Illustration by EUGENE CUBILLO

If there be a dominion of archangels, then the Swiss German painter Paul Klee is an archangel-artist.

Klee was born under a lucky star; he was anarch, angel, evangel; commissioned by his star to innovate art by making pure art poetic, lyrical, musical; by revolutionizing through drawing and the right creatively-used of the wheel of colors to draw out the essence and being in man in their pristine existence as it was in the beginning of time when man was in pure bliss in his first creation. Harmony and balance were imbued in him for his art was “profoundly influenced by structures and themes drawn from nature, music and poetry.”

Klee lived 60 years, yet he packed into them 10,000 paintings, drawings, etchings, indubitably works of art, outstanding, astonishing, of unusual beauty, his powers of creations tremendous. His scintillating wit, eminent in his works made him create with staggering powers, being without self-consciousness a superior artist himself. For himself he evolved a creative ethics by which he swore artistic allegiance. “First of all, the art of living, then as ideal profession, poetry and philosophy, and as my real profession, the plastic arts, in the last resort, for lack of income, illustrations.”

He emphasized the betoken importance of drawing. He himself spared nothing; he drew voluminously (the line is important in drawing), evidenced by his profound remark: “A line is a dot that went for a walk; or drawing is taking a line for a walk.” His drawings drew the remark from the German poet Rilke:“They are transcriptions of music.”

Klee was reared in a musical family, his father a musician, his mother an opera actress. His parents so desired him to become a musician that at age seven he was playing the violin.Definitely his musical background with his strong susceptibility to poetry and philosophy firmed up his foundations explorations.

Neither monkish nor loner, he spent time in pubs and carried on with lower-class women, bar girls and artists’ models (he was a natty dresser and sported a Don Juanish mustache). In short, he was a regular Lothario.

Yet still his personal artistic vision gripped, possessed him endlessly, exercised his spiritual bent to the utmost, confiding to his intimate the Russian painter Kandinski, he would weep if he does not paint. His life throughout was bedeviled by an uncontrollable superior power, felt and did not conceal from his intimates that his works were dictated from Above, infusing a deep spiritual sensibility into his creations precisely.

Drawing was his great master and forte, the right sensitive use of colors, his insatiable mistress. The use of the line can dazzle, with its kaleidoscopic rhythms, so that a highly evolved drawing done well is already visually a painting. These, drawing and the shifting use of colors he shared their secrets with his students at the Bauhaus.

Klee was obsessed with the spirits of Africa (he derived his sensuous rhythms from her) and the Mediterranean (deriving from it its sensual heat). But the subtle thrusts of the Orient were strongest because of his poetic sensibility. All this proves how relevant the old saw is: The child is father of the man . Without his highly artistic background all this could not have been. Do we forget he was blessed from On High at his birth?

He was no sucker for movements. He transcended Impressionism, Expressionism, Surrealism. He was unique on his own. Like true poetry, form was art to him. He detected this in nature, in man’s handiwork, in Persian rugs whose designs constantly involved the untold power of the spiritual that made his poetic spirit soar in his acts of creations. So much so that his art “burned with a hard gem-like fire.”

Klee was a heretic like a true believer. For one, he painted angels as hermaphrodites. The spiritual exists, can be manifested joyfully or orgasmically through “the derangement of all the senses.” He apotheosized the spiritual, the primitive impulse gloriously pristine which is man’s before and after The Fall. He forged the spiritual with the lyrical , married them with balance and harmony, indicating that the powers do not end like the song but continues forever.

So man must know deathless song, bliss is what makes us god-like and godly; in our world these forces have gone out of existence, so preoccupied we are with the material. Before pure art turned abstract art, Klee was already indulging in it with bliss at its heart. Still political dimensions aare interwoven but very subtly indicated and cutting in their allusions.

Critics agree…Klee explored radical ideas and styles; black or white grotesques and satires; his aim though distant was noble; the long struggle that lies in store for us in the field of color, its cool romanticism; frequently alludes to poetry, music, drama; his lifelong concern with the possibilities of parody and wit; married art forms of music and visual art…

Well — if our Villa transformed and transfigured Pointillism into Poetry, then Klee made Poetry the reality, being and essence of Visual Art!