s graphic text. The two lines of verbal text written into
the linear structure of Palace nevertheless serve as a lingering reminder that
Klee was still referring to extrapictorial models.
By the late 1920s Klee was well on his way to inventing a pictographic
language that could communicate content through linear structures and
without reference to external sources. He was tempted to return to an
operatic model only by the challenge of recapitulating the theoretical
framework and symbolic content of the most controversial opera of the
early twentieth century. Although Klee would continue to interpret oper-
atic themes in his drawings as late as 1940, Stricken City (Betroffene Stadt,
1936/22) (fig. 40) is the last of his operatic paintings. One of only twenty-
five catalogued works dating from 1936, it reverts to his earlier practice of
referencing both the libretto and the musical score of an opera. A unique
confluence of formal and pictorial elements suggests that Stricken City was
conceived as a gloss on The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny
(Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny), a hallmark of Weimar musical
culture featuring lyrics by Bertolt Brecht, a musical score by Kurt Weill,
and stage sets by Caspar Neher.57
During the spring of 1927 Brecht began discussions with Weill about
composing music to accompany his five satirical “Mahagonny Songs,”
which were published the same year in Manual of Piety (Die Hauspostille),
his first book of poetry. Their collaboration resulted in the Mahagonny
Songspiel [sic], performed in the summer of 1927 at a music festival orga-
nized by the composer Paul Hindemith in Baden-Baden. The projected
backdrops, designed by Neher for each song, proved to be a catalyst for
Brecht’s alternative to Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk. In his notes on the
production of Mahagonny Brecht outlined the concept of an “epic opera”
(“eine epische Oper”) in which music, text, and setting communicate the
same message independently yet simultaneously. What Brecht character-
ized as a “radical separation of the elements” (“eine radikale Trennung der
Disclaimer:

Fig. 40: Paul Klee, Stricken City (1936/22). Gypsum and oil on canvas with original
frame, 45.1 35.2 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Berggruen
Klee Collection, 1987 (1987.358). © 2006 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG
Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Photograph © 1985 The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Elemente”) was fully realized in the longer operatic version of Mahagonny,

which retains sections of the original songs, interspersed throughout
twenty scenes.58 The opera, which sparked opening-night riots at Leipzig’s
Neues Theater on 9 March 1930, traveled on to Kassel and Frankfurt. The
following year another production was staged at Berlin’s Kurfürstendamm
Theater, where, despite arguments between Brecht and Weill during
rehearsals, performances took place without incident.
Although Brecht’s name appears nowhere in Klee’s voluminous corres-
pondence, he did mention a 1932 performance of Weill’s opera The Pledge
(Die Bürgschaft) in Düsseldorf.59 Unfortunately, there is scant documenta-
tion of Klee’s familiarity with any of the operas written and staged by the trio
of Brecht, Weill, and Neher. Felix Klee did cite Weill, along with Debussy, to
substantiate his father’s interest in contemporary operatic composers, so it is
reasonable to assume that Klee knew works other than the relatively obscure
The Pledge.60 A likely candidate would be The Threepenny Opera (Die
Dreigroschenoper), the popular Brecht/Weill/Neher collaboration that Klee

could have seen during its phenomenally successful run in Berlin beginning
in late summer 1928, and in provincial German theaters for much of the fol-
lowing year. Given the proximity of Dessau to Leipzig, it seems equally likely
that Klee might also have attended a performance of Mahagonny. If so, he
would have found Neher’s set designs remarkably similar to some of his own
works dating from the twenties.
Eighteen years Klee’s junior, Neher had dabbled in playwriting and
the visual arts but had not yet committed himself to a profession when he
volunteered for military service in 1915. Following his discharge, he pur-
sued formal training in illustration and painting at the Munich Academy.
Neher’s renewed contact with Brecht, a Gymnasium friend, introduced
him to Munich’s theater world and reinforced his proclivity for art that
challenged established conventions. In 1924 both Neher and Brecht
moved to Berlin, where they met Weill. Despite personality differences,
their aesthetic views coalesced, resulting in some of the most innovative
theater of the late twenties and early thirties. For the Leipzig and Berlin
productions of Mahagonny, Neher replaced the stage curtain and trad-
itional sets with a suspended screen on which scene titles and visual images
were projected. The projections combined transparent color with symbolic
signs and descriptive motifs intended to mirror and comment on the
opera’s dramatic action.61 As specified in stage directions for the end of
scene 11 and the beginning of scene 12, the progress of a storm was
charted on an aerial map by an animated arrow, which functioned as a sign
of directional movement and a symbol of impending destruction.
Arrows are similarly deployed in a number of works by Klee, one
example being Stricken Place (Betroffener Ort, 1922/109), where the
arrow, as a symbolic form in motion, is layered over bands of color ranging
from pale yellow to burnt sienna.62 As early as 1915 Klee had appropriated
the arrow from war maps in the news media to give a sense of immediacy
to his View of the Severely Threatened City of Pinz (fig. 17). By 1922, when
he painted Stricken Place, he could also have known Karl Froelich’s Ikarus
(1918), an experimental film that spliced together different systems of rep-
resentation, including an aerial map, a schematic diagram, and figurative
symbols.63 Any similarities between Neher’s projections and Klee’s earlier
paintings could conceivably be attributed to common visual sources such
as these. There is, however, ample visual evidence to counter this argu-
ment, for Neher’s watercolor and ink studies of stage sets throughout the
twenties leave little doubt that he was looking at the works of George
Grosz and Otto Dix, as well as Klee, who was exhibiting regularly at the
Alfred Flechtheim Gallery in Berlin. Stricken Place and other works by Klee
were also featured in an exhibition at Berlin’s National Gallery in February
1923. If Stricken Place was one of many models for Neher’s Mahagonny
projections, Klee subsequently returned the compliment, thereby initiating
a creative exchange. In 1936 he reworked Stricken Place by framing it in

the contemporary operatic context of Mahagonny.
In Stricken Place Klee applied concepts he had developed in his Bauhaus
lectures on movement and countermovement, creating the illusion of three-
dimensional space with color gradations rather than linear perspective, and
countering movement into depth with surface movement controlled by
directional arrows. The formal tension between surface and depth reverber-
ates at the level of content, where the pure pictorial relations of abstract art
are counterbalanced by small figurative motifs that imply a narrative.
Fourteen years later, in Stricken City, Klee contemporized the narrative con-
tent of Stricken Place and recast its formal vocabulary, although forms still
oscillate between imitation and abstraction. Stricken City is not unlike
Mural, Cathedrals, and Palace in that horizontal lines provide structural
supports for patterned repetitions of sign units. The rows of signs are
stacked into a shaped configuration that resembles a walled or fortified town
— thus Klee’s descriptive title. A musical model for Stricken City is indicated
internally by its calligraphic notational system and by what Carola Giedion-
Welcker characterizes as a visual adaptation of the patterns of change and
repetition found in musical variations.64 Like Weill and other contemporary
composers who invented new markings and otherwise made creative use of
standard musical notation, Klee designed his own system of schematized
visual signs. Abstractions of architectural and landscape motifs are strung
across stavelike linear supports in densely concentrated notational patterns
comparable to bars of music.65 It is perhaps coincidental that Klee’s expand-
ing and contracting linear rhythms combine the lyrical flow of Weill’s
melodic accompaniment to the “Alabama Song” with the staccato syncopa-
tion that punctuates Brecht’s sardonic invocation of “God in Mahagonny.”
Yet coincidence is given credibility in the company of less fortuitous corre-
spondences, the most obvious being the link between the monochromatic
palette of Stricken City and the title Mahagonny. The ground of Stricken
City is saturated with brown oil paint applied in varying degrees of intensity.
Although it can be argued that the dark palette was intended only to evoke
a general sense of doom, the choice of color takes on a more specific mean-
ing in light of the persistent rumor that Brecht’s title was a satirical refer-
ence to the brown shirts of Adolf Hitler’s storm troopers.
Brecht himself prevaricated about any topical meaning encoded in the
name Mahagonny, cagily distancing his fictional city from current events
by locating it in a geographic region of America that cannot be found on
any map.66 This transparent dissimulation did not fool contemporary audi-
ences, who readily equated the unlicensed pleasures and venal greed of
Mahagonny with the moral corruption and rampant inflation of Weimar
Germany. Nor was Brecht’s thinly disguised political agenda lost on the
Nazis’ cultural police, whose tolerance for artistic and political provocation
has been well documented. Suspicious of Brecht’s motives, Hitler’s
brownshirts purportedly fueled the public demonstrations on the opening

night of Mahagonny. Because of their reputations in avant-garde circles,
Brecht and Weill were subjected to persistent harassment. Both fled
Germany in 1933, their works being burned or confiscated and branded as
“degenerate.” Klee, too, was forced into exile, with his art suffering the
same fate. By the time he painted Stricken City in 1936, Klee was follow-
ing global politics from neutral Switzerland, apparently resigned to the
imminent fulfillment of the prophetic message implicit in Mahagonny.
Stricken City tacitly acknowledges the inevitability of the destruction of
war and can thus be interpreted as covert commentary on a climate of con-
flict. In the context of Klee’s ongoing experiments with integrating the
structural and the poetic, it can also be seen as a pictorial exercise in appro-
priating a radical new approach to a traditional art form.
Throughout his artistic practice Klee periodically turned to opera as a
model for bringing together poetic content and structural form. The inno-
vations of twentieth-century composers and librettists posed alternatives to
traditional operatic models of integration. Bluebeard’s Castle exemplifies one
alternative, Mahagonny another. In his notes to Mahagonny, compiled in
1930 after the work’s premiere, Brecht redefined the constituent elements
of opera. The role of music in what he called “epic opera” would be to com-
municate the meaning of a didactic text, as opposed to heightening the emo-
tional impact of a poetic libretto. Brecht characterized the text of
Mahagonny as the exposition of a “moral tableau” (“eine
Sittenschilderung”), which is articulated by both the spoken and the printed
word. Like the printed titles, the setting would be projected, providing
“visual aids” (“Anschauungsmaterial”) that not only adopt an attitude
toward the stage action but also inculcate a new attitude on the part of the
audience. This new attitude marks the fundamental difference between the
pleasure principle of dramatic opera and the social function of epic opera,
which requires the audience to take a stance on controversial issues.67
Although Klee’s visual response to Mahagonny can hardly be said to take a
stance in favor of radical innovation, it does explore the pictorial possibilities
of Brecht’s “radical separation of the elements,” even if only tentatively.
In other examples of Klee’s operatic paintings, including Palace, the
relationship between line and color parallels the relationship between an
operatic text and its musical score. In Stricken City the separation of
elements is indicated by a structure in which color, line, and the symbolic
arrow are confined to discrete layers. The arrow, isolated on the surface
plane, visually reiterates Klee’s title, very much like Neher’s symbolic pro-
jections for Mahagonny. Incised beneath the arrow are aggregates of signs
not unlike the words of a text, in the sense that they are both descriptive
and abstract. To the extent that linear patterns define a rhythmical struc-
ture, they also function like the notes of a musical score. To use Brecht’s
terminology, individual signs articulate the text, and linear rhythms
communicate or “set forth the text” (“den Text auslegend”). Finally, the
colored ground of Stricken City refers to both the title and the narrative
content of Mahagonny, injecting a generic landscape with contemporary
political implications as well as experimental artistic value.68
Klee’s investigations into the possibilities of effecting a dynamic rela-
tionship between the poetic and the structural were open-ended but by no
means inconclusive. The works discussed in this chapter exemplify his
experiments in juxtaposing, layering, and otherwise combining the signs
and syntactical patterns of different language systems. This process resulted
in new compositional structures for poetic subject matter while also giving
new meaning to metaphor. A metaphor, whether verbal or visual, is usu-
ally defined as a poetic figure that generates fresh associations through a
shift in context or normative usage. Klee mastered this kind of metaphor-
ical language in his postwar paintings. During the twenties he expanded his
repertoire of source material for visual metaphors, in effect inventing a new
pictorial language that defines metaphors in terms of new structural rela-
tionships between linguistic and visual elements. His poems in pictorial
script are composed utilizing various permutations of this language.
Notes
1
Gropius, “Program of the Staatliche Bauhaus in Weimar,” 31 (Wingler, Das
Bauhaus, 39).
2
Briefe, vol. 1, 11 July 1902, 254.
3
Tagebücher #429, 521.
4
Tagebücher #429, 521.
5
Tagebücher #389, Easter 1902, 123 (Diaries, 98).
6
Spiller, ed., The Thinking Eye, 267–77, 289 (Spiller, ed., Paul Klee: Das bildner-
ische Denken, 267–77, 289), and Klee, Beiträge zur bildnerischen Formlehre, 49–51.
7
Spiller, ed., The Thinking Eye, 273, 289 (Spiller, ed., Paul Klee: Das bildnerische
Denben, 273, 289), and Klee, Beiträge zur bildnerischen Formlehre, 51.
8
For the term “lace picture,” see Grohmann, Klee, 208, 257, 394; on Klee’s oper-
atic line drawings, see Andrew Kagan, Paul Klee: Art & Music (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
UP, 1983), 95–143; hereafter cited as Klee: Art & Music.
9
See Anger, Klee and the Decorative, and Philippe Büttner, “In the Beginning was
the Ornament: From the Arabesque to Modernism’s Abstract Line,” in Brüderlin,
ed., Ornament and Abstraction, 100–101.
10
Klee cut apart drawings and rearranged fragments in 1905–7 and consistently
began applying the process of composing by cutting in 1910. For photographic
documentation, see Kersten and Okuda, Im Zeichen der Teilung, 82–83, 322–68.
11
Tagebücher #892, February 1911, 311 (Diaries, 256). On Klee’s “pseudoim-
pressionist principle,” see Kersten and Okuda, Im Zeichen der Teilung, 31–32.
12
Kersten and Okuda, Im Zeichen der Teilung, 11–24, 321–68.
13
Klee assigned the title Curtain to the five smaller works cut from the same
watercolor (Vorhang, 1924/129 and 129 a–d); for reproductions and an analysis
of the process, see Kersten and Okuda, Im Zeichen der Teilung, 185–92, 352. On
the relationship of these works to textile design and structure, see Jenny Anger,
“Klees Unterricht in der Webereiwerkstatt des Bauhauses,” in the exhibition cata-
logue Das Bauhaus webt: Die Textilwerkstatt am Bauhaus, ed. Magdalena Droste
and Manfred Ludewig (Berlin: Bauhaus-Archiv, 1998), 38, 41.
14
Schwitters, Manifeste und kritische Prosa, 5:242–43; originally published under
the same title in Der Sturm 17 (October 1926): 106–7.
15
For a reproduction, see Catalogue raisonné, 4:116. On parallels between Klee and
Schwitters, see Temkin, “Klee and the Avant-Garde,” 17–18. The occasion for Klee’s
gift is noted by Temkin and also by Roskill in Klee, Kandinsky, 89. On Schwitters’s
cordial relations with Klee and other Bauhaus masters, see Florian Steininger, “Kurt
Schwitters — Leben und Werk,” in Schwitters, ed. Ingried Brugger, Siegfried Gohr,
and Gunda Luyken (Vienna: Kunstforum / Salzburg: Jung und Jung, 2002), 56.
16
“Wand” was originally published in Anna Blume Dichtungen (Hannover: Paul
Steegmann, 1922), 42; it is reprinted in Schwitters, Lyrik, 203.
17
The term “opto-phonetic” is applied to Schwitters’s sound poems by Jasia
Reichardt, “Type in Art,” in the exhibition catalogue published by the Institute of
Contemporary Arts, Between Poetry and Painting (London: Institute of
Contemporary Arts and W. Kempner, 1965), 17; hereafter cited as Between Poetry
and Painting. Variations on the term have been applied to other examples of dada
sound poetry; see, e.g., Richard Huelsenbeck, ed. The Dada Almanac, trans.
Malcolm Green (London: Atlas Press, 1993), x.
18
On Gropius’s original proposal and its relationship to Bauhaus initiatives, see
Gilbert Herbert, The Dream of the Factory-Made House: Walter Gropius and
Konrad Wachsmann (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984), 33–42.
19
It is interesting to note parallels between Muche’s “Haus am Horn” and Klee’s
postcard announcing the 1923 Bauhaus Exhibition (1923/47), which likewise
made creative use of “prefabricated” parts, in this case the sign language used in
his earlier Script-Architectural (Schrift-Architectonisch, 1918/8).
20
For reproductions of these works, see Catalogue raisonné: Structural I and
Structural II, 4:219; Structural Composition, 4:220.
21
See Glaesemer (Colored Works, 142), who describes the rhythmically repeated
details as “assembled units.” See also Anger (Klee and the Decorative, 170–71) on
the extent to which Mural was both mass-produced and one-of-a-kind.
22
Denken, 239).
23
Spiller, ed., The Thinking Eye, 247–53 (Spiller, ed., Paul Klee: Das bildnerische
Denken, 247–53).
24
Denken, 491); and Klee, Beiträge zur bildnerischen Formlehre, 177.
25
Tagebücher #1081, July 1917, 440 (Diaries, 374).
26
Khlebnikov, “The Word as Such,” 1:255. On the relationship of “zaum” poetry
to other types of experimental verse, see Johanna Drucker, The Visible Word:
Experimental Typography and Modern Art, 1909–1923 (Chicago: U of Chicago P,
1994), 168–92.
27
Die Aktion (23 April 1913): 451; Ernst Stadler, Der Aufbruch: Gedichte
(Leipzig: Weissen Bücher, 1914).
28
Hamburger, German Poetry, 45–46.
29
Briefe, vol. 2, 17 November 1916, 835.
30
Tagebücher #1026, 17 November 1916, 410 (Diaries, 350).
31
32
By contrast, the architecture of Cologne is readily identifiable in Ernst Ludwig
Kirchner’s Rhine Bridge at Cologne (1914), which Sherwin Simmons characterizes
as a pictorial fusion of personal experience and collective memory in “ ‘To Stand
and See Within’: Expressionist Space in Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Rhine Bridge at
Cologne,” Art History 27 (April 2004): 250–81.
33
34
On the relationship between the “dividual” and “individual” in Klee’s work, see
Denken, 217, 249), and Glaesemer, Colored Works, 142. For analyses of Klee’s the-
oretical and pedagogical writings from the Bauhaus years, see the following essays
in the Bremen Kunsthalle exhibition catalogue Paul Klee — Lehrer am Bauhaus,
ed. Wulf Herzogenrath, Anne Buschhoff, and Andreas Vowinckel (Bremen: H. M.
Hauschild, 2003): Michael Baumgartner and Rossella Savelli, “Die kunsttheoretis-
chen und pädagogischen Schriften Paul Klees am Bauhaus in Weimar und Dessau,”
28–36; Andreas Vowinckel, “Beiträge zur Bildnerischen Formlehre (1921/1922)
und zur Bildnerischen Gestaltungslehre (1928) von Paul Klee,” 52–55.
35
Hamburger, German Poetry, 45.
36
Denken, 287), and Klee, Beiträge zur bildnerischen Formlehre, 53.
37
In addition to Kagan’s Klee: Art & Music, there are numerous other publica-
tions on Klee and music. For factual information and various perspectives, see
Centre Georges Pompidou, Klee et la musique, ed. Ole Henrik Moe (Paris: Centre
Georges Pompidou, 1985); hereafter cited as Klee et la musique.
38
For Klee’s response to Mozart, see Kagan, Klee: Art & Music, 51–59, 96–98,
114–16, 132–34, 141–53; for his response to both Mozart and Wagner, see my
article “Paul Klee’s Operatic Themes,” 450–66.
39
See, e.g., Briefe, vol. 1, 20 June 1899, 56; 10 October 1900, 98. If Klee owned
a copy of the libretto, it is no longer in his library. The only complete Wagner
libretto listed in the catalogue of the Klee library is Götterdämmerung.
40
On the nineteenth century’s integration of music into the theory of ut pictura
poesis, see: Roy Park, “ ‘Ut Pictura Poesis’: The Nineteenth-Century Aftermath,”
Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 28 (winter 1969): 155–64; Elizabeth Abel,
“Redefining the Sister Arts: Baudelaire’s Response to the Art of Delacroix,” Critical
Inquiry 6 (spring 1980): 364–84; and the section entitled “Music and the Sister
Arts” in Siglind Bruhn, Musical Ekphrasis: Composers Responding to Poetry and

Painting (Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon, 2000), 3–54. Although Klee’s name appears
throughout Bruhn’s study, no mention is made of the works discussed here.
41
Paul Klee, Pedagogical Sketchbook, ed. and trans. Sibyl Moholy-Nagy (London:
Faber and Faber, 1968), 54–58. On arrows in Klee’s work, see Mark Rosenthal,
Paul Klee and the Arrow (Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms, 1979); idem,
“The Myth of Flight in the Art of Paul Klee.”
42
43
The following analysis of Long Hair and Soulful revises and expands a section
of my article “Paul Klee’s Operatic Themes,” 453.
44
Denken, 388), and Klee, Beiträge zur bildnerischen Formlehre, 117.
45
On Debussy’s adaptation of Maeterlinck’s text, see Joseph Kerman, Opera as
Drama, rev. ed. (Berkeley: U of California P, 1988), 142–57.
46
Tagebücher #847, January 1909, 286 (Diaries, 234). Felix Klee identified Pelléas
et Mélisande as one contemporary opera that Klee heard on numerous occasions
and very much admired; see Moe, “Entretien avec Felix Klee,” in Klee et la
musique, 168).
47
For the original libretto plus a translation, see Pelléas and Mélisande: Lyric
Drama in Five Acts, trans. Charles Alfred Byrne (New York: F. Rullman, 1907).
48
Briefe, vol. 2, 8 May 1926, 1011. According to Felix Klee, Bartók wrote a note
in the Klee family guestbook (Moe, “Entretien avec Felix Klee,” Klee et la musique,
165–66), so Klee must have met the composer, possibly on one of the occasions
when Bartók’s music was performed at the Bauhaus. See Andreas Hüneke, “Musik
am Bauhaus,” in Musikkultur in der Weimarer Republik, ed. Wolfgang Rathert and
Giselher Schubert (Mainz: Schott Musik International, 2001), 189–97.
49
Translations of the Hungarian libretto of Bluebeard’s Castle are included in most
modern recordings. The lines cited here are from the translation by Christopher
Hassall in the performance by the London Symphony Orchestra, István Kertész,
long-playing record, Decca 414 167–1 LE.
50
I wish to thank Carl S. Leafstedt, author of Inside Bluebeard’s Castle: Music and
Drama in Béla Bartók’s Opera (New York: Oxford UP, 1999), for sharing informa-
tion about Bluebeard’s Castle — and literature operas in general — with me.
51
On the use of this term, see, e.g., Miroslav John Hanak, A Guide to Romantic
Poetry in Germany (New York: Peter Lang, 1987), 153.
52
Cited in Leafstedt, Inside Bluebeard’s Castle, 7.
53
Leafstedt, Inside Bluebeard’s Castle, 7.
54
On Klee and Salome, see my article “Paul Klee’s Operatic Themes,” 460;
Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, discussed earlier, is another example of a literature
opera.
55
“Phallustrade” was cited by Ernst as an example of a “verbal collage” in “Beyond
Painting,” originally published in the Cahiers d’art in 1937 and reprinted in
“Beyond Painting” and Other Writings by the Artist and His Friends, trans. Dorothea
Tanning and Ralph Manheim (New York: Wittenborn, Schultz, 1948), 15–17.
56
It is tempting to speculate that Diego Rivera — who purchased Palace from
Galka Scheyer as a gift for Frida Kahlo — personally responded to this aspect of the
imagery even if he knew nothing about its source. On the circumstances of the pur-
chase, see Naomi Sawelson-Gorse, “Kleine Kreise und brüchige Bündnisse: Galka
Scheyer und amerikanische Sammler der ‘Blauen Vier,’ ” in Die Blaue Vier:
Feininger, Jawlensky, Kandinsky, Klee in der Neuen Welt (Bern: Kunstmuseum /
Düsseldorf: Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen / Cologne: DuMont, 1997),
57–58.
57
For accounts of this collaboration see Douglas Jarman, Kurt Weill: An
Illustrated Biography (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1982), 39–70; hereafter cited as
Kurt Weill. See also John Willett, Caspar Neher, Brecht’s Designer (London:
Methuen, 1986), 48, 120–22; hereafter cited as Caspar Neher. This catalogue
accompanied an exhibition organized by the Arts Council of Great Britain.
58
See Bertolt Brecht, “The Modern Theatre Is the Epic Theatre: Notes to the
Opera Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny (1930),” in Modern Theories of
Drama: A Selection of Writings on Drama and Theater, 1850–1990, ed. George W.
Brandt (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), 228; hereafter cited as Modern Theories of
Drama. For the original German, see “Anmerkungen zur Oper Aufstieg und Fall
der Stadt Mahagonny,” in Schriften I: Zum Theater, vol. 7 of Gesammelte Werke, ed.
Elisabeth Hauptmann (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1967), 1010–11; hereafter cited as
Schriften I. To see how the original songs were incorporated into the libretto, com-
pare the “Mahagonny Songs” in Die Hauspostille / Manual of Piety, the bilingual
edition with English text by Eric Bentley (New York: Grove., 1966), 184–205,
with The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, trans. W. H. Auden and Chester
Kallman (Boston: David. R. Godine, 1976).
59
Briefe, vol. 2, 13 April 1932, 1186; 17 April 1932, 1187.
60
F. Klee, ed., Klee, 94.
61
For more complete biographical information and photographs of Neher’s
designs for Brecht’s plays, see Willett, Caspar Neher.
62
For a color reproduction of Stricken Place, see Catalogue raisonné, 3:401.
63
On Froelich’s Ikarus, see Paolo Cherchi Usai, Lorenzo Codelli, and Jan-
Christopher Horak, Prima di Caligari: Cinema Tedesco, 1895–1920 (Pordenone,
Italy: Biblioteca dell’immagine, 1990), 249. Regine Prange also compares Klee’s
Stricken Place to the earlier View of the Severely Threatened City of Pinz; see her
study Das Kristalline als Kunstsymbol — Bruno Taut und Paul Klee: Zur Reflexion
des Abstrakten in Kunst und Kunsttheorie der Moderne, Studien zur
Kunstgeschichte, 63 (Hildesheim: G. Olms, 1991), 305.
64
Carola Giedion-Welcker, Paul Klee, trans. Alexander Gode (New York: Viking,
1952), 104.
65
This paragraph incorporates and expands upon some observations in my article
“Paul Klee’s Operatic Themes,” 454.
66
On Brecht’s prevarication, see the introduction to Brecht, The Rise and Fall of
the City of Mahagonny, 16.
67
This paragraph summarizes the points made by Brecht in Modern Theories of
Drama, 224–31; see also Schriften I, 1004–16.
68
Schriften I, 1011. Peter-Klaus Schuster notes that the title Stricken City func-
tions as a kind of “motto,” which would be consonant with my reference to the
Brecht/Weill/Neher collaboration; see his essay “ ‘Diesseitig bin ich gar nicht fass-
bar,’ Klees Erfindungen der Wirklichkeit,” in Klee aus New York: Hauptwerke der
Sammlung Berggruen im Metropolitan Museum of Art (Berlin: Staatliche Museen
zu Berlin, Preussischer Kulturbesitz, 1998), 14.
5: Poems in Pictorial Script
B Y THE LATE TWENTIES Klee had spent the better part of two decades
forging a unique visual language. While at the Bauhaus he began to
consider how he might develop a language system that would obviate the
differences of form and syntax that distinguish alphabetic writing from pic-
torial representation. To this end, he transferred his theories of form gen-
eration from pedagogical exercises to discursive pictorial structures. In
works of the mid-twenties, such as Mural (fig. 32) and Cathedrals (fig.
34), Klee drew from a lexicon of predominantly architectural and geomet-
ric signs that served as building blocks for larger architectural structures.
By 1926 he had introduced a greater variety of iconic signs into his picto-
rial vocabulary, thereby generating an increasingly pronounced tension
between individual signs that are inscribed and arranged like written char-
acters and compositional structures that are perceived as visual images. In
his Bauhaus lecture notes dating from about 1923–24, Klee referred to the
temporal reading of a “kind of pictorial writing” (“die Form einer
Bilderschrift”).1 Although he did not elaborate on the meaning of “picto-
rial writing,” it seems clear that he meant something other than “artistic
writing” (“künstlerische Schrift”). That term would have been familiar in
print shops and artists’ studios from Rudolf von Larisch’s Beispiele künst-
lerischer Schrift, a multivolume source book of typefaces and layouts
designed by artists active in Great Britain and throughout continental
Europe in the early twentieth century. In choosing terminology that would
have been more familiar in archaeological and philological rather than
artistic circles, Klee invited comparisons between his visual language and
the signs of pre-alphabetic writing systems. His pictorial writing also has
conceptual analogies in literary “word painting” and theoretical analogies
in the surrealists’ concept of “automatic writing.”
Like other forms of pictorialism, word painting is a poetic device of
long standing. Not surprisingly, examples of word painting proliferated in
the fluid domain of modernist poetic practice, where observing traditional
boundaries between the visual and verbal arts was considered not only
obsolete but counterproductive. Klee himself had tried his hand at the kind
of word painting that colors so much expressionist poetry. In 1918 he
inscribed an exercise in expressionist verse into the pictorial setting of Once
Emerged from the Gray of Night (fig. 10), pairing verbal imagery with cor-
responding colors. During the twenties and thirties he produced numer-
ous works that retain the linear structure of poetry, although visual
POEMS IN PICTORIAL SCRIPT 155
transcriptions of verbal imagery give way to signs drawn from the vocabu-
lary of his pictorial writing. Klee’s concept of pictorial writing posed one
of many challenges to traditionally observed distinctions between tempo-
ral sequencing and spatial organization. Such challenges were common-
place in the rhetoric of modernism, from Delaunay’s theory of rhythmic
simultaneity to the surrealists’ proprietary claims on automatic writing and
drawing.
Automatism was invoked by surrealist theorists and artists alike to
characterize a technique applicable to the production of either verbal or
visual art. Although there was no single definition of automatism, it was
generally assumed to be a process predicated on an unmediated synchrony
between mental and manual activity. In theory automatism could generate
carriers of meaning that function as either verbal or visual signs — or as
both. In fact, few works illustrated in La Révolution surréaliste, the princi-
pal vehicle of surrealist thought, achieved that level of indeterminacy.
However, Klee’s concept of pictorial writing implies just this degree of cal-
culated equivocation. Even though he coined the term prior to being
exposed to any surrealist theory, visual evidence suggests that he
responded to the provocations of surrealism well into the thirties.
Because the products of Klee’s pictorial writing engage the viewer’s
visual and verbal faculties simultaneously, the viewer assumes a participa-
tory role in activating oppositional relationships that Dee Reynolds has
characterized as “rhythmic structures.” Reynolds first introduced the idea
of rhythmic structures in an important study of early abstract art. The
objective of her study is to explore the role of the imagination in the recep-
tion of “semantically disruptive poems and paintings,” by which she means
works that challenge traditional modes of representation and perception.2
The two painters represented in her study are Kandinsky and Piet
Mondrian, both of whom aimed to transform the spectator’s perception
and experience of medium. They did so, she argues, by foregrounding
rhythmic structures. Her definition of rhythm embraces but is not limited
to the compositional principle common to all artistic media, one that is a
recurring theme in Klee’s theoretical and pedagogical writing. She pro-
poses that rhythm be more broadly interpreted as an effect of the interac-
tions between an artist’s signifying processes and the receiver’s imagining
activity. These interactions effect changes in the way the receiver experi-
ences a work of art, and these changes in turn replace definable subject
matter as the principal content of the work.3
Rhythmic content is a common denominator of the verbal and visual
poetry that Klee produced during the last decade of his life. Throughout
the thirties he continued to experiment with the kinds of modernist poetry
he had written earlier. The verbal bestiary (see chapter 2) and most of his
other poems in manuscript form were jotted down in pocket diaries, while
others, such as Alphabet AIOEK (fig. 14) have visual frames of reference.
156 POEMS IN PICTORIAL SCRIPT
Disclaimer:

Fig. 41: Paul Klee, Tree Nursery (1929/98). Oil with incised gesso ground on
canvas, 43.815 ⫻ 52.3875 cm. The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, acquired
1930. © 2006 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.
Photograph courtesy of The Phillips Collection.
However, a majority of his poetic production took the form of paintings

and drawings that incorporate a pictorial vocabulary into compositional
structures adapted from linguistic and literary models. These experiments
in pictorial writing culminated in what Klee himself entitled Poem in
Pictorial Script. I am appropriating this drawing title to encompass a num-
ber of visual images that counter traditional modes of conception, con-
struction, and perception. Despite certain commonalities, including a
degree of visual abstraction that approximates any number of writing sys-
tems, Klee’s poems in pictorial script never ossify into formulaic repetition.
This chapter follows Klee as he bridged the distance that separates the pic-
tographic signs and linear structure of Tree Nursery (Junge Pflanzung,
1929/98) (fig. 41) from the more abstract imagery and indeterminate for-
mal structure of Poem in Pictorial Script.
Tree Nursery marks a reflective pause in Klee’s autobiographical
narrative of process.4 It is both a summative assessment of his efforts to
harmonize poetic imagery and structural form and a prototype of his poems
in pictorial script. In the lower-right-hand corner of the painting are two
small stick figures, both seemingly overwhelmed by the vastness of the cul-
tivated natural setting they are charged with tending. In this respect Tree
Nursery perpetuates Klee’s “poetic-personal idea of landscape.” By the late
twenties, however, Klee’s experiments with visual constructs generated by
dividual and individual rhythms had resulted in significant changes in the
appearance of his landscape paintings. These changes are evident in Tree
Nursery, which exemplifies a fully developed pictorial writing system.
Comparing this painting to expressionist poetry reveals the extent to which
Klee’s pictorial writing parallels contemporary word painting.
The poetry written by Georg Heym provides a fitting comparative
framework since he, like Klee, responded to the modernist impulse that
instinctively rejected boundaries between media. Characterized by Patrick
Bridgwater as a “painter manqué,” Heym thought iconographically and
spatially in composing his verbal texts.5 Like other poets of his generation,
he was initially seduced by neo-Romanticism, producing numerous exam-
ples of poems that parallel Klee’s “poetic-personal idea of landscape.”
Between 1910 — when he discovered his own niche within the experimen-
tal preserve of German expressionism — and 1912 (the year of his death)
Heym’s poetry changed perceptibly. Galvanized by a letter from his friend
John Wolfsohn, Heym assimilated and combined diverse visual influences
into a unique literary style. It was Wolfsohn who encouraged Heym to pur-
sue the idea of infusing Ferdinand Hodler’s unified vision of nature with
Vincent van Gogh’s transformative color.6 The idea was realized in a series
of landscape poems that bear comparison with Klee’s Tree Nursery.
Heym’s seasonal landscape poems, which date from 1910 and 1911,
affirm Wolfsohn’s assessment that the poet’s resemblance to Hodler was
most striking in their shared affinity for “parallelism,” or “reduplication”
of imagery.7 By adding van Gogh’s expressive color to Hodler’s accumula-
tion of images, Heym applied the technique of word painting to a personal
poetic language that evokes the sensory specifics of observable reality, as
opposed to the compulsive obsessions of an internal reality. These features
are readily apparent in the opening quatrain of “Winter” (“Der Winter”),
composed sometime in November 1910:
Der blaue Schnee liegt auf dem The blue snow lies on flat
ebenen Land, ground,
Das Winter dehnt. Und die Which winter stretches. And the
Wegweiser zeigen signposts show
Einander mit der ausgestreckten Hand One another with hands outstretched
Der Horizonte violettes Schweigen. The horizon’s violet silence.8
Klee’s Tree Nursery is not a literal transcription of the imagery in any of
Heym’s seasonal landscapes. Nor should any particular significance be
accorded to the coincidence that the bands of color in Tree Nursery com-
bine the stretches of blue and violet in “Winter” with the wide, flat strand
of yellow road and the broad green heights of the forest in “Autumn”
(“Autumnus”).9 More to the point is the fact that Klee, like Heym, was
not using color descriptively but rather as the backdrop for a dense scrim
of crisply delineated images, each of which retains its specific identity.
Wolfsohn had recognized the same tendency in Heym’s verbal landscapes:
“You repeat yourself, you juxtapose all sorts of disparate things, giving
each one the same status, and treating them all as equivalent.”10 As
Bridgwater has observed, the visual effects in Heym’s seasonal poems were
no longer conveyors of mood in the Romantic tradition but were instead
the vehicles of a postimpressionist vision of the natural world.11 The fact
that the same generalization could be made about Klee’s Tree Nursery does
not justify a claim for Heym’s direct — let alone exclusive influence on this
particular painting. Nevertheless, Klee, like Heym, was exploring the
potential of cross-pollination as a creative strategy.
Assuming that Klee knew Heym’s poetry and recognized its visual
sources, he would no doubt have responded more enthusiastically to traces
of van Gogh’s intense color than to evidence of what he had once dismissed
as Hodler’s tiresome “Dinge an sich.”12 Whatever he may have thought of
Heym’s preferences in the visual arts, Klee would have discerned the novelty
of the poet’s approach to composing verbal landscapes. Heym’s seasonal
landscape poems are emphatically visual not only in the use of vivid color
imagery but in the clarity with which objects are located in their spatial set-
tings. A particularly apt example is found in the third stanza of “Winter,”
where crossroads are oriented toward the four points of the compass:
Dann ziehn sie weiter in die Then they wend their way into
Einsamkeit the solitude
Gen Nord und Süden und nach Of North and South, East and
Ost und Westen West.13
These precise spatial indicators notwithstanding, the semantic units of
“Winter” appear to be strung together in no preconceived order and based
on no implied hierarchy. Repetitive sounds such as the sibilant s are like-
wise iterated in irregular patterns. These, too, assume a visual dimension,
accumulating in what Jean Chick has described as thickly textured verses.14
The linear organization of Heym’s discrete visual images and alliterative
sound patterns are remarkably similar to Klee’s distribution of repetitive
signs along superimposed registers, which more closely resemble lines of
text than a conventionally structured pictorial space. Klee himself drew on
the same analogy in coining the phrase “a kind of pictorial writing,” which
he equated with the notations on a page of printed text or music. Although
he used the term figuratively, it was grounded in his methods of pictorial
construction. In the case of Tree Nursery, Klee’s choice of medium and his
technical processes had parallels in his own writing practice and in the his-
tory of writing in general.
As his ground and support, Klee chose a gesso-primed canvas. He
probably began by dividing the surface area into eleven registers, organiz-
ing his pictorial space into the kind of lined textual space he was accus-
tomed to using in his writing. However, unlike the ruled lines of the
notebooks in which he recorded his diary entries or transcribed his poems,
the linear registers of Tree Nursery were drawn freehand and are therefore
intentionally uneven, just as they are in Palace (fig. 39) of the previous
year. Before applying any color, Klee worked into the surface with a sharp,
pointed instrument — possibly an etching needle or perhaps one of the
tools he designed and made for his personal use.15 As he incised signs into
the soft gesso ground, he retraced the movements of many a
Mesopotamian scribe deftly manipulating a stylus to make legible marks in
a clay tablet. Probably working from top to bottom, he must have decided
that the painting required more variations in dividual patterning and indi-
vidual characters than are evident in the top two registers. At that point he
began varying the sizes and character of the signs and introducing subdi-
visions within the linear registers. From the outset Klee was conscious of
applying different degrees of pressure as he inscribed the surface with a
variety of signs. Once oil paint was wiped over the surface, filling the
incised lines, even subtle differences in line thickness and depth of incision
became more pronounced. When applied in superimposed bands, color
reinforces the linear structure of the painting, yet it also seeps across linear
boundaries, asserting its own material properties.
An oppositional relationship between the painted surface of Tree Nursery
and its textual linear structure is among the first indicators that this image will
challenge conventional expectations about looking at a work of visual art.
The viewer who approaches Tree Nursery as a painting soon realizes that it
requires a temporal as well as a visual mode of perception. To ascertain what
the painting represents, the viewer scans the linear registers looking for rec-
ognizable signs, thereby reexperiencing the temporal dimension generated as
Klee incised graphic signs into the linear divisions. The initial perception of
repetition encourages the viewer to abandon a sequential reading and to
begin to make spatial connections not only within this particular painting but
throughout Klee’s oeuvre. The most familiar of his many tree signs triggers
this process. The sign consisting of a vertical line crossed by curved branches
may well have originated in the diary entry that records his association with
the Sema group in Munich. Klee noted that he had been recruited as a found-
ing member in the fall of 1911 and carefully inserted a sign that visually punc-
tuates the name Sema, which itself means sign (fig. 42).16 In the end, the
skeletal tree sign had greater longevity than his affiliation with the Sema
group. The sign was incorporated into the hybrid vocabulary of Landscape
with Gallows (fig. 25) and other postwar landscapes, then into Klee’s
Disclaimer:

Fig. 42: Paul Klee, Entry 902 from the Diaries (Tagebücher, III, Munich, 1911).
vocabulary of pictographs, and was eventually enlarged as the central pictor-

ial motif of a late drawing entitled Shoots (Schösslinge, 1938/242).17 The
viewer who recognizes this familiar pictograph in Tree Nursery and identifies
many of the other signs as tree forms will have no difficulty associating the
linear organization of the signs with the orderly rows of a tree farm.
The gratification of establishing a link between Klee’s title and the iconic
imagery in the painting will satisfy some viewers. A nagging curiosity about
the signs that appear to be more alphabetic than pictographic might send
others in search of similar signs in the history of writing. This quest would
uncover contradictions that pertain to the related processes of making and
interpreting. Given the fact that the technique applied in Tree Nursery has
historical precedents in cuneiform writing, it is surprising to find that rela-
tively few of the signs have the appearance of cuneiform characters, which
typically combine short lines with triangular wedges.18 Evidently linguistic
consistency was irrelevant. Klee took the liberty of foraging among a variety
of historical writing systems to compile his lexicon of signs. The knowledge
that Tree Nursery contains inventive variations on signs from the Irish
Ogham alphabet and the ancient Linear B script provides insight into Klee’s
experimental working methods but is of little help in deciphering the mean-
ing of his visual text.19 Tree Nursery is not a painting that lends itself to either
linguistic or iconographic decoding. Its meaning resides in the structural
rhythms set in motion by the viewer, who attempts to reconcile these two
fundamentally different approaches to interpretation.
Although Tree Nursery is recognizably a landscape, rhythmic struc-

tures counter the conventions of traditional landscape painting, thus gen-
erating a new level of content. As conceived by Reynolds, a defining
characteristic of rhythmic structure is the tension between temporal and
spatial elements experienced and activated by the receiver.20 This tension
is immediately apparent in the nonillusionistic spatial structure of Tree
Nursery. In notes on the pictorial representation of space, Klee pointed out
that in breaking with the conventions of illusionistic space, “we gain pos-
sibilities of spatio-plastic representation and movement that were limited
under earlier methods” (“wir erreichen damit die Möglichkeit der räumlich-
plastischen Darstellung und der Bewegung, die nach der früheren
Darstellungsweise begrenzt war”).21 In Tree Nursery he expanded on these
possibilities, replacing a conventional pictorial space with a textual, discur-
sive space. Graphic signs are arranged like linguistic units along horizontal
linear supports that approximate the visual appearance of stanzas in much
modernist poetry, most notably where Klee subdivided horizontal registers
into the visual equivalents of the quatrains favored by some of the experi-
mental poets of his generation, including Heym. The expanding and con-
tracting rhythms of the hand-drawn registers are compounded by
variations in the distribution of signs. Signs tend to be densely concen-
trated on the left side of the painting, with more variety in placement on
the right — a device that simulates variations in the line lengths of poetic
verse. As in the earlier Mural, color spatializes the linear structure of Tree
Nursery, but here it does so by functioning like rhyme, which adds a spa-
tial dimension to poetry. The palette conforms to Klee’s principle of repe-
tition by reflection, or mirror imaging (“Spiegelung”).22 Applied to color,
this principle introduces the one dominant rhythmic pattern that imposes
order on a complex pictorial structure.
Rhythmic content is also perceptible in the syntactical arrangements of
signs, although here, too, rhythm is structured by means of opposition.
Examples of the repetitive patterning that Klee associated with dividual
rhythms are rare. The patterns in Tree Nursery are less like the rhythmical
repetitions found in the decorative arts than the repetitions of sounds in
poetry. To cite one example, Klee’s recurring “Sema” sign is comparable
to the alliterative sibilant sound in Heym’s “Winter.” Extending the liter-
ary analogy, the predominantly individual rhythms of the sign clusters in
Tree Nursery might be compared to verbal units were it not for the fact
that signs span a spectrum from reductive landscape forms to alphabetic
abstractions. The variety of tree signs is displayed in the strips of blue and
violet near the top of the painting, where changes in what Klee referred to
as weight and measure transform an evenly spaced row of trees into beds
of shrubs.23 The bands of yellows and greens at the center are dominated
by more abbreviated signs that could be shorthand notations with linguis-
tic value. In the lower third of the painting the sign types are combined,
Disclaimer:

Fig. 43: Paul Klee, Album Leaf (1935/6). Pen on paper mounted on cardboard,
27.8 ⫻ 17.9 cm. Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern. © 2006 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New
York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Photograph courtesy of the Zentrum Paul Klee.
and in some cases even obviously pictorial signs could be residually or

potentially linguistic.24 Once again the “Sema” tree can be cited as an
example. It functions as a graphic sign that retains its original identity as a
visual substitute for a verbal sign, while at the same time assuming pictor-
ial value in a landscape setting. Within a matrix of signs that range from
the iconic to the geometric, the two stick figures are the most semantically
disruptive precisely because they appear to be exclusively iconic. As such
they lay claim to the figurative tradition of conventional landscape paint-
ing. This claim is countered by a pictorial structure that generates a
dynamic tension between figuration and abstraction and between visual
and textual space. Variations on the rhythmic relationships established by
these tensions are common to all of Klee’s poems in pictorial script.
Although Klee continued to explore the poetic possibilities of rhyth-
mic structures embedded in the oppositional relationship between
graphic signs and painted surfaces, he increasingly turned to drawing as
the medium of his pictorial writing. By the early thirties drawing and
writing had become not only parallel but in some cases indistinguishable
activities in Klee’s mind. The graphic notations in Abstract Script
(Abstracte [sic] Schrift, 1931/284) and Report on Events at Dui (Bericht
über Vorgänge in Dui, 1932/106) have the cursive flow of a handwritten
text, yet they are legible only as visual abstractions in a pictorial space.25
Whereas the slippage between two forms of communication is subtle
in these two drawings, it becomes more pronounced in Album Leaf
(Albumblatt, 1935/6) (fig. 43). Instead of referencing content, the title
names a material support that was torn from a pad of the writing paper
Klee occasionally used for drawing. Written in the upper-right-hand cor-
ner rather than centered at the bottom of the page beneath a ruled line,
Albumblatt reads less like a picture title than the indicator of a graphic
space that could be the site of either verbal or visual activity — or both
in this case. Klee’s choice of pen and ink on paper as his medium was like-
wise appropriate to both writing and drawing. Because of the historical
evolution of writing from drawing, the graphic media have long been
associated with both forms of expression. These historical connections
converged in modernist practice, achieving privileged status among the
surrealists. Album Leaf closely parallels surrealist theory and practice,
albeit in unexpected ways.
In the first issue of La Révolution surréaliste (1 December 1924) Max
Morise equated the stroke of a pencil with a word. A drawing and a hand-
written text by Robert Desnos, reproduced on the page following Morise’s
article, lend credence to his claim, but they do so by maintaining a quasi-
illustrative relationship between visual and verbal imagery.26 Automatic
drawing and writing were frequently invoked as quintessentially surrealist
techniques. When André Breton looked back at the origins and development
of surrealism from the vantage point of the early forties, he observed that
graphic and verbal automatism (“l’automatisme graphique, aussi bien que
verbal”) achieved a “rhythmic unity” (“l’unité rythmique”) that could be
perceived by either the eye or the ear.27 It was in this retrospective summary
of surrealism that Breton famously described Klee as a practitioner of “(par-
tial) automatism” (“l’automatisme [partiel]”).28 True to Breton’s assess-
ment, Album Leaf does not qualify as a product of unpremeditated graphic
automatism, if only because the sections of handwritten text are semantically
coherent. It does, however, establish a “rhythmic unity” between writing
and drawing, which it achieves by modifying the compositional format of a
popular type of surrealist poetry.
Album Leaf successively engages the viewer in two modes of percep-
tion. Four lines of handwritten text are placed slightly off center, well
beneath Klee’s signature, the date, and the intentionally ambiguous title.
Although the words are not consistently aligned or evenly spaced, they are
easily readable as: “Jetzt ist / der Winter / drüberweg / geschritten”
(“Now / Winter / has trod / over it”). A space separates this verbal text
from two columns of calligraphic notations and a diagonal vector of cursive

script that is initially indecipherable. What appears to be illegible handwrit-
ing is, in fact, a line of mirror writing that reads: “dann ist es doch gesagt”
(“yet it has been said”). This line introduces a proliferation of looped linear
scrawls that assume a distinctly visual character where the drawing is spo-
radically overlaid with ink wash. The impression that a verbal text is pro-
gressively dissolving into visual abstractions is abruptly reversed by the
insertion of two additional lines of text: “Das war einmal / ein
Gemüsegarten” (“This was once / a vegetable garden”).29 Although writ-
ten in the same hand as the other legible words, these are more generously
spaced, with individual letters less cramped, mirroring the breadth of han-
dling in the final linear flourish, which replaces the last line of a legible text
with a visual substitute. Assuming a reciprocal relationship between a verbal
text that describes and a visual text that does not, the linear rhythms can be
perceived as nonmimetic substitutes for both illustrative figurative imagery
and legible verbal imagery. By pairing fragments of a verbal text with com-
plementary visual rhythms rather than representational remnants of a veg-
etable garden, Klee salvaged the poetic potential of what would otherwise
have been a prosaic combination of words and images.
In an article published in the final issue of La Révolution surréaliste,
René Magritte analyzed the various ways that words and images could
interact in a pictorial space. Occasionally, he noted, “words written in a
painting designate precise things, and images vague things” (“les noms
écrits dans un tableau désignent des choses précises, et les images des choses
vagues”).30 Such is the case with Album Leaf — and intentionally so. In
other respects Album Leaf is anything but vague or tentative. Confidently
executed in pen on paper, with no apparent hesitations or corrections,
Album Leaf is the material form of a carefully thought out idea rather than
an exploratory or preliminary sketch. To borrow from archival terminology,
it is a final manuscript rather than a working draft.31 Had Klee wanted to
render his handwriting illegible, he could have mirror-written the entire
text or reinvented his Abstract Script, which mirrors the rhythm and slant
of his own handwriting.32 Alternatively, he could have reduced words to
sound values, as he had done in Éhatévauih (fig. 13). Evidently, he wanted
to explore the possibilities of combining the figurative imagery of verbal
poetry with nonfigurative drawing in a new compositional structure.
The composition of Album Leaf refers back to the surrealists’ “exquis-
ite corpses”(“cadavres exquis”), featured in the 1927 issue of La Révolution
surréaliste devoted to automatic writing.33 Some of the examples repro-
duced are either exclusively verbal or visual, whereas others combine the
written word with predominantly figurative visual imagery. All have the
vertically oriented, disjunctive composition that was the by-product of a
process involving successive folding. This composition type is common to
Klee’s Album Leaf, as is the combination of verbal and visual signifiers.
For the most part the exquisite corpses did not pair verbal and visual signs
any more imaginatively or provocatively than Klee himself did in a work
such as Seventeen, Mad (Siebzehn, irr, 1923/136), which is reproduced in
the third issue of La Révolution surréaliste.34 What Klee would have seen in
the surrealists’ exquisite corpses was a poetic composition that could be
adapted to his pictorial writing. In Album Leaf he imposed a coherent verse
structure on the vertical format and sectional divisions of the exquisite
corpses. Although the units of verse are not literally delineated as they are
in Tree Nursery, the textual components of Album Leaf are organized into
four sections, each with its own linear structure. The line breaks in the first
section spatialize the breaks and slashes Klee used to indicate a verse struc-
ture when he recorded poems or line endings in his Diaries. Arranged in a
neatly staggered quatrain, the words establish the rhythm and typographic
arrangement of free verse. The spatial layout of the visual text in the second
stanza introduces a variation on the diagonal orientation of the first stanza,
initiating a rhythmic pattern that is carried through the entire composi-
tional structure, echoing and reinforcing the rhythmic alternation between
alphabetic writing and an abstract pictorial writing.
The idea of combining a readable poetic text with visual abstractions
was not original with Klee. He was deliberately seeking a way to repackage
an idea dating back to Hiberno-Saxon manuscript illumination and that
had produced more recent progeny in modernist circles. In 1908
Kandinsky conceived the project that would be realized in his only livre
d’artiste, the 1912 publication Sounds. The black-on-white woodcuts
printed above the poems are abstractions that relate rhythmically rather
than figuratively to Kandinsky’s poetic images.35 Although they occupy the
same pages as the printed texts of the poems, the visual designs are con-
tained within their own pictorial spaces, rather like modernist paraphrases
of the framed filigree patterns that grace the pages of illuminated manu-
scripts and illustrated books produced down through the centuries. By the
mid-twenties there were numerous examples of artists’ books in which tex-
tual and pictorial spaces merged, notably the 1927 edition of Sleeping,
Sleeping in the Stones (Dormir, dormir dans les pierres), a collaboration
between Benjamin Péret and Yves Tanguy.36 Here letters meander into the
pictorial spaces of the illustrative images, yet they maintain their typo-
graphic distance from both Péret’s poetry and Tanguy’s abstract dream-
scapes. Not until decades later was there a surrealist publication that fully
realized a rhythmic unity between writing and drawing.
Miró’s Lizard with Golden Feathers (Le Lézard aux plumes d’or), pub-
lished in 1971, is a minimally revised but liberally illustrated version of his
“Poetic Games” (“Jeux poétiques”), which originally appeared in the 1946
issue of Cahiers d’art.37 Although the relationship between word and
image varies throughout the publication, in some cases verbal and visual
signifiers intermingle on the same page (fig. 44). Using the medium of
Disclaimer:

Fig. 44: Joan Miró, Lithograph from The Lizard with Golden Feathers (Le Lézard
aux plumes d’or, 1971). © Successió Miró / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York /
ADAGP, Paris. Digital image by Dan Smith.
lithography, which allowed him to write and draw with equal fluidity, Miró
copied out his text, arbitrarily inserting arabesques that would have looked
remarkably similar to his handwriting on the lithographic stone, where the
text was written out in reverse. Miró’s drawing disrupted the linear conti-
nuity of the poem in its printed version, while his handwriting liberated the
poem from the confines of its original verse structure. At the expense of
semantic coherence, he displaced words from their usual textual order,
substituting a visual order that complements the graphic space shared by a
handwritten text and free-form linear embellishments. Many of these dis-
tinctive features of Miró’s design are anticipated in Klee’s Album Leaf.
Common to Miró’s lithograph and Klee’s drawing is the visible trace
of the artist’s hand, with writing and drawing in a unified graphic space.
Both works require the participation of the viewer to activate rhythmic
relationships between verbal and visual texts that flow from the same hand.
Like Miró, Klee exploited textual displacement and fragmentation as
poetic devices, while simultaneously imposing visual unity with emphatic
linear rhythms and more subtle graphic transitions. Despite these similarities,
there are perceptible differences. Klee, an unapologetic purist when it
Disclaimer:

Fig. 45: Paul Klee, Park N (partial sketch) (1935/15). Chalk on paper mounted on
cardboard, 17.9 ⫻ 27.9 cm. Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern. © 2006 Artists Rights Society
Klee.
came to poetic form, declined to take liberties with verse structure, which
is preserved as a way of identifying the verbal and visual texts as a single
poetic entity. To the extent that his illegible scrawls are intended to be read
as visual substitutes for lines of text, Klee’s looped lines are even more sub-
tly integrated than Miró’s decorative swirls. These differences point to the
more fundamental distinction between an illustrated edition of poetry and
an entirely new way of writing poetry. For Miró The Lizard with Golden
Feathers provided an exhibition venue for displaying his facile command of
the art of book illustration. The page reproduced here underscores the
artist’s double role as poet and illustrator. Seen in context, it has the cachet
of an autograph page, albeit in facsimile. Klee’s Album Leaf may well
have been conceived as part of a projected publication, but it was also an
experimental model for poetry that is neither exclusively verbal nor
predominantly visual, shifting between verbal and visual modes of concep-
tion, execution, and perception.
The speculation that Klee was exploring an alternative to a book of

illustrated poetry is supported by another drawing that reinvents historical
precedents. Park N, (1935/15) (fig. 45) is so close to Album Leaf in
Klee’s numeric cataloguing system that the two must have been executed
within several days of each other. In Park N Klee reduced the legible text
to a single, uppercase letter, juxtaposing letter and image in a drawing exe-
cuted with just two unbroken lines. One line flows between a point just
below the letter N and another point just above Klee’s signature; the
second begins and ends within the linear interlace at the far right. The
overlapping arabesques give pictorial form to a graphic idea Klee had pre-
viously explored in a pedagogical exercise. Using nine sheets of paper, he
illustrated how the letter N could assume different visual properties as it
expanded horizontally and vertically, eventually filling the space available
on a single page.38 Transferred from Klee’s teaching notes to the space of
a drawing, the letter acquires new meaning as well as a new setting.
Looking at Park N, it is not at all clear which of the two lines Klee set
in motion first, nor is it possible to determine the formative directions of
the linear movements, which complement each other figuratively as well
as rhythmically. The expansive flow of one line minimally indicates the
ground plane and horizon line of a landscape, whereas the more tightly
controlled movement of the other line defines a cursive letter N that visu-
ally mirrors the peaked projection in the center of the page. Even without
benefit of the title, the viewer can identify the central projection as a
conifer and the scribbled arabesque at the far right as a mound of rocks or
a leafy tree. In addition to generating a pictorial structure that is recog-
nizably a landscape, the lines intersect at three points, forming a graphic
unit that can be characterized as a monogrammatic combination of a letter
and nonalphabetic visual abstractions. As specified in the title Park N, the
uppercase N functions as an initial that abbreviates a place name. The land-
scape forms that visually represent a park are likewise abbreviated, giving
them the same degree of abstraction as the letter form. Although differ-
ently configured, initial letters and landscape imagery are also paired in the
history of illuminated manuscripts and printed books.
Klee’s unique combination of elements reflects selective borrowing
from a range of historical precedents. With respect to letter type, the N can
be identified as a penwork initial. These handwritten letters, adorned only
with simple flourishes, abound in Gothic manuscripts, where they are per-
ceived as integral elements of the written text and as visual transitions
between the illuminated decoration and the cursive script of the text
body.39 The spatial setting for Klee’s initial has antecedents in the more
richly ornamented Gothic initials that serve as frames for narrative
vignettes. By the end of the thirteenth century, the spatial settings of these
narrative scenes had become increasingly illusionistic and elaborate, with
landscape forms echoing the shape of the framing letter on a smaller scale.
Although initials assumed various three-dimensional figurations in the

ensuing centuries, letters shaped from trompe l’oeil nature imagery did not
proliferate until the availability of lithography in the early nineteenth cen-
tury.40 Judging from ten ornamental initials that Klee copied into a note-
book containing school exercises in 1892, decorative letters in the guise of
figurative motifs would have been familiar to him from illustrated chil-
dren’s books and the pattern books that served as models in his penman-
ship classes.41 For all of its informed references to past traditions, Park N
has nothing of the nostalgia of historicism. With its reductive simplicity,
this drawing is clearly an exercise in modernist revisionism.
Klee himself confirmed the experimental nature of Park N by append-
ing an unusual clarification in parentheses “partial sketch” (“teil entwurf
[sic]”) to the title on the drawing support and in his oeuvre catalogue. Just
as Album Leaf explores a new way of composing poetry, Park N represents
a modernist variation on the illuminated initial. It takes no leap of the
imagination to envision these two drawings as studies for a publication fea-
turing Klee’s visual poetry. In such a volume the kind of monogram he
designed in Park N would conceivably double as title and initial letter for
the kind of poem he was constructing in Album Leaf. As early as 1917 Klee
had outlined the prospectus for a minimally illustrated anthology of verse.
He may have written “Once Emerged from the Gray of Night” (Einst dem
Grau der Nacht enttaucht”) for inclusion in this volume, but nothing ever
came of the project at the time.42 If he revived the idea in 1935, it was not
with the intention of producing a conventional volume of illustrated
poetry. What Klee seems to have entertained, if only briefly, was a publica-
tion of his poems in pictorial writing that would restore the “aura” Walter
Benjamin claimed was lost in the era of mechanical reproduction.43 If pub-
lished by a lithographic offset process, the book could have circumvented
the typographic consistencies of a mass-produced book by introducing
some of the idiosyncrasies of a hand-copied manuscript. This method of
production would have engaged the viewer in the process of interpreting
the rhythmic content generated by shifts from writing to drawing and from
linguistic to visual abstractions.
Assuming that Park N and Album Leaf were conceived for potential
publication, the question remains as to why Klee would have revisited the
livre d’artiste some fifteen years after he had given up book illustration,
apparently by choice and with no regrets.44 Had he wished to reconsider
his decision, there was no shortage of opportunities. In 1928 he was asked
to contribute illustrations to a volume of Paul Eluard’s poetry. No doubt
recalling that Eluard had composed a dedicatory poem on the occasion of
his 1925 exhibition at the Vavin-Raspail Gallery, Klee responded enthusi-
astically, but the proposal never materialized.45 Klee seems to have pre-
ferred solo pursuits to collaborative projects, choosing to preserve his
independence even as his professional options narrowed in proportion to
the expanding power of the National Socialist Party. Exiled to Switzerland

in 1933, he no longer had the security of even a meager teacher’s salary.
His income was reduced to modest returns on his investments and pro-
ceeds from whatever sales were transacted through the Simon Gallery in
Paris, which was operated by the formidable Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler.46
When Alfred Flechtheim, Klee’s German dealer, was forced to close his
gallery and leave Germany, he asked Kahnweiler, a longtime friend and
business associate, to take over his exclusive contract with Klee. Kahnweiler
agreed but had limited success selling Klee’s works in a depressed art mar-
ket.47 At a time when Klee’s financial situation looked increasingly precar-
ious, a book showcasing his innovative poetic production may have seemed
like a marketable commodity. In any event, Klee’s idea for reinventing the
livre d’artiste never advanced beyond a few drawings. Why he temporarily
abandoned the mixed-language system represented in Park N and Album
Leaf remains a matter of speculation. Whatever the determining factors, by
1938 he was experimenting with two types of poetry. In one set of exper-
iments he used letters of the alphabet as basic compositional units, pro-
ducing the sequence of alphabet drawings that includes Alphabet AIOEK
(fig. 14). In another group of drawings he deconstructed alphabetic signs
into visual abstractions that serve no immediately apparent linguistic func-
tion.
Klee’s interest in the pictorial origins of alphabetic writing date back
to the years immediately following the First World War, when he incorpo-
rated letter forms and variants of their pictorial antecedents into works
such as Landscape with Gallows (fig. 25). He pursued this interest through-
out the twenties, compiling the lexicon of invented signs featured in Tree
Nursery. Although Klee’s interest in the history of language was prompted
by artistic rather than scholarly ambitions, his pictorial experiments were
assuredly informed by scholarly research. Circumstantial evidence confirms
that he consulted numerous sources, including Karl Weule’s Vom Kerbstock
zum Alphabet, which was in his library.48 He would also have had access to
the lavishly illustrated articles on pre-alphabetic writing published in peri-
odicals such as the Cahiers d’art. During the early thirties his focus shifted
to the relationship between drawing and writing. Later in the decade he
broadened the scope of his investigation. In a group of drawings dating
from 1938 he reflected on the place of pictorial writing in a print-centered
culture. To restore the textural materiality lost in the era of mechanical
printing, Klee created his graphic texts with thick, viscous pastes and
paints, often working over newspaper as a site of comparative reference.
Growth Is Stirring (Wachstum regt sich, 1938/78) (fig. 46) is a typical
example.49
Broadly executed in paste, Growth Is Stirring contrasts hand-painted
marks with an underlying typeset support. As in Park Near Lu (fig. 30), a
hairline gap between the black signs and the white ground cover reveals
Disclaimer:

Fig. 46: Paul Klee, Growth Is Stirring (1938/78). Colored paste on newspaper
mounted on cardboard, 33/32.4 ⫻ 48.7 cm. Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, on loan from
a private collection. © 2006 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-
fragments of a newspaper printed in uniform, die-cast type, with letters

separated by regular spaces and lines of text by standard leading strips. The
printed text was set in both Gothic and Latin typefaces that delineate read-
able words in German (“Haus”) and French (“École”), word fragments
(“Luxu”), and numbers as well as letters (“bis 100”). Although the visual
text of Growth Is Stirring is no less carefully laid out than the blocks of
printed type, there is no uniformity in either the signs or the spaces
between them. Unlike the visible segments of printed text in the underly-
ing typographic space, the signs in the pictorial space are not constructed
utilizing legible alphabetic units. The shapes of Klee’s signs resemble some
of the script designs reproduced in Larisch’s Beispiele künstlerischer
Schrift.50 This presents the possibility that Klee deconstructed an existing
typeface, reducing the letter forms to the discontinuous lines of an illegi-
ble script. In doing so, he gave the thick black marks a distinctly visual
appearance, as if they were the contours of iconic forms fragmented
beyond recognition or pared down to linear abstractions that in some

instances retain vestiges of figuration. Alternatively, the graphic signs can
be interpreted as some form of shorthand notation that has both linguis-
tic and visual properties.
In the upper left is a sign cluster that could be read either as an embell-
ished initial I or as the skeletal shape of a tree. The grouping of the signs
in the upper right is equally ambiguous. What looks like an uppercase Y
faces its mirror image in an arrangement that recalls Victor Hugo’s essay
on the visual properties of letter forms. Describing his journey through the
Jura Mountains in 1839, Hugo mused on the “picturesque” quality of the
letter Y: “A tree is a Y; the fork of two roads is a Y; the confluence of two
rivers is a Y.”51 Klee shared Hugo’s curiosity about the visual dimension of
letters but reversed his process of association. Instead of assigning alpha-
betic signs to identifiable landscape forms, Klee designed letters to look as
if they could once have represented objects in nature — specifically trees.
Analogies based on tree imagery are found in Klee’s theoretical writing as
well as in works such as Growth Is Stirring. In the lecture he delivered at
the Jena Kunstverein in 1924, Klee posed the idea of using “a simile, the
simile of the tree” (“Lassen Sie mich ein Gleichnis gebrauchen, das
Gleichnis vom Baum”).52 He then proceeded to develop this figure of
speech into one of his most eloquent comparisons between nature and art.
Although this lecture was not published until 1945 under the title “On
Modern Art” (“Über die moderne Kunst”), Klee kept his notes in manu-
script form and evidently consulted them from time to time. Given the rec-
iprocity of Klee’s art and theory, it is entirely plausible to posit a
relationship between the symbolic language of his studio work and the fig-
ures of speech elaborated in his theoretical notes. The tree image recurs in
his pictorial and theoretical writing as one element of a simile that estab-
lishes a parallel relationship between the growth and structure of a natural
object and the genesis and evolution of a work of art. Visually contextual-
ized, as it is in Growth Is Stirring, this familiar analogy provides a key to
the meanings encoded in Klee’s abstract signs.
If the sign language in Growth Is Stirring is based on verbal figures of
speech, it follows that the syntax could likewise be linguistic. At first glance
there appears to be no clearly articulated linear structure as in Tree Nursery.
In other drawings dating from 1938 (notably Alphabet I and Alphabet II)
Klee worked directly on a newspaper support, intentionally disrupting the
compositional grid defined by vertical columns of horizontally aligned text.
In Growth Is Stirring the disruptive action takes a more subtle form. Here
Klee turned the newspaper on its side so that the visible fragments of type
are vertically oriented, like various forms of oriental calligraphy. Conforming
to the pattern established by the typeset text, the marks embedded in the
palpably tactile ground appear to be vertically aligned, yet they are arranged
in self-contained clusters that correspond to words or phrases. In the absence
of any predetermined order, they can be read either vertically or horizontally.

Thus, the initial letter in the upper left forms a visual unit with the two signs
beneath it and is also linked by a visual conjunction on the right to a pair of
visual abstractions that could be either logograms or syllabic fragments.
There are at least two models for such a doubly oriented syntactic structure:
crossword puzzles and experimental poetry — including some of Klee’s
own. These two structural models — one from the popular press, the other
from the more rarefied realm of high art — are endemic to the two cultures
of communication Klee referenced when he chose to layer the tactile surface
texture of a work of art over the machine-printed text of a daily newspaper.53
Despite obvious differences, crossword puzzles and poetry do share
common ground. Crossword puzzles are thought to have originated in
Greek acrostics, which are verses that incorporate letter ciphers, and in the
Roman SATOR square, a word square in which letters spell the same words
down and across.54 Even though they have a lineage dating back to the
ancient world, crossword puzzles have been standard fare in the print media
for only a relatively short period of time. Exported from the United States
and England to Germany in 1925, they quickly developed into a national
obsession that was fed by specialized magazines and dictionaries. By the mid-
thirties the popular word games were featured in weekly and daily newspa-
pers across Europe. Virtually all were designed to be read vertically as well
as horizontally. Some served as vehicles of political propaganda, while others
were rumored to be cryptically encoded for clandestine communication.55 It
is perhaps serendipitous that Klee’s Growth Is Stirring is similarly structured
and encoded.
There is no reason to believe that Klee had any particular interest in
crossword puzzles, although anyone with his proclivity for wordplay would
be a likely devotee. Conversely, there is ample evidence that Klee was
knowledgeable about word squares and acrostic verse, both of which he
appropriated as models for his illustrative diagrams and verbal poetry. The
diagrams illustrated in fig. 31 are variations on word squares. “Abel and His
Brothers” (1933) is a modernist acrostic, with the first syllable of each line
phonetically transcribing a letter of the alphabet. Each of the twenty-three
lines is read horizontally, whereas the letters of the alphabet and the repet-
itive syllable “bel” are visually perceived as vertical columns.56 In Growth Is
Stirring Klee retained the distinctive syntactic structure common to the
word square and acrostic verse, replacing words with graphic signs that
could be either alphabetic or iconic. Within their compositional matrix,
signs are clustered in discrete yet related groups, in some cases paired like
the repetitive sounds of a rhyme scheme and spatially distributed like the
words of a refrain — both devices common to poetry.
If its symbolic language and a compositional structure based on exper-
imental verse invite the viewer to consider Growth Is Stirring as visual
poetry, then it is not unreasonable to ask what the poem is about. The title
suggests early signs of spring, but the visual signs themselves suggest early
forms of writing. Conveniently, there is a fairly straightforward response to
the question of why Klee would have cast a theory about the pictorial ori-
gins of language into poetic form: he was ironically inverting — and
thereby modernizing — an established poetic tradition, one invoked by
Goethe in a pair of essays entitled “The Fate of Handwriting” (“Schicksal
der Handschrift”) and “The Fate of Printing” (“Schicksal der
Druckschrift”). Their portentous titles notwithstanding, these essays are
anecdotal accounts detailing the lukewarm reception of Goethe’s scientific
inquiries into plant morphology. Coyly skirting names, Goethe reminisced
that some of his female friends were not pleased with his “abstract gar-
dening” (“mit meiner abstrakten Gärtnerei”).57 To make his research on
the structure of plants more accessible, he included a poem that is a
masterpiece of word painting. Klee’s visual poetry differs from Goethe’s
conventional poetic conceit in one significant respect. Whereas Goethe’s
flowery language made his theories about plants less abstract, Klee’s visual
metaphors rendered plant life more abstract.58 Growth Is Stirring is not a
landscape depicting recognizable objects from the natural world, nor is it
manifestly a poem about incipient spring. It is visual poetry with rhythmic
content generated by the inherent ambivalence of Klee’s pictorial script
and by the viewer’s perception of the relationships between pictorial writ-
ing and alphabetic texts, each with its corresponding spatial setting.
By layering the thickly textured pictorial surface of Growth Is Stirring
over a typographic space, Klee knowingly placed his experiment with poetic
language in the context of a recurring theme in the history of modernism. In
the early years of the twentieth century the cubists had selectively
encroached on the popular press. The proponents of dada followed suit,
brashly staking claims to commercial advertising. Although Klee was famil-
iar with these precedents, his own use of newspaper as a site of creative
activity may well have originated in the practical need for an available sur-
face to absorb excess ink and to clean brushes. Once he began to use news-
paper as a support, he tended to cover most of the surface, usually
revealing only fragments of legible text.59 By compromising the legibility
of the printed word, Klee was pointedly questioning conventional expec-
tations about reading. To recognize that this challenge to legibility extends
to the reading of his pictorial script does not preclude the possibility that
the underlying newspaper texts might be as relevant as the visual texts lay-
ered over them. In works such as Alphabet I, where the newspaper support
is not covered with a ground, the text seems to have been the source of
doubly coded metaphors that lend themselves to plays on both words and
images. Given the text that is legible beneath the surface of Growth Is
Stirring, it seems entirely possible that this drawing was also conceived as
a visually encoded response to classified advertisements that had caught
Klee’s eye in the newspaper. Whatever may have been his initial motivation,
Disclaimer:

Fig. 47: Paul Klee, Poem in Pictorial Script (1939/170). Pen on paper mounted on
cardboard, 10 x 21 cm. Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, on loan from a private collection. ©
2006 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Photograph
courtesy of the Zentrum Paul Klee.
the visual image evolved into a multilevel visual and verbal commentary on
the role of language in his creative process. A number of themes come
together in Growth Is Stirring. Principal among them is the relationship
between the pictorial origins of language and the pictorial sign language
that was Klee’s preferred medium for composing visual poetry and one of
his principal contributions to the aesthetics of modernism. As a thematic
corollary, Klee ruminated on the relative merits of manuscript and typo-
graphic spaces as the settings of visual poetry. He pursued this line of inves-
tigation in Alphabet I and Alphabet II before declaring his allegiance to
poetry in a visual context.
The three self-contained sections of Poem in Pictorial Script (Gedicht in
Bilderschrift, 1939/170) (fig. 47) represent the practice as well as the prod-
uct of pictorial writing. The legible signature in the upper-left corner seems
to have been placed there to identify the box of abstract shapes and the
human head immediately below it as the artist/author and his thoughts.
Presumably the actual “poem” is in the larger framed box to the right.
Although signs are as broadly defined as they are in Growth Is Stirring, the
thick brushstrokes of the earlier work have contracted into the thin, brittle
lines of a pen. Klee’s Poem in Pictorial Script attests to the fact that, like any
living language, his pictorial sign language was in a constant state of evolu-
tion. By telescoping the historically glacial processes of assimilation and
change, Klee could renew his familiar vocabulary of signs for each new
work. Thus, each sign type looks as if it is unique to Poem in Pictorial Script,
even though it has precedents in numerous other works by Klee. For exam-
ple, he plucked the angular abstractions below his signature from Tree
Nursery and then distorted shapes and manipulated scale before placing
them in their new setting. The visual text of the poem itself was composed
in a script of bulbous forms that recall the free renderings of petrographs in
Signs on Rocks (Zeichen auf Felsen, 1938/271).60 In short, Klee’s eclectic
pictorial vocabulary is so uniquely his that it reads like a kind of visual sig-
nature, rendering its alphabetic counterpart all but redundant.
Although Klee’s descriptive title identifies his language as pictorial, it
does not specify how the pictorial abstractions communicate meaning or in
what respects they are poetic. Despite formal analogies to signifiers in other
paintings and drawings, the visual signs that constitute Poem in Pictorial
Script have their own character. To isolate distinguishing features, it is use-
ful to review some of Klee’s previous experiments with the figurative lan-
guage of poetry in visual form. The full panoply of his poetic language is
on display in Tree Nursery. The most accessible poetic symbol is the
omnipresent Sema sign, which establishes an analogy between a tree and
the word “sign.” More complex and therefore more resistant to decipher-
ing are the syntactic units that juxtapose botanical images and geometric
forms in extended metaphorical hybrids of iconic and nonrepresentational
signs. In Park N Klee crafted a particularly elegant visual simile in pairing a
tree form with an uppercase N. The poetic language of Growth Is Stirring
likewise depends on a perceived oscillation between figurative and alpha-
betic signs, which assume an additional level of symbolic content when
viewed in the context of Klee’s frequent invocation of the tree as a theoret-
ical simile. There is a noticeable change in Poem in Pictorial Script, where
the only immediately recognizable iconic form is a disembodied human
head, and Klee’s signature and title comprise the only alphabetic writing.61
The text of the poem itself consists of nonrepresentational signs. If they are
interpreted as visual substitutes for letters or syllabic units, Klee’s Poem in
Pictorial Script could exemplify a type of poetic object that Jorge Luis
Borges characterized as those “famous poems made up of one enormous
word.”62 Given Klee’s interest in the history of writing, his signs could also
be the modern equivalents of logograms or ideograms. It is left to the
viewer to determine whether the signs function as letters, words, objects, or
ideas. Regardless of how they communicate meaning, there are no readily
apparent analogies between signs and letters, and any relationship of resemb-
lance between signs and objects in the external world is so tenuous as to
be negligible. Klee’s pictorial signs thus take the form of abstract visual
metaphors rather than similes.
Despite differences of medium and sign types, the composition of the
poetic text is not unlike Growth Is Stirring. A case can also be made for
compositional models that reflect Klee’s investigation of ancient writing
systems. For example, the spatial distribution of signs and their semantic
relationships are distantly hieroglyphic, although the segmented compo-
sitional units could just as well have been derived from cuneiform.63
Among Klee’s many sources of information about the history of writing
were illustrated periodicals, which provided readers with a mix of con-

temporary art criticism and learned studies of ancient art and archaeology
by credentialed academics. I cite the Cahiers d’art as a typical example
because Klee would have been familiar with an art journal that marketed
his own works in feature articles, reviews, and advertisements for exhibi-
tions and publications. Beginning with the first issue, which was published
in 1926, and continuing throughout the thirties, the Cahiers d’art
offered a veritable smorgasbord of pictorial writing systems, including
Easter Island ideographs and North African petrographs. Occasionally
special issues were devoted to the art of specific geographic regions. In
1930 the focus was on prehistoric Africa. Several articles in this issue are
illustrated with drawings and fragments of stone objects from neolithic
and paleolithic cultures.64 Here, as elsewhere in the Cahiers d’art, objects
are shown in rectangular frames, photographed from above, with illustra-
tive drawings grouped in the same way. Klee was not the only contempo-
rary artist who seems to have adopted the manner in which scholars
presented the visual documentation of their research. Like Klee’s Poem in
Pictorial Script, Kandinsky’s Each for Itself (Chacun pour soi, 1934) dis-
tributes abstract shapes in a framed horizontal format in much the same
way that arrowheads and other stone fragments are laid out on the pages
of the Cahiers d’art.65 Two years after Kandinsky’s Each for Itself was
reproduced in the magazine, a special issue was published to coincide with
an exhibition of surrealist objects on view in the Charles Ratton Gallery
from 22 to 29 May 1936.66 Paging through this issue devoted to the
object, even the casual reader would have paused to examine the box of
found objects collected by Max Ernst and Salvador Dalí’s odd assortment
of objects carefully assembled on a tray. These and numerous other illus-
trations provide ample evidence that the surrealists paid as close attention
as did Klee and Kandinsky to the way fragments of ancient cultures were
arranged for visual presentation.
Almost as provocative as the photographs is Breton’s article entitled
“Crisis of the Object” (“Crise de l’objet”). By “object” Breton did not
mean a small, three-dimensional construction. In a lecture delivered at a
conference held in Prague in March 1935, he emphasized that he was
using the word in its broadest sense, giving as examples “oneiric object(s),
object(s) with symbolic functions, real and virtual object(s), mobile and
mute object(s), phantom object(s), found object(s), etc.” (“objet onirique,
objet à fonctionnement symbolique, objet réel et virtuel, objet mobile et
muet, objet fantôme, objet trouvé, etc.”).67 His essay on the crisis of the
object is both a defense of the importance of experimentation in art and
science and a catalogue of the ways that the surrealists had fomented a
“complete revolution of the object” (“une révolution totale de l’objet”).68
He began his list with the strategy of reclassifying a found object by attach-
ing a new label and adding a signature, ending with the possibility of
creating an object from scratch by bringing together disparate, arbitrarily

chosen elements.69 Whatever the strategy, the ultimate goal was to give
objects a new identity. Breton concluded his essay with a general observa-
tion and a word of caution. He noted with approval that all the objects
produced by the surrealists for the 1936 exhibition were the result of a
thought process that moved from the abstract to the concrete. By contrast,
he cited a certain segment of contemporary art — which he identified par-
enthetically as “abstractivisme” — that “insisted obstinately on moving in
the opposite direction” (“s’obstine à prendre le sens inverse”).70 In the
Prague lecture he had attempted to distance surrealism from “works of an
‘abstractivist’ tendency in Holland and Switzerland” (“des oeuvres de ten-
dance ‘abstractiviste’ ”).71 According to Breton, those artists who persisted
in pursuing the tendency toward abstraction risked having their works out-
classed (“définitivement surclassées”) by the surrealist objects reproduced
in the 1936 issue of the Cahiers d’art.72 Klee seems to have taken that
warning as a challenge.
When he responded to Breton’s challenge, Klee apparently returned
to the source. In the 1937 volume of the Cahiers d’art R. Vaufrey pub-
lished a two-part article entitled “L’Âge de l’art rupestre Nord-Afrique.”73
Like other scholarly studies, this exhaustive survey of rock art in North
Africa is amply illustrated, in this case with photographs of petrographs
that are either in situ on rock surfaces or on stone fragments that are num-
bered and laid out in orderly rows. Here is art that evolved from a concrete
material structure to an abstract sign system. The irony of this uninten-
tional rebuttal of Breton’s repudiation of abstraction does not seem to
have been lost on Klee. His Poem in Pictorial Script retains the format, syn-
tax, and shapes of African rock art, but it is by no means a copy of any one
of the photographs that illustrate Vaufrey’s article.74 Needing little
prompting to heed Breton’s exhortation to pursue experimentation,75 Klee
applied the first strategy outlined in Breton’s essay, which is to say that he
delineated the African petrographs in a different medium, reclassified
them, and signed the transformation as his own work. The transformed
object is rendered in a kind of pictorial writing that is clearly based on a
petrographic script but would not be recognizable as a poem were it not
identified as such. One possible explanation as to why Klee revived the
verse structure of Growth Is Stirring and labeled his drawing a poem lies in
the significance that the surrealists accorded poetry. Although there are as
many definitions of “poésie” and “poétique” as there are surrealist the-
orists and critics, there was general consensus that poetry — visual as well
as verbal — is the preeminent form of artistic expression.76 Not surpris-
ingly, Breton’s own response to what he perceived as the crisis of the object
took the form of the “object poem” (“poème-objet”), which sought to
bring together the resources of poetry and the visual arts in order to tap
their potential for reciprocity.77 Klee’s objective was essentially the same,
and he achieved it in Poem in Pictorial Script. Conceptually similar to

Breton’s “object poem,” it is readable not as conventional poetry but
rather as an ironic visual riposte to Breton’s skepticism concerning the
future of abstraction.
Poem in Pictorial Script is just one of well over a thousand drawings
Klee turned out in 1939, the year before his death. Since this work repre-
sents only one of many experimental approaches to making art that char-
acterized the last years of Klee’s productive life, there is no reason to view
it as typical of his late work. Nor does it represent a terminal point in the
evolution of his pictorial language. The diverse works analyzed in this
chapter convincingly demonstrate that Klee’s sign language did not evolve
in a linear, cumulative fashion. Moreover, even as he developed a doubly
coded poetic language, Klee the poet/painter never definitively relin-
quished the written word. He was recording poems in a pocket diary as
late as 1934, and in 1935 he inserted fragments of free verse into Album
Leaf. This was followed by a hiatus of two years (1936–37) during which
his production was exclusively visual. In 1938 he resumed his previous
practice of incorporating verbal poetry in visual spaces, composing
Beginning of a Poem, Alphabet AIOEK (fig. 14) and Alphabet WE. The
next year he again shifted between two language systems, inscribing tex-
tual fragments in the pictorial setting of Eternity for Little People before
reverting to the visual abstractions of Poem in Pictorial Script. Since Klee’s
poetic output — whether verbal, visual, or a synthesis of the two — rarely
developed in predictable ways, it is conceivable that he might have found
a way to turn the “abstractivist” vocabulary of Poem in Pictorial Script into
his own version of the concrete poetry that proliferated in the later twen-
tieth century.
Notes
1
Spiller, ed., The Nature of Nature, 83 (Spiller, ed., Paul Klee: Unendliche
Naturgeschichte, 83). This passage is included with manuscript material from 1923.
2
Dee Reynolds, Symbolist Aesthetics and Early Abstract Art: Sites of Imaginary
Space (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995), xii; hereafter cited as Symbolist
Aesthetics.
3
Reynolds, Symbolist Aesthetics, 40, 199, 226.
4
For a summary of the literature on Tree Nursery, see Sabine Fischer’s entry
(#159) in The Eye of Duncan Phillips: A Collection in the Making, ed. Erika D.
Passantino (Washington, DC: Phillips Collection and Yale UP, 1999), 285.
5
Bridgwater, Poet of Expressionist Berlin, 167–96. This aspect of Heym’s poetry
appealed to other contemporary artists besides Klee, most notably Kirchner, who
produced forty-seven original woodcuts to illustrate a special edition of Umbra
Vitae, which is often singled out as a particularly fine example of a livre d’artiste
dating from the early twentieth century. See Georg Heym and Ernst Ludwig
Kirchner, Umbra Vitae (Munich: Kurt Wolff, 1924).
6
Bridgwater, Poet of Expressionist Berlin, 182–83.
7
Bridgwater, Poet of Expressionist Berlin, 182.
8
Bridgwater, Poet of Expressionist Berlin, 200. See also Georg Heym, Lyrik, vol. 1
of Dichtungen und Schriften, ed. Karl Ludwig (Munich: H. Ellermann, 1960),
163; hereafter cited as Lyrik. The translation is mine.
9
Heym, Lyrik, 129.
10
Quoted in Bridgwater, Poet of Expressionist Berlin, 182.
11
Bridgwater, Poet of Expressionist Berlin, 197.
12
On Klee and van Gogh, see Franciscono, Klee, 102–4, 107–11. On Klee’s ref-
erence to Hodler, see Tagebücher #904, autumn 1911, 320 (Diaries, 265).
13
Heym, Lyrik, 163; the English translation is found in Bridgwater, Poet of
Expressionist Berlin, 200.
14
Jean M. Chick, Form as Expression: A Study of the Lyric Poetry Written between
1910 and 1915 by Lasker-Schüler, Stramm, Stadler, Benn, and Heym, Studies in
Modern German Literature, no. 10 (New York: Peter Lang, 1988), 59.
15
For photographs of some of Klee’s tools, see Nathalie Bäschlin, Béatrice Ilg, and
Patrizia Zeppetella, “Paul Klee’s Painting Equipment: Working Processes and
Picture Surfaces,” in Paul Klee Rediscovered: Works from the Bürgi Collection, ed.
Stefan Frey and Josef Helfenstein (London: Merrell / Bern: Kunstmuseum, 2000),
183–97; hereafter cited as Paul Klee Rediscovered.
16
Tagebücher #902, autumn 1911, 319 (Diaries, 264).
17
For a reproduction of Shoots, see Catalogue raisonné, 7:434.
18
For a survey of cuneiform writing, see C. B. F. Walker, Cuneiform, Reading the
Past (Berkeley: U of California P, 1987).
19
For a discussion of the derivation of the sign types in Tree Nursery, see my book
Klee’s Pictorial Writing, 187–89.
20
Reynolds, Symbolist Aesthetics, 53.
21
Denken, 152).
22
Denken, 228).
23
Denken, 220, 235).
24
Jean Laude has also noted that there is a greater degree of abstraction in the
lower bands; see “Paul Klee: Lettres, ‘écritures,’ signes,” in Écritures / Systèmes
idéographiques et pratiques expressives, Actes du colloque international de
l’Université Paris VII, ed. Anne-Marie Christin and Pierre Amiet (Paris: Le
Sycomore, 1982), 383.
25
For reproductions, see Catalogue raisonné: Abstract Script, 6:159; Report on
Events at Dui, 6:197.
26
See Max Morise, “Les Yeux enchantés,” La Révolution surréaliste, no. 1
(1 December 1924): 26–27; for the Desnos drawing and text, see page 28.
27
André Breton, “Genèse et perspective artistiques du surréalisme” (1941), in
Le Surréalisme et la peinture (New York: Brentano’s, 1945), 93.
28
“Genèse et perspective artistiques du surréalisme,” 90.
29
In Gedichte, 122, the verbal text is printed as follows: “Jatzt [sic] ist der Winter
/ drüber weggeschritten // Das war einmal / ein Gemüsegarten // dann ist es
doch gesagt.” On Klee’s facility with mirror writing, see F. Klee, ed., Klee, 50.
30
René Magritte, “Les Mots et les images,” La Révolution surréaliste, no. 12
(15 December 1929): 33. A copy of this issue of La Révolution surréaliste is in the
Klee library.
31
This terminology is discussed by Dana Gioia; see “The Magical Value of
Manuscripts,” in the catalogue, The Hand of the Poet: Poems and Papers in
Manuscript (New York: Rizzoli, 1997), 5.
32
Glaesemer, Handzeichnungen, 2:242.
33
See La Révolution surréaliste, nos. 9–10 (1 October 1927): 8–44.
34
For a color reproduction of Seventeen, Mad (also translated as Seventeen,
Astray), see the Catalogue raisonné, 4:80.
35
For an analysis of Kandinsky’s poems (and reproductions of the woodblock
prints), see Elizabeth Napier’s introduction and the illustrations in Sounds.
36
For an extensive discussion of this book, see Renée Riese Hubert, Surrealism
and the Book (Berkeley: U of California P, 1988), 34–46.
37
See Hubert, Surrealism and the Book, 97–108. For other examples of surrealist
book projects combining words and images, see Surrealismus, 1919–1944, ed.
Werner Spies (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2002), the catalogue that accom-
panied an exhibition at the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf. It is
interesting to note that although Klee’s works were included in the first exhibition
of surrealist art, they were absent from this one.
38
These exercises are contained in the “Pädagogischer Nachlass” 15/MAN16/
242–50, which is housed in the collection of the Zentrum Paul Klee. For repro-
ductions of other pages from the “Pädagogischer Nachlass” and related drawings
and paintings, see Paul Klee — Die Kunst des Sichtbarmachens: Materialien zu Klees
Unterricht am Bauhaus, ed. Michael Baumgartner (Bern: Benteli, 2000), the cata-
logue that accompanied an exhibition at the Seedamm Kulturzentrum, Pfäffikon.
39
See J. J. G. Alexander, The Decorated Letter (New York: Braziller, 1978), 21.
40
See Massin, Letter and Image, trans. Caroline Hillier and Vivienne Menkes
(New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1970), 87.
41
These uncatalogued exercises involving ornamental initials are in the Zentrum
Paul Klee. In chapter 3 I cite specific examples pertaining to Park Near Lu.
42
Briefe, vol. 2, 14 October 1917, 882. This proposed project is discussed in
chapter 1.
43
See Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,”
in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt,
Brace & World, 1968), 223. On Klee and the “auratic” in another context, see
Charles W. Haxthausen, “Zwischen Darstellung und Parodie: Klees ‘auratische’
Bilder,” in Bätschmann and Helfenstein, eds., Paul Klee: Kunst und Karriere,
9–26. See also Anger, Klee and the Decorative, 167–70.
44
On Klee’s involvement with book illustration, see Vogel, Zwischen Wort und
Bild, 146–48; see also my book Klee’s Pictorial Writing, 37–41.
45
See Temkin, “Klee and the Avant-Garde,” 28. For a facsimile of Klee’s letter of
21 April 1928 responding to Eluard’s request, see Berggruen & Co., L’Univers de
Klee (Paris: Berggruen, 1955).
46
For an extensive assessment of Klee’s financial situation at this time, see Stefan
Frey, “Rolf Bürgi’s Commitment to Paul and Lily Klee and the Creation of the
Paul Klee Foundation,” in Frey and Helfenstein, eds., Paul Klee Rediscovered,
200–202. For Frey’s detailed chronology and exhibition history of the last decade
of Klee’s life, see Frey, “Chronologische Biographie (1933–1941),” 111–32. For
information about the dealers who represented Klee in America during the thirties,
see Lanchner, “Klee in America,” 99–101.
47
See Pierre Assouline, An Artful Life: A Biography of D. H. Kahnweiler,
1884–1979, trans. Charles Ruas (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990), 234–36.
48
Karl Weule, Vom Kerbstock zum Alphabet: Urformen der Schrift (Stuttgart:
Kosmos, 1915). On Klee’s use of this volume, see James Smith Pierce,
“Pictographs, Ideograms, and Alphabets in the Work of Paul Klee,” Journal of
Typographic Research 1 (July 1967): 220, 233.
49
This work has been the focus of numerous studies and has served as the theme
of an entire exhibition. See Christiane Dessauer-Reiners, Das Rhythmische bei Paul
Klee: Eine Studie zum genetischen Bildverfahren (Worms, Germany: Wernersche
Verlagsgesellschaft, 1996), 171, 183–86, 195–99. See also Paul Klee — Wachstum
regt sich: Klees Zwiesprache mit der Natur (Munich: Prestel, 1990), which is the
catalogue that accompanied the exhibition held in Saarbrücken at the Saarland-
Museum and in Karlsruhe at the Prinz-Max-Palais.
50
Rudolf von Larisch, Beispiele künstlerischer Schrift, 2 vols. (Vienna: Anton
Schroll, 1900–1902), vol. 1: plate xxvii by Alfred Roller; vol. 2: plate xxvi by Rich.
Riemerschmid.
51
Victor Hugo, “Sur la route d’Aix-les-Bains,” in Voyages et excursions, vol. 6,
pt. 2, of Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Librairie Ollendorff, 1910), 215. The translation
of this passage is taken from Massin, Letter and Image, 87.
52
Klee, “On Modern Art,” 76 (Spiller, ed., Paul Klee: Das bildnerische Denken, 82).
53
For contrasts between a manuscript or scribal culture and modern print culture,
see Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man
(Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1962), 74–97.
54
On the origins of crossword puzzles, see Roger Millington, Crossword Puzzles:
Their History and Their Cult (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 1975), 29–38.
Although it is constructed with graphic notations rather than letters, the diagram
illustrated in fig. 31 (top) is structurally similar to the SATOR square.
55
On German crossword puzzles, see the essay “Kleine Geschichte eines milden
Wahns — Kreuzworträtsel,” in Udo Pini’s book Kreuzwort für Intelligenz
(Hamburg: Hanseatische Edition, 1984), 21–29. I am indebted to Will Shortz,

crossword puzzle editor of the the New York Times and puzzle master at National
Public Radio, for this reference and a copy of the essay.
56
See Gedichte, 120; see also chapter 1.
57
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Schicksal der Druckschrift,”
Naturwissenschaftliche Schriften, vol. 13 of Goethes Werke (Hamburg: Christian
Wegner, 1960), 107.
58
Although neither “Schicksal der Druckschrift” nor Growth Is Stirring is men-
tioned, other aspects of Goethe’s influence on Klee are explored by Richard
Hoppe-Sailer in “Genesis und Prozess: Elemente der Goethe-Rezeption bei Carl
Gustav Carus, Paul Klee und Joseph Beuys,” in Goethe und die Verzeitlichung der
Natur, ed. Peter Matussek (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1998), 276–300.
59
As reported in the the New York Times (Holland Cotter, “The Gentle Art of
Those Who Preserve Art,” 17 October 1994, sec. C), conservators have discovered
that the underlying texts can be read with infrared reflectography.
60
For a reproduction of Signs on Rocks, see Catalogue raisonné, 7:444.
61
Dörte Zbikowski has noted that Klee brought together linguistic signs with
what looks like a child’s drawing; see Geheimnisvolle Zeichen: Fremde Schriften in
der Malerei des 20. Jahrhunderts (Göttingen: Cuvillier, 1996), 131. While not
specifically addressing Poem in Pictorial Script, other scholars have written exten-
sively about the character of the visual vocabulary used in Klee’s late drawings. See,
e.g., Charles W. Haxthausen, “Zur ‘Bildsprache’ des Spätwerkes,” in Das Schaffen
im Todesjahr, 27–36, and Regine Prange, “Das utopische Kalligramm: Klees
‘Zeichen’ und der Surrealismus,” in Paul Klee: Kunst und Karriere, 204–25.
62
Jorge Luis Borges, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” (1940), in Labyrinths: Selected
Stories and Other Writings, ed. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby (New York: New
Directions, 1964), 9.
63
Sadao Wada reproduced Poem in Pictorial Script next to hieroglyphic inscrip-
tions Klee could have seen when he visited Karnak and Luxor in December 1928;
see Paul Klee and His Travels (Tokyo: Nantenshi Gallery, 1980), 131–33. See also:
W. V. Davies, Egyptian Hieroglyphs, Reading the Past (Berkeley: U of California P,
1987); and Walker, Cuneiform. It is equally possible that Klee based the composi-
tional divisions on one or more of his own earlier works; likely candidates would
be Creative Handwritten (Schöpferisch Handschriftlich, 1914/194) and
Pictographic Tablet (Bilderschrift Tafel, 1924/44).
64
See, especially, Henri Breuil, “L’Afrique préhistorique,” Cahiers d’art 5 (1930):
449–83.
65
For a reproduction of the Kandinsky work, see Cahiers d’art 9 (1934): 151.
66
See Cahiers d’art 11 (1936): 3–68.
67
André Breton, “Situation surréaliste de l’objet, situation de l’objet surréaliste”
(1935), in Manifestes du Surréalisme (Paris: Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 1962), 307. The
essay is hereafter cited as “Situation surréaliste de l’objet”; the volume is hereafter
cited as Manifestes. This essay is placed in the broader context of surrealist theory
by Kim Grant in Surrealism and the Visual Arts: Theory and Reception (New York:
Cambridge UP, 2005), 347–49.
68
André Breton, “Crise de l’objet,” Cahiers d’art 11 (1936): 24.
69
Breton, “Crise de l’objet,” 24.
70
71
Breton, “Situation surréaliste de l’objet,” 308.
72
73
R. Vaufrey, “L’Âge de l’art rupestre Nord-Afrique,” Cahiers d’art 12 (1937):
63–77, 181–92.
74
Klee was not alone in appropriating the vocabulary of rock art. On Miró’s use
of petroglyphs and petrographs, see Sidra Stich, Joan Miró: The Development of a
Sign Language (St. Louis, MO: Washington University Gallery of Art, 1980).
75
76
See, e.g., Breton, “Situation surréaliste de l’objet,” 314; see also the index in
Grant, Surrealism and the Visual Arts, 402.
77
See Breton, “Du Poème-Objet,” in Le Surréalisme et la peinture, 178–80.
According to the introduction, Breton composed his first “poème-objet” in 1929.
Orban, however, dates the first to 1935; see The Culture of Fragments, 110.
Conclusion: Klee and Concrete Poetry
Klee’s secure niche in the history of modernism is based not on his poetry
but rather on his reputation as a major figure in the history of modern
painting. Given his singular status as an artist, it is not surprising that his
work as a painter does not fit neatly into the traditional movements and
categories featured in most historical surveys of modern art. As an alterna-
tive, less conventional frame of reference by which to contextualize his
work, I have focused on Klee’s experiments with the language and struc-
tural forms of poetry. Unlike Arp, Grosz, and other poet/painters of his
generation, Klee apparently made no effort to publish or otherwise estab-
lish himself as a practicing poet. Presumably he harbored no illusions about
the originality of his early poetry. Once he set his sights on making a name
for himself as a visual artist, he channeled his activity as a poet into the pro-
duction of pictorial images, drawing on his command of traditional poet-
ics and his knowledge of experimental contemporary poetry to establish a
place for himself within the cross-disciplinary matrix of modernisms. He
knew who the other innovators were, and there is every reason to believe
that their work served as a standard by which to measure his own achieve-
ment and as models to internalize but not imitate. Comparing his pictor-
ial poetry to other forms of contemporary visual poetry reveals the extent
to which Klee assimilated and reinvented modernist experimentation.
Klee might very well have agreed with Miró, who claimed to make no
distinction between painting and poetry. Nevertheless, Klee would proba-
bly have stopped short of concurring with Miró’s assessment of the rela-
tionship between his painting and his poetry: “I have sometimes illustrated
my canvases with poetic phrases and vice versa” (“Il m’arrive d’illustrer
mes toiles de phrases poétiques et vice-versa”).1 Klee would have avoided
the verb “illustrate” in favor of language calculated to reinforce the dis-
claimer of distinctions. Although Miró’s verbal and visual poetry often
coexist in a unified spatial structure, there is always a clear distinction
between words and images. By contrast, Klee’s works introduce an ele-
ment of intentional ambiguity at the level of language as well as process.
This is the language of his poems in pictorial script. As a poetic genre, a
poem in pictorial script can be construed as yet another modernist variant
of classical and Renaissance pattern poetry. Given that Klee’s poems in pic-
torial script either incorporate fragments of handwritten text or otherwise
retain vestiges of his handwriting, they can be compared to Apollinaire’s
poem “The Bouquet” (“Le Bouquet”).2 They are nevertheless significantly
186 CONCLUSION: KLEE AND CONCRETE POETRY
different from this calligramme or the shaped poems by Schwitters in that

the compositional arrangements do not bear a mimetic relationship to any
named object. Even when composing in a verbal space, Klee avoided not
only compositions with iconic visual shapes but also the stylish layouts and
verbal plays perfected by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Michel Leiris, and
other masters of typographic poetry.3
At least some of Klee’s poems in pictorial script are modifications of
the compositional structure that links Apollinaire’s conversation poems,
such as “The Windows,” to the poem composed of fragments cut from
newspapers, reset, and printed in Breton’s 1924 manifesto of surrealism.4
Klee, however, applied the technique of excerpting and reintegrating not
only to the construction of his poetic compositions but also to the compi-
lation of his poetic vocabulary, which draws on many different sign sys-
tems. The result is a lexicon of signs that is as abstruse as Henri Michaux’s
1927 alphabet or the graphic language Max Ernst invented for his
Maximiliana (1964) and Écritures (1970).5 Klee’s pictorial signs differ
from those of either Michaux or Ernst in that they are not as homogeneous
in appearance. In this respect his visual poetry anticipates the innovations
of groups and solo practitioners active in the years during and following
the Second World War.
In 1942 Isidore Isou issued his “Manifesto of Lettrist Poetry” (“Le
Manifeste de la poésie lettriste”), in which he boldly called for the destruc-
tion of words and advocated the priority of the letter. Isou and other prac-
ticing lettrists elaborated on their goals in “Poetic and Musical Principles
of the Lettrist Movement” (“Principes poétiques et musicaux du mouve-
ment lettriste”). When it came to realizing their stated intentions, some of
the lettrist poets used letters in conventional and unconventional combi-
nations, whereas others created a variable form of notation that was ini-
tially called metagraphy (“métagraphie”) and then hypergraphy
(“hypergraphie”).6 As early as 1918 in Inscription (Inschrift, 1918/ 207),
Klee had anticipated one of the lettrists’ goals, namely, to create an archi-
tecture of letter-rhythms (“de créer une architecture de rythmes let-
triques”).7 Klee’s graphic “architecture” took the form of a grid with
letters, which he again used in Alphabet AIOEK (fig. 14). Although the
sign language Klee developed in the thirties is comparable to Isou’s dou-
bly coded poetic language — it similarly commingles figuration with some
readable letters and a graphic script that defies legibility — the composi-
tional formats of his poems in pictorial script are less confined and the signs
are less densely concentrated.8 Just before he entered a sanatorium in Orselina-
Locarno and, shortly thereafter, the hospital in Muralto-Locarno where he
died, Klee was painting variants of the signs in his drawings onto strips of
burlap. These experiments with distinctly painterly marks may have devel-
oped in the direction taken by another self-professed lettrist, Havana-born
Roberto Altmann, who combined the stains and drips of postwar abstract
CONCLUSION: KLEE AND CONCRETE POETRY 187
expressionism with legible texts, which metamorphose into glyphs that

appear to have both visual and linguistic properties.
The Noigandres group offers yet another international perspective on
experimental poetry in the postwar years. Named for the poetry magazine
they founded, the Noigandres poets include Augusto de Campos, Décio
Pignatari, and Haroldo de Campos. Their theories were initially formulated
in an essay published in 1956 on the occasion of the first national exhibi-
tion of concrete poetry, sculpture, and painting, held at the Museum of
Modern Art in São Paulo, and were subsequently synthesized in 1958 as
the “Pilot Plan for Concrete Poetry” (“Plano-piloto para poesia concreta”).
The term “concrete poetry” had been used previously by other artists,
including the Swiss sculptor Max Bill. Like the name they appropriated, the
ideas of the Noigandres group had precedents in the statements and works
of artists they acknowledged as forerunners, Apollinaire and the dadaists
among them. What they accomplished in their “pilot plan” was to lay out
a set of principles that could be interpreted and applied in any number of
ways. The concept that gives coherence to their loosely organized para-
graphs of sentence fragments is structure, which is a common denominator
of Klee’s theories and works as well. In the first paragraph of their plan the
authors pinpoint the awareness of graphic space as a structural agent of con-
crete poetry (“poesia concreta começa por tomar conhecimento do espaço
gráfico como agente estrutural”).9 Klee’s concept of pictorial writing
demonstrates just such an awareness. The challenge, as he saw it, is “to pro-
ject something of rather long linear extension onto a modest area limited
on all sides” (“Die Aufgabe besteht in der Übertragung eines ziemlich
länglichen Vorganges auf eine gedrungene Fläche von allseitiger
Begrenztheit”).10 Although he noted that music and poetry accomplish this
through temporal sequencing (“Eine zeitliche Kunst wie die Musik oder die
Dichtung würde dies ohne jedes Kopfzerbrechen auf dem natürlichsten
Weg, eben dem zeitlichen lösen können”), he illustrated how visual artists
could avoid the limitation that the Noigandres group would refer to as
“mere linear-temporistical development” (“desenvolvimento meramente
temporístico-linear”).11 For Klee, as for the Noigandres poets, a dynamic
tension between visual and/or verbal signs in space-time defines a structure
that engenders meaning. The Noigandres group coined the term “struc-
ture-content” (“estrutura-conteúdo”) to convey the idea that a concrete
poem does not interpret or communicate outside referents, whether they be
other texts or feelings.12 Although my interpretations of Klee’s poems in
pictorial script clearly violate this condition of concrete poetry, I have left
open the possibility that they might exist independently of any external or
intertextual references. To this extent, I acknowledge that Klee’s visual
poetry “remains in the magnetic field of perennial relativeness” (“per-
manece no campo magnético do relativo perene”), which is where the
Noigandres group placed concrete poetry.13
Like Klee, other visual poets worked outside the parameters of a group
manifesto or affiliation. Some made statements or used phrases that Klee
might have uttered. Dom Sylvester Houédard, like Klee, recognized paral-
lels between nonfigurative painting and poetry, yet his “typestracts,” which
were all composed on a typewriter, are unlike Klee’s insistently handcrafted
visual poems.14 Hans Staudacher’s “manuscript-pictures” are conceptually
similar to Klee’s Growth Is Stirring and Poem in Pictorial Script, yet they are
altogether different in the use of materials more common to Schwitters’s
collages.15 Although Klee experimented freely with materials and tech-
niques, he did so primarily with the traditional media of the visual arts.
Consequently he is usually placed in the company of midcentury artists
rather than poets. Much has been written about his legacy to subsequent
generations of modern artists, particularly the gestural painters among the
abstract expressionists.16 By contrast, relatively little attention has been paid
to the larger question of how the second generation of modernists and the
postmodernists have interpreted the relationship between modernist
abstraction and Bill’s concept of “concrete art” (“konkrete Kunst”), which
is applicable to the visual arts as well as poetry.17
As early as 1936 Bill called for concrete art to be created indepen-
dently of either experiential nature or the transformative process of
abstraction. It is interesting to consider whether Klee might have explored
this possibility using a visual vocabulary stripped of the vestiges of refer-
ence implicit in Poem in Pictorial Script. If so, his visual poetry would cer-
tainly have looked altogether different from the “visual poems” (“visuelle
Gedichte”) of Klaus Peter Dencker or the “visual texts” (“visuelle Texte”)
of Helmut Zenker.18 In her anthology of international concrete poetry,
Mary Ellen Solt observes that the visual poem in the mid-twentieth cen-
tury was a “new product in a world flooded with new products . . . a word
design in a designed world.”19 Klee’s inventive use of newspaper confirms
his interest in graphic design as a site of reference and comparison in the
production of drawings and paintings. However, based on the kinds of
visual poetry he had produced by 1940, it seems unlikely that he would
have narrowed his vocabulary of visual abstractions to the signs available to
a typesetter, as Zenker did in his “ballade,” which is composed of question
marks and exclamation points. Conversely, Klee might well have been
tempted to adapt Zenker’s neatly laid out ballad quatrains to his own ver-
sion of “visual texts.”20 As models for the structural rhythms of such texts,
he might have returned to the diagrams illustrated in fig. 31.
Klee seems never to have used a typewriter, let alone a computer, so it
is perhaps far-fetched even to suggest analogies between the reductive,
encoded language of his pictorial script and the digitally programmed
codes of combinatorial or programming-code poetry. His poems in picto-
rial script are differently encoded and are not reducible to the logic of dig-
ital codes, yet they do share self-reflexivity in common with the kind of
CONCLUSION: KLEE AND CONCRETE POETRY 189
digital poetry that is readable as both program source code and output.21
Although these speculative analogies are beyond the scope of this study,
they ignite flashes of insight into the direction Klee’s visual poetry might
have taken had he lived another twenty years and the influence he might
have had on poetry of the late twentieth century.
Notes
1
Rowell, ed. Miró: Selected Writings, 151. For illustrations of Miró’s “painting-
poems,” see Jacques Dupin and Ariane Lelong-Mainaud, comp., Joan Miró:
Catalogue raisonné, vol. 1, Paintings, 1908–1930 (Paris: Daniel Lelong, Successió
Miró, 1999), 124–27, 151, 195–97.
2
Apollinaire’s poem “Le Bouquet” is discussed at length by Willard Bohn in
Apollinaire, Visual Poetry, and Art Criticism (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 1993),
180–85.
3
For an in-depth study of typographic poetry, see Drucker, The Visible Word.
4
Breton, “Manifeste du surréalisme” (1924), in Manifestes, 57–59.
5
On Klee, Michaux, and Ernst, see Temkin, “Klee and the Avant-Garde,” 27–28.
6
See Jean-Paul Curtay, La Poésie lettriste (Paris: Seghers, 1974), 101.
7
See “Principes poétiques et musicaux du mouvement lettriste,” in Curtay, La
Poésie lettriste, 307. For an illustration of Inscription, see Catalogue raisonné, 2:526.
8
For essays on lettrist hypergraphy, see Isidore Isou, Le Lettrisme et l’hypergraphie
dans la peinture et la sculpture contemporaines (Paris: J. Grassin, 1961).
9
Augusto de Campos, Décio Pignatari, and Haroldo de Campos, “Plano-piloto
para poesia concreta,” in Concrete Poetry: A World View, ed. Mary Ellen Solt
(Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1969), 70–71; hereafter cited as Concrete Poetry. The
original text, published in Noigandres 4, is reprinted in this volume together with
a translation by the authors.
10
Naturgeschichte, 83).
11
Naturgeschichte, 83). See also “Plano-piloto” in Solt, Concrete Poetry, 70–71.
12
“Plano-piloto,” 71–72.
13
“Plano-piloto,” 71–72.
14
For a statement by Houédard about his “typestracts,” see Institute of
Contemporary Arts, Between Poetry and Painting, 53.
15
For a statement by Staudacher about his “manuscript-pictures,” see Institute of
Contemporary Arts, Between Poetry and Painting, 81.
16
See, e.g., Lanchner, “Klee in America,” 83–111.
17
Bill’s definition of “konkrete Kunst” first appeared in the catalogue of the exhi-
bition Zeitprobleme in der Schweizer Malerei und Plastik (Zurich: Kunsthaus,
1936). It was subsequently revised in 1949 and appeared in the catalogue Zürcher
Konkrete Kunst. It is reprinted in Max Bill: Oeuvres, 1928–1969 (Paris: Centre
National d’Art Contemporain, 1969), 61.
18
Examples of both Klee’s and Dencker’s poetry are included in Klaus Peter
Dencker, ed., volume Poetische Sprachspiele: Vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart
(Stuttgart: Reclam, 2002), 179–80, 184, 276–77.
19
Solt, Concrete Poetry, 60.
20
See Helmut Zenker, Spottbuch: Geschichten, Gedichte, visuelle Texte, Artikel,
Beleidigungen, Lieder, Satiren u. a. (1967–1990) (Vienna: Cabal, 1990), 106.
21
For information about this kind of poetry, see the essay by Florian Cramer enti-
tled “Program Code Poetry” at the following Web site: http://www.netzliteratur.
net/cramer/programm.htm.
Appendix: What Counts as Poetry?
The first edition of Klee’s collected poetry was published in 1960 by Arche
Verlag, Zurich. A majority of the poems published in this edition was
gleaned from Klee’s Tagebücher, although in many cases there is doubt as
to whether the diary entries were intended as poems. The 1960 edition has
been reissued four times (1980, 1996, and 2001 by Arche; 1991 by
Luchterhand Literaturverlag, Frankfurt), with mostly minor variations in
format, layout, and illustrations. The only major changes occurred in the
1980 edition, which added a section entitled “Weitere Gedichte und
Fragmente in chronologischer Ordnung,” and in the 1996 edition, which
changed the format of the index and the listing of original sources.
Translations of Klee’s poetry into English, French, Italian, Spanish,
and other languages have been based on the material contained in the first
and subsequent Arche editions. Inevitably, therefore, the editors and trans-
lators have included selections that may or may not have been written as
poems. Cases in point are found in available English translations, includ-
ing: Some Poems, translated by Anselm Hollo (Lowestoft, Suffolk: Scorpion
Press, 1962), and the anthology entitled Three Painter-Poets — Arp,
Schwitters, Klee: Selected Poems, translated by Harriett Watts
(Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1974).
Klee’s poetic production is represented differently in German-
language anthologies, beginning with Carola Giedion-Welcker’s
Anthologie der Abseitigen: Poètes à l’Écart, first issued in 1946 (Bern:
Benteli), and again in 1965 (Zurich: Arche). These volumes include only
poems Klee recorded in the notebook of “Geduchte.” A more recent the-
matic anthology entitled Poetische Sprachspiele: vom Mittelalter bis zur
Gegenwart (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2002), edited by Klaus Peter Dencker,
includes selections of later poetry from Klee’s pocket diaries and a repro-
duction of the 1938 alphabet poem Beginning of a Poem.
In the absence of a definitive critical edition of his poems, the Klee
scholar is faced with the exacting task of collating material contained in
two sources: the 2001 Arche edition of the Gedichte (currently out of
print), and Marianne Vogel’s 1992 publication Zwischen Wort und Bild:
Das schriftliche Werk Paul Klees und die Rolle der Sprache in seinem Denken
und in seiner Kunst. Vogel accounts for 66 manuscripts in private hands
and in the collection of the Zentrum Paul Klee. Of this number, 48 are
included in the 2001 edition of Gedichte, although the formal arrange-
ments of the original texts are not consistently retained. By contrast, the
192 APPENDIX: WHAT COUNTS AS POETRY?
alphabetic index of the 2001 edition lists titles or first lines of 148 poems,
as well as selected picture titles. Since Vogel counts only poems that exist
in manuscript form, she provides the nucleus of any definitive list of Klee’s
poems. Her compilation includes:
• one poem dating from 1895, published in Gedichte (2001), 105;
• sixteen poems written between the fall of 1898 and December 1901,
in unpublished correspondence with Hans Bloesch, now in a private
Swiss collection; two of these are similar to variants Klee included in
his Tagebücher (#s 77, 82, as indicated below);
• three poems composed between the summers of 1899 and 1900; two
are variants of poems listed above, and all three are published in the
Tagebücher (#s77, 82, 111) and in Gedichte (2001), 18, 20, 22–23;
• two poems from mid-1900 in a letter dated 2 September 1900 to Lily
Stumpf and published in Gedichte (2001), 107–8;
• one poem jotted down sometime between 1913 and 1914 in Klee’s
personal copy of Georg Büchner’s Danton’s Death and published in
Gedichte (2001), 16;
• twenty-nine poems, a third of which are no more than couplets, prob-
ably recorded in the notebook of “Geduchte” between 1922 and
1926 and published in Gedichte (2001), 7–12;
• four poems, whose dates are unknown, written on loose sheets and
interleaved in the back of the notebook of “Geduchte,” published in
Gedichte (2001), 13–16, with free interpretations of Klee’s original
layouts;
• one poem of unknown provenance, published in Gedichte (2001), 95;
• nine short texts interspersed throughout four pocket diaries dating
from 1928–29 and 1933–34, seven of which are published in Gedichte
(2001), 16, 115, 118, 120–21.
The considerably expanded body of poetry published in the Arche edi-
tions of Gedichte includes excerpts from Klee’s diaries, in many cases with
changes in layout and punctuation. Although Vogel concedes that some of
Klee’s diary entries may have been conceived as poems, she cautiously adds
the caveat that the line separating poetry and prose is often so thin as to
be imperceptible.1 Close scrutiny of the critical edition of the Tagebücher,
which scrupulously retains Klee’s indentations, breaks, and punctuation,
confirms that relatively few of the poetic passages excerpted from the
Tagebücher have the stylistic and typographic features common to Klee’s
other poems. Of the nineteen excerpts to which Vogel grants the possibil-
ity of poetic status, twelve can be identified as poems through some com-
bination of language, stanzaic structure, and rhyming (#s 61/second half,
138, 167, 384, 444, 462, 466/first half, 550/last section, 846, 945, 948,
1081A); five could possibly be considered poetic fragments or prose
poems (#s 295, 436, 480/first paragraph, 837, 934), while one (#935)
APPENDIX: WHAT COUNTS AS POETRY? 193
seems questionable due to the lack of internal evidence of poetic structure

or content. Not included in this account is entry #940, which is a variant
of one of the poems recorded in the notebook of “Geduchte.”2 Included
in neither the 2001 edition of Gedichte nor Vogel’s list are the lines of dog-
gerel verse in diary entry #67, which are in the humorous vein of other
short prose poems in the Tagebücher:
Die Musik ist für mich wie eine Music for me is a love bewitched,
verscherzte Geliebte.
Ruhm als Maler?? Fame as a painter??
Schriftsteller, moderner Lyriker? Writer, modern poet? Bad joke.
Schlechter Witz.
So bin ich beruflos, und bummle. So I have no calling and loaf.3
Other diary entries published in the 2001 edition of Gedichte as poems
can be characterized as aesthetic pronouncements (#s 862, 932, 943),
aphorisms (#s 935–38), introspective musings (#725), dream imagery (#s
748, 762, 946), or retrospection (#804). In more than one instance pas-
sages from several diary entries were pieced together and presented as sin-
gle poems (e.g., #s 84–88, #s 760–61). A significant exception to the
majority of diary entries in the 2001 edition of Gedichte are the twenty-
seven sets of line endings that Klee deliberately chose to include in his
diaries as evidence of his activity as a poet. Whereas the line endings are
stretched horizontally across the pages of the Tagebücher, separated by a
system of single and double slashes, they are vertically aligned in the col-
lected Gedichte. This spatial distribution creates visual structures that bear
a striking resemblance to Stramm’s columnar chains of words and word
pairs. A first step in establishing a critical edition of Klee’s poetry would be
to identify these line endings as such and restore the formats preserved in
the critical edition of the Tagebücher.
Finally, the 2001 edition of Gedichte incorporates some of the texts
that Klee wrote into his paintings and drawings. It is difficult to justify all
of these as poems, whereas other poetic texts that survive in visual settings
are inexplicably missing. Although the list below is not complete, all the
texts are justifiably poems or poem fragments and are discussed as such in
this book:
• Woe Is Me in the Gale Wind, 1912/131 and Fall, 1912/130

• Emilie, 1917/48
• Once Emerged from the Gray of the Night, 1918/17
• Memorial Sheet (of Gersthofen), 1918/196 [recorded in the notebook
of “Geduchte” and included in Vogel’s list of manuscripts; not dou-
ble-counted in my calculations below]
• Éhatévauih (1925/124)
• Album Leaf, 1935/6
194 APPENDIX: WHAT COUNTS AS POETRY?
• Beginning of a Poem, 1938/189

• Alphabet WE, 1938/226
• Alphabet AIOEK, 1938/227
• Eternity for Little People, 1939/30
So what counts as poetry? A conservative working list would be
restricted to the sixty-six manuscripts documented by Vogel (sixty-four
poems plus two variants), the nine additional poems inscribed in drawings
or paintings, and diary entries #61/second half, 67, 138, 167, 384, 444,
462, 466/first half, 550/last section, 846, 945, 948, 1081A, and the line
endings contained in diary entries #184, 286, 292, 296, 306, 316, 325,
330, 343. A more generous assessment would include diary entries #295,
436, 480/first paragraph, 837, 934. This working list would not, however,
constitute a definitive checklist for a critical edition of Klee’s poetry.
Questions remain even about the entries in the notebook of “Geduchte.”
One example suffices to illustrate the problems faced by the editor
who undertakes the task of establishing a definitive body of Klee’s poetry.
Page 11 of the notebook of “Geduchte” begins with the following lines:
1915 1915
Mein Stern ging auf My star rose
tief unter meinen Füssen. far beneath my feet.
⭈ ⭈
wo haust im Winter mein Fuchs? where does my fox dwell in winter?
wo schläft meine Schlange? where does my serpent sleep?4
The bullet indicating a break between the two couplets in Klee’s manu-
script is eliminated in published versions of these verses. Although the four
lines are counted as two separate poems in Vogel’s inventory, they are
printed as a single poem in the Arche editions of the Gedichte. Moreover,
in the 2001 edition of Gedichte, this poem is listed in the index under the
title “1915.”5 In addition to determining whether the verses constitute
two poems, fragments of two poems, or a single poem, the editor must
decide whether “1915” is a title or a chronological indicator.
Notes
1
Vogel, Zwischen Wort und Bild, 15–18.
2
Gedichte, 11.
3
Tagebücher #67, 33 (Diaries, 26).
4
Gedichte, 10; there recorded without the period after “Füssen” and the bullet
separating the two couplets.
5
Gedichte, 138.
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Index
abstract expressionism. See (“Le Poulpe”), 83; “The
expressionism Windows” (“Les Fenêtres”),
abstraction, 4–5, 7, 38, 44, 55, 67, 104–5
69, 72, 76, 95, 97, 100, 103, Aragon, Louis, 3
106, 114, 125, 128–29, 133–37, architectural imagery, 69, 76–79,
146–47, 155–56, 161–63, 165, 101–2, 104–6, 125, 127–28, 130,
168, 172, 174–76, 178–79, 133–34, 140, 143, 146
180 n. 24, 188; and modern art, Aristotle, 6, 89 n. 27
7–8, 51, 66, 76, 93, 124, 188; Arp, Hans (Jean), 3–4, 29, 185
pictorial, 8, 10, 66, 69, 100, 114, Arp, Hans (Jean), works by: “Second
134–35, 176; visual, 10, 41, 53, Hand” (“Sekundenzeiger”),
57, 68, 81, 112, 156, 163–65, 29–30; The Cloud Pump (Die
168–70, 173, 179, 188. See also Wolkenpumpe), 4
Klee, Paul, creative work artist’s book (livre d’artiste), 82–83,
acrostic. See poetry 165, 169–70, 179–80 n. 5
allegory, 83, 94, 98–99, 136 assonance. See poetry
alliteration. See poetry automatism, 154–55, 163–64
allusion, 27, 56, 71, 75–76, 86, 98, avant-garde, 2, 41, 125, 136, 147
140, 142
Altmann, Roberto, 186 Balázs, Béla, 141–42
anagram. See poetry Ball, Hugo, 29, 53–55, 64 n. 99, 99;
Anger, Jenny, 119 n. 53, 149 nn. 13, as author of Flight out of Time
21 (Die Flucht aus der Zeit), 110
animal imagery, 25, 84–85, 87 ballad form. See poetry
aphorism, 13, 32, 71, 76, 193 Bartók, Béla, 141, 151 n. 48; as
Apollinaire, Guillaume, 41, 104; as composer of Bluebeard’s Castle,
critic, 7, 66, 69, 95, 100; as poet, 140–43, 147
2, 79, 104 Baudelaire, Charles, 7
Apollinaire, Guillaume, works by: Bauhaus, 5–6, 8, 11, 22, 47, 53, 77,
Bestiary or Parade of Orpheus 81, 106, 122, 124, 126–29,
(Le Bestiaire ou, Cortège d’Orphée), 133–34, 137, 146, 154
82–83, 85–87; Calligrammes, 79; Bauschatz, Paul, 13, 18 n. 55,
“Die moderne Malerei” (“La 61n. 57
Peinture moderne”), 7–8, 104; Becher, Johannes R., 14 n. 9, 99
“It’s Raining” (“Il Pleut”), 41, Benjamin, Walter, 169
61 n. 72; “Ocean-Letter” Benn, Gottfried, 2–3, 14 n. 9; as
(“Lettre-Océan”), 41, 61 n. 71; author of The Morgue and Other
“The Bouquet” (“Le Bouquet”), Poems (Morgue, und andere
185–86; “The Octopus” Gedichte), 36
214 INDEX
bestiary, 82–83, 85–86, 155 Cocteau, Jean, 56

Bill, Max, 187–88, 189–90 n. 17 collage, 38, 42, 104–5, 111
Blake, William, 48, 50; as author concrete poetry. See poetry
and illustrator of Songs of conversation poem, 104, 186
Innocence and of Experience, couplet. See poetry
48–49 Court de Gébelin, Antoine, as
Blechen, Carl, 94; as painter of author of Histoire naturelle de la
Gallows Hill under Storm Clouds parole, 100
(Galgenberg bei Cramer, Florian, 190 n. 21
Gewitterstimmung), 97–98 crossword puzzles, 173
Bloesch, Hans, 18 n. 54, 22, 57, 192 cubism, 42, 52, 63 n. 95, 77, 87,
Bonfand, Alain, 63 n. 95 111, 124–25, 174
Borges, Jorge Luis, 176 cubists. See cubism
bouts-rimés. See poetry
Brecht, Bertolt, 143–48; and epic dada, 2–3, 29–30, 53–55, 63 n. 98,
opera, 143–44, 147–48 78, 85, 126, 149 n. 17, 174, 187
Brecht, Bertolt, works by: Manual of dadaists. See dada
Piety (Die Hauspostille), 143; The Dahl, Johann Christian, 94
Rise and Fall of the City of Dahlhaus, Carl, 141
Mahagonny (Aufstieg und Fall der Dalí, Salvador, 177
Stadt Mahagonny), 143–48; The Dante Alighieri, 82
Threepenny Opera (Die Darwin, Charles, 86
Dreigroschenoper), 144–45 Debussy, Claude, 144
Breton, André, 3, 100, 163, Debussy, Claude, works by: La
177–79, 184 n. 77, 186 Cathédrale engloutie, 76; Pelléas et
Bridgwater, Patrick, 67, 88 n. 10, Mélisande, 137–39, 151 n. 46
157–58 Delacroix, Eugène, 7
Bruegel, Pieter, 98 Delaunay, Robert, 100, 102, 104–5,
Büchner, Georg, as author of 117 nn. 33, 35, 125, 155; as
Danton’s Death (Dantons Tod), author of “La Lumière” (“Über
26–27, 192 das Licht”), 3, 7, 34, 101, 104;
Window paintings, 101–2, 104
Cahiers d’art, 11, 165, 177–78 Delaunay, Sonia, 104
calligramme. See poetry Dencker, Klaus Peter, 188, 191
calligraphy, 50, 53, 164, 172 Der Blaue Reiter (movement), 5
Campos, Augusto and Haroldo de, Der Blaue Reiter (periodical), 7
187 Der Sturm, 2–3, 5, 7, 11, 27,
caricature, 25, 70 34–35, 66, 104, 125–26
Carrà, Carlo, 125 Desnos, Robert, 163
Carus, Carl Gustav, 94–95 Diderot, Denis, 6–7
Chagall, Marc, 125 Die Aktion, 11, 66, 68, 131
Chappell, Fred, 59 n. 37, 60 nn. 38, Die Alpen, 114, 120 n. 79
40, 63 n. 93 Die Brücke, 103
Chaves, Jonathan, 50, 63 n. 91 Dix, Otto, 145
Chick, Jean, 158 dual practitioners, 4, 9, 13,
Citroen, Karel, 64 n. 105 34, 37
INDEX 215
Duchamp, Marcel, 111 German Romanticism. See

Dufy, Raoul, 83, 86, 92 n. 56 Romanticism
Giedion-Welcker, Carola, 20, 146,
Eichendorff, Joseph von, 31, 120 n. 191
79 Glaesemer, Jürgen, 22, 58 n. 11,
Eichendorff, Joseph von, works 149 n. 21
by: “Evening” (“Der Abend”), 31; Gluck, Christoph Willibald, 106
“Night Magic” (“Nachtzauber”), Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 22,
114 58 n. 10, 98; and the “Urpflanze,”
ellipse. See poetry 74, 89 n. 26
Eluard, Paul, 3, 169 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von,
epic. See poetry works by: Italian Journey
epigram. See poetry (Italienische Reise), 89 n. 26; “The
Ernst, Max, 143, 151 n. 55, 177, Fate of Handwriting” (“Schicksal
186 der Handschrift”), 174; “The Fate
experimental poetry. See poetry of Printing” (“Schicksal der
expressionism, 27–28, 34–35, 45, Druckschrift”), 174
154; abstract, 186–87, 188; Gogh, Vincent van, 157–58, 180 n.
German, 2–3, 34–37, 40, 68, 157 12
exquisite corpses, 164–65 Goltz, Hans, 125–26
Goya, Francisco de, 88 n. 10
Feininger, Lyonel, 133; as maker of grid, 46–47, 49–50, 55, 123–25,
Cathedral, 77–78, 90 n. 42, 133 128, 134, 140, 172, 186
Fernow, Karl Ludwig, 94 Grohmann, Will, 106, 108, 124
Feuerbach, Anselm, 115 n. 11 Gropius, Walter, 77, 91 n. 43, 122,
First World War, 66–67, 170 127–28, 149 n. 18
Flechtheim, Alfred, 145, 170 Grosz, George, 9, 34, 145, 185
fragment, 1, 20, 30–32, 35, 42, 44, Grosz, George, works by: “Berlin
69, 74–75, 80, 82, 86, 105, 112, 1917,” 75; “From the Songs”
164, 166, 171–74, 177, 179, (“Aus den Gesängen”), 34; John,
186–87, 192–93 the Woman Killer (John, Der
Franciscono, Marcel, 87 n. 2 Frauenmörder), 74–75
free verse. See poetry
Frey, Stefan, 58 n. 16, 182 n. 46 Haftmann, Werner, 106
Friedrich, Caspar David, 94, 98–99, handwriting. See writing
116 n. 11; as painter of Cross in Hardenberg, Friedrich von. See
the Mountains (Das Kreuz im Novalis
Gebirge), 94 Haring, Keith, 13
futurism, 13, 38, 129 Hausenstein, Wilhelm, 9, 17 n. 48,
futurists. See futurism 65–66, 87 n. 3
Hausmann, Raoul, 53
Garnett, Richard, 48 Heilmann, Hans, 50, 63 n. 89
Geelhaar, Christian, 57 n. 2, 108 Heine, Heinrich, 22, 58 n. 11, 98; as
George, Stefan, 23, 58 n. 14 author of Book of Songs (Buch der
German expressionism. See Lieder), 23
expressionism Helmholtz, Hermann von, 47
216 INDEX
Henry, Sara Lynn, 81, 91 n. 51 Kahlo, Frida, 152 n. 56

Hesse, Hermann, 9, 102–3, 118 n. 37 Kahnweiler, Daniel-Henry, 170
Hesse, Hermann, works by: Poems of Kandinsky, Wassily, 4–5, 116 n. 17,
the Painter (Gedichte des Malers), 125–26, 155
103; The Journey to the East (Die Kandinsky, Wassily, works by: Each
Morgenlandfahrt), 103 for Itself (Chacun pour soi), 177;
Heym, Georg, 157, 161, “On the Problem of Form”
179–80 n. 5 (“Über die Formfrage”), 7; On the
Heym, Georg, works by: “The War” Spiritual in Art (Über das Geistige
(“Der Krieg”), 67–68; “Winter” in der Kunst), 95; Sounds
(“Der Winter”), 157–58, 161 (Klänge), 4, 165, 181 n. 35
Hildebrand, Adolf von, 95 Kersten, Wolfgang, 39, 57 n. 3,
Hindemith, Paul, 143 60 n. 47, 117 n. 36
Hitler, Adolf, 146 Khlebnikov, Velimir, 56, 129
Hodler, Ferdinand, 157–58 Kirchner, Ernst Ludwig, 150 n. 32,
Hölderlin, Friedrich, 22, 58 n. 10 179–80 n. 5
Hollo, Anselm, 191 Klee, Felix, 20, 62 n. 75, 151 n. 46,
Homer, 71 151 n. 48
Hopfengart, Christine, 18 n. 48 Klee, Lily, 3, 11, 20, 45, 112–13,
Horace, 73, 93 120 n. 77, 131–32, 140
Horace, works by: Ars Poetica, 2, 6, Klee, Paul, biography:
10, 71–72; Satires, 88 n. 16 affinity for poetry of Morgenstern,
Houédard, Dom Sylvester, 188, 23–29, 42, 59 n. 21, 85, 99
189 n. 14 editing of Diaries, 4, 20, 31–32,
Hubert, Renée Riese, 13 37–39, 52
Huelsenbeck, Richard, 3, 53, 64 n. exhibitions, 3, 145, 169,
98 181 n. 37
Hugo, Victor, 172 exile from Germany, 82, 113, 170
Hutcheon, Linda, 98–99 gallery affiliations, 3, 27, 34, 145,
hypogram. See poetry 170
as musician, 1, 134–35
illustration, 4, 41, 45, 69, 72, relationships to: Arp, 4; Bloesch,
80–82, 86, 99, 164, 185; book, 18 n. 54, 22, 57, 192; Delaunay,
48–49, 82–83, 165, 167–69. 3, 34, 101–2; Kandinsky, 4–5;
See also artist’s book Marc, 34, 66, 75–76; Miró,
imitation, 6–8, 10, 66, 95, 98, 146 5–6, 185; Rilke, 107–8;
irony, 2, 23, 34, 36, 52, 99, 113, Schwitters, 5, 55, 78–79,
128 125–30
Isou, Isidore, 186 studies, 1, 22, 31, 81, 93, 112, 169
teaching: at the Bauhaus, 5–6, 8,
Jakobson, Roman, 12–13, 18 n. 53 11, 22, 47, 53, 77–78, 81, 86,
Janco, Marcel, 3 106, 122, 126, 129, 133–34,
Janschka, Fritz, 59 n. 31, 62 n. 78, 137, 146, 154; at the
117 n. 28, 118 n. 39 Düsseldorf Academy, 6, 8
Jollos, Waldemar, 3 travels, 67–68, 96–98, 101, 103,
Jordan, Jim, 63 n. 95 113, 122, 125, 183 n. 63
INDEX 217
wartime experiences, 45, 52, 66, 160, 163, 168–69, 173, 176,
70–71, 75, 100, 107, 131–33 192
years in: Bern, 1, 11, 23, 82; use of: abstraction, 5, 8, 44, 51,
Munich, 1, 5, 23, 48, 93, 107, 53, 55, 57, 66–69, 72, 74, 76,
114, 126, 135 81, 97, 106, 114, 124–25,
Klee, Paul, creative work: 128–29, 133–37, 146, 156,
composing by cutting and editing, 161–65, 168–70, 172–76,
11, 31–32, 35, 38–39, 42, 178–79, 180 n. 24; color,
57 n. 2, 75, 105, 124–25, 42–43, 45–48, 50, 74, 78, 98,
148 n. 10, 186 105, 108, 112–14, 129–30,
developing a pictorial script, 2, 10, 133, 140, 142, 146, 158–59,
57, 100, 148, 154–58, 160–62, 161; grids, 46–47, 49–50, 55,
165, 170–76, 178–79, 186 124–25, 134, 140, 172, 186;
imagery: animals, 25, 35–36, 87, letters in visual images, 10, 33,
194; architectural, 76–77, 102, 41–42, 53–55, 99–100, 112,
106, 125, 128, 130, 133–34, 125, 168, 170–71, 173, 186;
140, 143, 146, 154; arrows, 72, linear patterns, 69, 106–7,
137, 145–47; birds, 33, 60 n. 109–10, 124, 133–34, 137,
47, 73; celestial, 25, 33, 74, 147; musical analogies, 106,
194; creation, 72–76; flight, 40, 123, 129, 134–39, 146–48,
76, 81–82; landscape, 32–33, 158, 187; newspaper, 111–13,
45, 65, 73–75, 81, 93, 95–100, 171–74, 188; poetic devices in
102–6, 108–10, 112–15, 146, visual images, 9–11, 41, 44, 46,
157, 161–62, 168, 172; trees, 49, 52, 56, 67, 69, 80–81, 100,
112, 160–61, 172, 176; war, 105, 108–10, 114, 125, 128,
66–70; windows, 100–102, 134, 158–59, 161, 165–66,
105–6, 125 173–74, 176, 179, 185–86
line endings, 30–32, 35, 39, 52, Klee, Paul, poems by:
57, 61 n. 57, 193 “1/1000,” 28–29
pedagogical notes, 24, 55, 123, “Alle alle hatt ich gern”
128, 154, 168 (“All, I loved all of it”), 33
play, 2, 11, 23, 27, 29, 31, 43, “Als verstummte Nachtigall” (“As
126, 135, 137 a silenced nightingale”), 33,
poems placed in: pictorial settings, 60 n. 47
11, 20–21, 39–57, 66, 155, “Der Wolf spricht” (“The wolf
163–64, 170, 175–76, 179, speaks”), 35–36, 61 n. 58, 129
193–94; textual spaces, 11, “Die Ewigkeit,” (“Eternity”),
20–29, 32–36, 85, 155, 179, 92 n. 71
192, 194 “Die Musik ist für mich” (“Music
processes, creative and technical, is for me”), 193
4–5, 32, 48, 52, 72, 74, 86–87, “Du still allein” (“Thee, calm and
100, 109–12, 125, 129–30, alone”), 51–52
133, 139, 147–48, 159, “Einst dem Grau der Nacht
170–72, 175–76, 185, 188 enttaucht” (“Once emerged
titles, 2, 12, 20, 32, 34, 52–53, from the gray of night”),
72, 84, 86, 106, 112, 138, 45–47, 50, 154, 169
218 INDEX
Klee, Paul, poems by (continued): A 2 Upper Stockhornsee

“Einst werd ich liegen im (Oberer Stockhornsee), 103–4
Nirgend” (“Someday I’ll lie A Garden for Orpheus, 106–10,
nowhere”), 25 118 n. 51
“Elephantastisch” ab ovo, 2, 10, 71–74, 76, 88 n. 16,
(“Elephantastic”), 85–87 89 nn. 22, 23
“Emilie,” 43 Abstract Script (Abstracte Schrift),
“Esel” (“Donkey”), 25 163–64, 180 n. 25
“Es war mal was” (“It once was Aged Phoenix, 86
such”), 28 Album Leaf (Albumblatt),
“(helft bauen)” [“(help build)”], 162–67, 169–70, 179, 193
32, 105 Alphabet I, 111, 120 n. 68, 172,
“Herr Abel und Verwandte” 174–75
(“Abel and His Brothers”), 30, Alphabet II, 111, 120 n. 68, 172,
173 175
“In einem Zimmer gefangen” Alphabet AIOEK, 54–57, 155,
(“Caught in a room”), 41 170, 179, 186, 194
“In später Stunde sitze ich” (“The Alphabet WE, 55–57, 64 n. 104,
hour grows late, I sit alone”), 179, 194
21–22 Als ich Rekrut war (see When I
“Mein Stern ging auf” Was a Recruit)
(“My star rose”), 194 An Angel Serves a Small Breakfast,
“Motto,” 26–27, 59 n. 25 25
“Nun hat dich genommen der Anfang eines Gedichtes (see
Tod” (“Now Death has taken Beginning of a Poem)
thee”), 22–23 Ansicht der schwer bedrohten Stadt
“Rach [sic] und Degen” (“Shoof Pinz (see View of the Severely
and rowers”), 28, 59 n. 27 Threatened City of Pinz)
“Was artet einsam und allein?” Ansicht eines Berg-Heiligtums (see
(“What thrives alone, just let it View of a Mountain Sanctuary)
be?”), 33 Ausschreitende Figur (see Striding
“Weh mir unter dem Sturmwind” Figure)
(“Woe is me in the gale wind”), B. (Delicate Landscape) [B. (zarte
40, 82 Landschaft)], 81, 91 n. 49
“weil ich ging” (“as I walked”), 35 Beginning of a Poem, 55–56,
“Weil ich kam erschlossen sich 64 n. 104, 179, 194
Blüten” (“Because I came, Bericht über Vorgänge in Dui (see
blossoms opened”), 32–33, 35, Report on Events at Dui)
60 n. 47, 76 Betroffene Stadt (see Stricken City)
“wo haust im Winter mein Betroffener Ort (see Stricken Place)
Fuchs?” (“where does my fox Blick auf einen Platz (see View
dwell in winter?”), 194 onto a Square)
“Zurufe” (“Cheers”), 34 Blumenmythos (see Flower Myth)
Klee, Paul, visual images by: C for Schwitters (C für Schwitters),
A 1 Lower Stockhornsee 126
(Unterer Stockhornsee), 103–4 Cathedral, 76–82, 130
INDEX 219
Cathedrals, 130, 132–34, 140, Fensterausblick (see View from a

146, 154 Window)
Classical Garden, 106, 118 n. 50 Fensteraussicht der elterlichen
Composition with Windows, 102, Wohnung in Bern (see View from
117 n. 35, 118 n. 36 a Window of My Parents’ Home
Curtain, 124, 149 n. 13 in Bern)
D. Krieg schreitet üb. e. Ortschaft Flower Myth, 73–76, 89 nn. 24,
(see The War Strides over a 26, 125
Village) Gallows Humor (Galgenhumor),
Death for the Idea, 62 n. 79, 88 n. 9 99, 117 n. 26
Der Inferner Park (see The Gate in the Garden, 110, 119 n.
Infernal Park) 64
Der Künstler (Dichtermaler) Gedenkblatt (an Gersthofen) (see
(see The Artist [Poet/Painter]) Memorial Sheet [of Gersthofen])
Der Luftballon (see The Balloon) Gedicht in Bilderschrift (see Poem
Der Tod für die Idee (see Death for in Pictorial Script)
the Idea) Gepflegter Waldweg, Waldegg b.
Der Zeichner am Fenster (see The Bern (see Well Tended Forest
Draughtsman at the Window) Path, Waldegg near Bern)
Diagrams illustrating structural Glockentönin Bim (see Lady
rhythms, 123–24, 173, 188 Bell-Tone Bim)
Die Gehängten (see The Hanged Greiser Phönix (see Aged Phoenix)
Ones) Growth Is Stirring, 170–76, 178,
Dogmatic Composition (Dogmatische 188
Komposition), 90 n. 38 Houses on the Outskirts (Häuser an
E, 41 der Peripherie), 96, 116 n. 19
Éhatévauih, 53–55, 164, 193 Inscription (Inschrift), 186, 189 n. 7
Ein Garten für Orpheus (see A Inscription in Clouds (Inschrift in
Garden for Orpheus) Wolken), 54, 64 n. 99
Ein Genius serviert e. kl. Frühstück Insula Dulcamara, 111–12,
(see An Angel Serves a Small 120 n. 68
Breakfast) Inventions, 65, 86, 88 n. 8
Einst dem Grau der Nacht Junge Pflanzung (see Tree
enttaucht (see Once Emerged Nursery)
from the Gray of Night) Karge Worte des Sparsamen (see
Emilie, 42–46, 51, 193 Scanty Words of the Thrifty Man)
Eternity for Little People (Ewigkeit Kathedrale (see Cathedral)
für kleine Leute), 86, 92 n. 7, Kathedralen (see Cathedrals)
179, 194 Klassischer Garten (see Classical
Fall, 40–42, 193 Garden)
Felsentempel (see Rock Cut Komposition mit Fenstern
Temple) (see Composition with Windows)
Fenster im Garten (see Window in Lady Bell-Tone Bim, 24, 26
the Garden) Landscape with Gallows
Fenster u. Palmen (see Window (Landschaft m. d. Galgen),
and Palms) 96–100, 112, 159, 170
220 INDEX
Klee, Paul, visual images by Schösslinge (see Shoots)

(continued): Script-Architectural (Schrift-
Long Hair and Soulful (Langes Architectonisch), 149 n. 19
Haar und Seelisches), 137–39 Seventeen Mad, 165, 181 n. 34
Memorial Sheet (of Gersthofen), Shoots, 160, 180 n. 17
51–52, 193 Siebzehn irr (see Seventeen Mad)
Mit d. Luft Ballon (see With the Signs on Rocks, 176, 183 n. 60
Balloon) Sketches illustrating structural
Mural, 125–30, 133, 140, 146, rhythms, 24
154, 161 Spiegelndes Fenster (see Reflecting
Once Emerged from the Gray of Window)
Night, 44–51, 55, 62 n. 75, Strasse unter Bäumen (see Tree-
124, 154, 193 Lined Street, Georgenschweige)
Opus One, 86, 88 n. 8 (see also Stricken City, 143–48, 153 n. 68
Inventions) Stricken Place, 145–46,
ORCHS, as Relative (ORCHS als 152 nn. 62, 63
Anverwandter), 84, 86–87 Striding Figure, 110
Ovidian (Ovidisch), 86 Stromgeist (see River Spirit)
Palace (Palast), 140–43, 146, Structural I, 128, 149 n. 20
152 n. 56, 159 Structural II, 128, 149 n. 20
Park N, 167–70, 176 Structural Composition
Park Near Lu (Park bei Lu), (Structurale Komposition), 128,
110–14, 170, 181 n. 41 149 n. 20
Persian Nightingales (Persische Sturz (see Fall)
Nachtigallen), 33, 60 n. 47 Temple of Bj. (Tempel von Bj.),
Poem in Pictorial Script, 175–79, 106, 118 n. 50
183 nn. 61, 63, 188 The Artist (Poet/Painter), 1–2
Red Balloon, 81, 91 n. 49 The Balloon, 81, 91 n. 49
Red Church and White Panel, 96, The Draughtsman at the Window,
116 n. 19 101, 118 n. 36
Red Urchs, 91 n. 55 The Hanged Ones, 99, 117 n. 26
Reflecting Window, 102, 118 n. 36 The Infernal Park, 82, 91 n. 55, 108
Report on Events at Dui, 163, The War Strides over a Village, 67
180 n. 25 Tor im Garten (see Gate in the
Rhythm of the Windows (Rhythmus Garden)
der Fenster), 102, 105, 118 n. 36 Tree Nursery, 156–62, 170,
River Spirit, 135–37 175–76, 179 n. 4, 180 n. 19
Rock Cut Temple, 110, 119 n. 64 Tree-Lined Street, Georgenschweige,
Rote Kirche u. weisse Tafel (see Red 96, 116 n. 19
Church and White Panel) URCHS drawings, 83–84, 86–87,
Roter Ballon (see Red Balloon) 91 n. 55, 92 nn. 61,69
Roturchs (see Red Urchs) View from a Window, 102–6,
Ruins of Oi (Ruinen von Oi), 106, 117 n. 36, 125
118 n. 50 View from a Window of My
Scanty Words of the Thrifty Man, Parents’ Home in Bern, 5,
92 n. 56 15 n. 22
INDEX 221
View of a Mountain Sanctuary, Kokoschka, Oskar, 126

106, 118 n. 50 Kruchonykh, Alexei, 129
View of the Severely Threatened City Kubin, Alfred, 88 n. 10
of Pinz, 68–70, 145, 152 n. 63
View onto a Square, 101, 118 n. 36 La Révolution surréaliste, 3, 155,
Vigilant Angel (Wachsamer Engel), 163–65
25 Lamorisse, Albert, 81
Vorhang (see Curtain) Lanchner, Carolyn, 182 n. 46
Wachstum regt sich (see Growth Is landscape imagery, 32–33, 73–76,
Stirring) 95–115, 146, 148, 157–58,
Wandbild (see Mural) 161–62, 168, 172
Well Tended Forest Path, Waldegg Larisch, Rudolf von, 154, 171
near Bern, 96, 116 n. 19 Lasker-Schüler, Else, 9, 33–34
When I Was a Recruit, 70 Lasker-Schüler, Else, works by: “But
Window and Palms, 101–2, 118 n. Your Brows Are a Storm” (“Aber
36 deine Brauen sind Unwetter”), 33;
Window in the Garden, 102, “Flight from the World”
118 n. 36 (“Weltflucht”), 41
With the Balloon, 81, 91 n. 49 Leafstedt, Carl, 151 n. 50
Woe Is Me in the Gale Wind, Lee, Rensselaer, 6, 18 n. 50
40–42, 82, 193 Leiris, Michel, 186
Zeichen auf Felsen (see Signs on Leonardo da Vinci, 101, 117 n. 33
Rocks) Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 10,
Klee, Paul, writings by: 17 n. 45, 37; as author of Laocoön
“Creative Credo” (“Schöpferische (Laokoon), 6–8
Konfession”), 8, 17 n. 43, 76, lettrists, 186
100, 115 Lichtenstein, Alfred, 3, 69–70
Diaries (Tagebücher), 1–2, 4, 9, Liebermann, Max, 115 n. 11
11, 20, 22–23, 30–31, 35, Luprecht, Mark, 92 n. 62
37–39, 48, 52, 57 n. 2, 65, 69, lyric poetry. See poetry
71–72, 74, 81, 130–32, 160,
191–93 Macke, August, 75, 103
Gedichte, 20–21, 35, 191–94 Maeterlinck, Maurice, 137–38
notebook of “Geduchte,” 2, 11, Magritte, René, 100, 164
20, 25, 28, 32–35, 39, 44, Mallarmé, Stéphane, 41
48, 57 n. 3, 58 n. 17, 191, manuscripts, 20–21, 34, 36, 38, 42,
193–94 48, 82, 155, 164, 168–69, 172,
“On Modern Art” (“Über die 175, 188, 191–92; illuminated,
moderne Kunst”), 81, 172 45, 48–49, 165, 168
Pedagogical Sketchbook Marc, Franz, 34, 59 n. 26, 66,
(Pädagogisches Skizzenbuch), 137 75–76
Kleist, Heinrich von, 94 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 38, 186
Klemm, Wilhelm, 68–69 Menzel, Adolph, 115 n. 11
Klimt, Gustav, 96 metaphor, 8, 33, 42, 69, 72–74, 81,
Klinger, Friedrich Maximilian, 27 83, 86–87, 100, 110, 129, 148,
Knirr, Heinrich, 87 n. 2, 93–94 174, 176
222 INDEX
meter. See poetry mit sich selbst”), 28; “The Stone

metonym, 81, 101 Ox” (“Der Steinochs”), 85; “The
Michaux, Henri, 186 Two Donkeys” (“Die beiden
Michelet, Jules, 74 Esel”), 25
Miró, Joan, 4–6, 111, 184 n. 74, Morise, Max, 163
185; lithographs for The Lizard Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 135
with the Golden Feathers (Le Muche, Georg, 128, 149 n. 19
Lézard aux plumes d’or), musical notation, 129, 135–37, 146
165–67 mythology, 71, 85–87, 108, 136
modernism, 2, 4, 9–10, 13, 30, 32,
41, 45, 50–52, 54, 57, 66, 72–73, narrative, 72, 85, 135–36, 146, 148,
76, 79, 82, 93, 95, 97–98, 100, 156, 168
110–11, 115, 124, 154–55, 157, Neher, Caspar, 143–45, 147
161, 163, 165, 169, 173–75, 185, Nietzsche, Friedrich, 75, 90 n. 30; as
188 author of Thus Spoke Zarathustra
modernists. See modernism (Also Sprach Zarathustra), 36,
Moilliet, Louis, 3, 103, 118 n. 37 61 n. 59
Molzahn, Johannes, 125 Noigandres poets, 187
Mondrian, Piet, 155 nonsense verse. See poetry
Montgolfier, Jacques-Étienne and Novalis, as author of Heinrich von
Joseph-Michel, 80–82, 91 n. 48 Ofterdingen, 74
Morgenstern, Christian, 23, 28–29,
42, 85, 99 object poem, 178–79, 184 n. 77
Morgenstern, Christian, works by: Okuda, Osamu, 39, 60 n. 47,
“Bim, Bam, Bum,” 24, 27; “Das 120 n. 69
grosse Lalula,” 29; “Fish’s Night opera, 106, 124, 135–45, 146–48
Song” (“Fisches Nachtgesang”), Orban, Clara, 13, 184 n. 77
24–25; Gallows Songs Ovid, 74; as author of the
(Galgenlieder), 23, 25, 59 n. 21, Metamorphoses, 85–87, 92 n. 69
99; “Jingle of the Gallows
Brothers” (“Bundeslied der palimpsest, 110–14
Galgenbrüder), 46; “Korf’s parallelism, 40, 109, 157
Clock” (“Die Korfsche Uhr”), 30; parody, 31, 52, 98–99, 117 n. 27
“Nein!,” 26, 59 n. 21; “New pattern poetry. See poetry
Creations Proposed to Mother Pechstein, Max, 103
Nature” (“Neue Bildungen, der Péret, Benjamin, 165
Natur vorgeschlagen”), 85; Picasso, Pablo, 83–84
“Noon News” (“Die Piccard, Auguste, 80
Mittagzeitung), 24; Palma pictographs, 99–100, 106, 124–25,
Kunkel, 23; Palmström, 23; 129, 133, 143, 156, 160
“Scholastic Conundrum” Pignatari, Décio, 187
(“Spitzfindiges”), 26; “The Does’ poem-painting, 45, 50–51, 63 n. 91
Prayer” (“Das Gebet”), 29; “The poet/painter, 1–2, 4, 9, 11, 13,
Moon” (“Der Mond”), 99–100; 33–34, 50, 185
“The Snail’s Monologue” poetic painting, 6–8, 65–66, 95, 97,
(“Gespräch einer Hausschnecke 100, 104
INDEX 223
poetry: poetry, 186, 189 n. 3; visual

categories of: epic, 2; lyric, 23, 28, poetry, 5, 155, 167, 173–75,
37, 98, 113–14 178–79, 185–86, 188–89
devices of: acrostic, 56, 173; Pound, Ezra, 99, 117 n. 27
alliteration, 43, 78, 158; programming-code poetry. See
anagram, 56–57; assonance, 43, poetry
46, 80; ellipse, 35, 42, 103, prose poetry. See poetry
109, 132; figures, 12, 27, puzzle poetry. See poetry
32–33, 72, 76, 80, 82, 86–87,
108–9, 139, 148, 172; quatrain. See poetry
hypogram, 56–57; meter, 23,
30, 36, 46, 123, 125, 128–29, Rainer, Arnulf, 111
134; rhyme, 21, 23, 26, 28–32, Ramdohr, Friedrich, 94, 98
35–36, 43, 46, 52, 70, 80, 85, Redon, Odilon, 81
99, 103, 109, 141, 161, 173, Reger, Max, 120 n. 79; as composer
192; rhythm, 32, 36, 44, 46, of A Romantic Suite (Eine
50, 69, 106, 109, 125, 127, romantische Suite), 113–14
134; stanza, 28, 33, 36, 38, 42, Renaissance: art, 9, 13, 84, 110;
49, 56, 67–69, 85, 109, 123, poetry, 185; theory, 6, 74
134, 158, 161, 165; syntax, 29, Reynolds, Dee, 155, 161
37, 52, 63 n. 93, 79, 104, rhyme. See poetry
109–10, 132, 148, 161, rhythm, 22, 106, 123–25, 128–30,
172–73, 176 134–35, 142–43, 146–47, 155,
forms of: ballad, 21, 99, 128, 188; 157, 160–62, 164–66, 168–69,
epigram, 30–32, 39, 57; sonnet, 174, 188. See also poetry
23, 109; sonnet sequence, Rilke, Rainer Maria, 107, 119 nn.
107–8 56, 57
linear structures of: couplet, 32, Rilke, Rainer Maria, works by: Book
35, 103, 192; quatrain, 21, 52, of Images (Buch der Bilder), 107;
128, 157, 161, 165, 188 Duino Elegies (Duineser Elegien),
types of: bouts-rimés, 31, 60 n. 39; 108; New Poetry (Neue Gedichte),
calligramme, 41, 61 n. 72, 79, 76, 108; Sonnets to Orpheus (Die
186; concrete poetry, 4, 179, Sonette an Orpheus), 107–9; The
185, 187–88; experimental Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
poetry, 2, 5, 11, 30, 35, 127, (Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte
150 n. 26, 173, 185, 187; free Laurids Brigge), 107
verse, 22, 40; nonsense verse, Rivera, Diego, 152 n. 56
42, 51; pattern poetry, 41, 185; Romanticism, 23, 81, 95, 97, 103,
programming-code poetry, 108, 113–14, 121 n. 81, 141,
188–89, 190 n. 21; prose 157–58; German, 27, 31, 40,
poetry, 41, 192–93; puzzle 61 n. 67, 93–95, 98–99, 115 n. 5
poetry, 56, 64 n. 106; shaped Roskill, Mark, 149 n. 15
poetry, 2, 29, 41, 79, 134, 186 Runge, Philipp Otto, 99
(see also pattern poetry); sound
poetry, 2, 29, 53–55, 63 n. 98, satire, 52, 65, 69
78, 149 n. 17; typographic Saussure, Ferdinand de, 56
224 INDEX
Scheffer, Ary, 7 die Coelner Rheinbruecke bei

Schelling, Friedrich von, 93–94 Nacht”), 131, 134
Schiller, Friedrich von, 27 stanzas. See poetry
Schlegel, Friedrich von, 1 Staudacher, Hans, 188,
Schmidt-Rottluff, Karl, 103 189 n. 15
Schoenberg, Arnold, 141 Stramm, August, 3, 29, 35, 37, 52,
Schwitters, Kurt, 4–5, 53, 125, 129, 60 n. 57, 193
149 n. 15, 188; as artist, 77, Strauss, Richard, 141
91 n. 43, 111, 125, 188; as critic, structure, 29–30, 56, 113, 122,
5, 126; as poet, 2, 18 n. 55, 129, 137, 141–42; architectonic,
29–30, 149 n. 17, 186 11, 122–23, 128, 134;
Schwitters, Kurt, works by; “Cigars architectural, 52, 128, 154;
[elementary]” (“Cigarren compositional, 66, 148, 154, 156,
[elementar]”), 29; “Doof,” 79; 164–65, 173, 186; formal, 40,
Merz, 126; “Merzbau,” 126; 115, 134, 139, 156; linear, 11,
“Rain” (“Regen”), 61 n. 72; 37, 44, 46, 109, 114, 125, 133,
“Register [elementary]” (“Register 135, 154, 156, 159, 161, 172;
[elementar]”), 55; “Simultaneous pictorial, 142, 154, 161–62, 168;
Poem” (“Simultangedicht / kaa poetic, 36, 44, 49, 167, 178, 193;
gee dee”), 78–79; “Typographic rhythmic, 22, 44, 114, 155, 161;
Visual Poem” (“Gesetztes spatial, 37, 68, 80, 98, 161, 185;
Bildgedicht”), 55; “Wall” stanzaic, 37, 46, 109, 192;
(“Wand”), 127–30 typographic, 29, 37, 128; visual,
Sema group, 159, 161–62, 176 43–44, 46, 49, 193
Severini, Gino, 125 Stuck, Franz von, 87 n. 2
shaped poetry. See poetry Stumpf, Lily, 6, 57 n. 2, 58 n. 11,
Shortz, Will, 183 n. 55 65, 122, 192. See also Klee, Lily
simile, 6, 108, 172, 176 Sturm Gallery, 3, 27, 104, 125
simultaneity, 54, 79, 101, 104–5, Sturm und Drang, 27–28, 59 n. 22
129, 155 surrealism, 2–4, 13, 14 n. 14,
Solt, Mary Ellen, 188 154–55, 163–65, 177–78, 181 n.
sonnet form. See poetry 37, 186
sonnet sequence. See poetry surrealists. See surrealism
sound poetry. See poetry Swiss Moderne Bund, 3
space: graphic, 163, 166, 187; syntax. See poetry
pictorial, 10, 79, 97, 109–10,
137, 158, 161–65, 171; textual, Tanguy, Yves, 165
11, 21, 50, 79, 159, 161–62, Tatar, Maria, 74, 90 n. 38
165; and time, 8, 37, 41, 105–6, Temkin, Ann, 14 nn. 13, 14,
110, 129, 137, 155, 159, 161, 149 n. 15
187; typographic, 100, 171, tone poem, 114
174–75 Trakl, Georg, 62 n. 79; as author of
Spiller, Jürg, 15 n. 19, 62 n. 82 “Music at Mirabell” (“Musik im
Stadler, Ernst, 131–32; as author of Mirabell”), 46
“On Crossing the Rhine Bridge at typography, 24, 41, 128–29, 165
Cologne by Night” (“Fahrt ueber Tzara, Tristan, 3
INDEX 225
ut pictura poesis, 6–7, 10, 16 n. 31, Weill, Kurt, 143–48

50–51, 72, 93, 136 Weill, Kurt, works by: The Pledge
(Die Bürgschaft), 144; The Rise
Vaufrey, R., 178 and Fall of the City of Mahagonny
Vaughan, William, 98 (Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt
Verdi, Richard, 88 n. 16, Mahagonny), 143–48; The
118 nn. 37, 38 Threepenny Opera (Die
Villon, François, 99; as author of Dreigroschenoper), 144–45
The Testament (Le Testament), 56, Weimar Germany, 36, 143, 146
99 Werckmeister, O. K., 52, 57 n. 2,
Vischer, Friedrich Theodor and 58 n. 14, 90 n. 29, 92 n. 69
Robert, 94 Weule, Karl, 170
Vishny, Michele, 13 n. 1, 90 n. 33, White, Erdmute Wenzel, 64 n. 99
120 n. 77 Wolfsohn, John, 157–58
visual poetry. See poetry word painting, 32, 45, 50–51, 68,
Vogel, Marianne, 13, 14 n. 8, 18 n. 154, 157, 174
54, 20, 57 n. 3, 59 n. 32, 61 nn. word pairs, 26–27, 31, 193
59, 67, 191–94 word square, 123, 173
wordplay, 5, 26, 28–29, 31, 43,
Wada, Sadao, 183 n. 63 60 n. 53, 85, 103, 126, 173
Wagner, Richard, 135–38, 143, Worringer, Wilhelm, 95, 116 nn. 16,
150 n. 39 17
Wagner, Richard, works by: The writing, 154, 156, 159, 162–66,
Rhinegold (Das Rheingold), 170–74, 176–77; handwriting,
135–37; The Ring of the Nibelung 41–42, 45–46, 48–49, 110,
(Der Ring des Nibelungen), 163–64, 166, 168, 185; history
135–36 of, 154, 159–60, 176–77
Walden, Herwarth, 3, 27, 33–34,
59 n. 26, 125 Zahn, Leopold, 9, 17 n. 48, 65–66,
war imagery, 66–70 87 n. 3, 88 n. 8, 93, 122
Watts, Harriett, 13, 191 Zenker, Helmut, 188

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PAUL KLEE

All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation,

First published 2006

Camden House is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Aichele, Kathryn Porter, 1947–

This publication is printed on acid-free paper.

1. Paul Klee, Sketches Illustrating Structural Rhythms 24

24. Paul Klee, ORCHS, as Relative, 1940/61 84

It is with particular pleasure that I thank the poets I am privileged to

practice since the Renaissance. This tradition values an artist’s ability to

his visual compositions with increasing frequency. As early as 1912 he wrote

various written forms to the semantic spaces of drawings and paintings.

Throughout this study I reproduce entire poems or quote excerpts in

Linguistic Inquiry and was reprinted in the collection entitled Hölderlin,

A LOGICAL POINT OF DEPARTURE FOR ANALYZING Klee’s poetry would be

Poems in Textual Spaces

Wir sahen uns innig an als When we parted our glances

By his own admission Klee penned sophomoric verses such as these to

This travesty of a poetic lament is reminiscent of any number of entries in

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crossing out Morgenstern’s choice of words and substituting others, as in

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Fig. 2: Christian Morgenstern, “Fisches Nachtgesang,” 1905. Reproduced from Alle

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that hover over the point of a needle in Morgenstern’s “Scholastic

Fig. 4: Christian Morgenstern, “Bim, Bam, Bum,” Galgenlieder (1922). Digital

expressionist poetry with which he himself would experiment once he came

steht in Pein stand and pine

Here wordplay extends to numbers in a variation on the unorthodox syn-

replace one of the two pairs of hands on Morgenstern’s “Korf’s Clock”

(helft bauen) (help build)

Als verstummte Nachtigall As a silenced nightingale

Alle alle hatt ich gern All, I loved all of it

Ich bin ein Stern I am a star

Since Klee never mentioned Lasker-Schüler in any of his published writings,

weil ich ging as I walked

Der Wolf spricht, am Menschen The wolf, chewing on

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Poems in Pictorial Settings

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a distinction it shares with Lasker-Schüler’s “Flight from the World”

described in his text. Instead, he opted to evoke the sensory perception of

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Fig. 9: Paul Klee, Emilie; Widuwilie / Widuwintu Kantilie / Widumops / Katops /

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poetic practice he conscientiously observed the rhythmically modulated

Einst dem Grau der Nacht enttaucht

[Once emerged from the gray of night

According to literary practice, the handwritten text would be considered

Because Klee’s working process is revealed beneath the transparent

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variations on Blake’s illuminated texts. Perhaps he was curious about

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preference for poetic suggestion over literal graphic transcriptions. The

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the next logical, though admittedly daring, step — that of composing

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atmospheric effect of nebulous clouds. As in his earlier Inscription in Clouds

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introduction to Huelsenbeck’s edited volume Memoirs of a Dada Drummer,