February Art: play
It’s been a while since February Art played with colour: who better to join the game than Paul Klee, with his fantastically-titled ‘Battle Scene from the Comic-fantastic Opera “The Seafarer”’ (1923). During the Italian Renaissance there was a supposed dividing line between Giorgione and Titian and the Venetian colourists, and Florentine masters of line like Leonardo and Michelangelo: the art of painting vs the art of drawing. It was never entirely true even then, but with Klee you certainly get both, and more. As a teacher at the Bauhaus, Klee was a colour theorist who started from the first principles of line, shape, and dimension; as an artist he at different times talked about taking a line for a walk and improvising freely on a keyboard of colours.
The musical flavour of this is elaborated as one of his wonderfully irregular gradated tonal grids becomes the sea-scene for some quixotic sea-knight, who might over-balance prodding these toothy monsters were it not for the lovely red transparency of his impossible spear. Here, maybe, colour is musical and the line is literary, but this messing with the picture plane flattens them into one joyous synaesthesia, in an affectionate take on grand Wagnerian opera or solemn symboliste poem. There’s no such opera, but who says there couldn’t have been? (And Ezra Pound banging timpani in the recording of his Anglo-Saxon ‘The Seafarer’ translation is just as wonderfully quixotic). Klee is always fun, but his games quite seriously prefigure the most meditative twentieth-century abstractions (Miró, Rothko) or the postmodern shadow-play of Jorge Luis Borges.
thebicyclops 