Paul Klee’s Artistic Genius Offsets an Exhibition Rebranding Him as Political Firebrand

Social justice warriors who have been losing sleep fretting over the gender identity of the modernist painter Paul Klee (1879-1940) can look forward to a hard-earned rest. According to an august Upper East Side institution, the Jewish Museum, the whimsical Swiss fabulist was non-binary or, at least, considered the category “appropriate” when setting down his compendiums of elemental blips and glyphs. Most forward thinking of the man, you have to admit.Allow a critic his modicum of snark, and then know that the fleeting usage of contemporary jargon shouldn’t dissuade New Yorkers from visiting what is, in the end, an elegantly appointed exhibition featuring some fetching works of art. “Paul Klee: Other Possible Worlds” is a reminder of the artist’s imaginative genius and formal invention, of informed caprice bolstered by pictorial rigor. The museum’s Senior Curator Emeritus, Mason Klein, has organized the show in conjunction with the Zentrum Paul Klee and the Kunstmuseum Bern.“Other Possible Worlds”, which has just opened at the Jewish Museum, is bound to be a hit. Who doesn’t like Paul Klee? The Mexican muralist Diego Rivera described him as “one of the greatest child/poets in the world.” A New York Herald art critic, Henry McBride, went for an extraterrestrial metaphor, dubbing Klee “a strange meteor.” Dadaist kingpin, Marcel Duchamp, was taken with how Klee’s “extreme productivity never shows evidence of repetition.” The graffiti artist Keith Haring thought enough of Klee’s pictograms to appropriate them wholesale. Steal from the best, right?Not everyone was entranced by the artist’s childlike vision. “That great fellow Klee . . . ,” wrote an observer in a Nazi organ, Die Rote Erde, “tells everyone he’s a thoroughbred Arab, but he’s a typical Galician Jew.” Klee was neither of the above, but that didn’t stop the Gestapo from raiding his Dusseldorf home or Klee’s subsequent sacking from the local branch of the Bauhaus. The Nazis condemned his art as degenerate, part of a wave of artists who “insult German feeling, or destroy or confuse natural form or simply reveal an absence of adequate manual and artistic skill.”This is where Mr. Klein, not unreasonably, picks up the ball. “Other Possible Worlds” concentrates on the last decade of Klee’s life, a time beset by tumultuous political circumstances and arduous personal travails. Having moved to Germany in 1906 and become a part of the Munich avant-garde, Klee returned to his native Switzerland in 1933 musing that the wiles of the Nazi revolution “will soon reveal itself to anyone curious to the degree it affects him personally. I no longer believe that there was anything that could have been done about it all.”‘Around the Fish,’ by Paul Klee, 1926. Courtesy of the Jewish MuseumThe problem with “Other Possible Worlds” is that it attempts to strong-arm a beguiling miniaturist into a chronicler of history, a commentator on the “ever-relevant exploration of the tension between what is and what could be.” Such an exploration is inherent to any form of creativity, but that doesn’t transform Klee into a kinder Otto Dix or a less aggrieved John Heartfield. To even suggest as much puts a straitjacket on his abiding universalism. The wall labels try to convince us that one image is “clearly intended to rebut the unabashed racism of Nazi eugenics” and that another “audaciously challenges a cultlike society that celebrated pseudoscience and supposed Aryan racial superiority.” But is the political proof in the artistic pudding?Klee absolutely put his hand to satire early in his career and Drinking Companion (Stammtischler) (1931), bears a resemblance to the Führer. But stray notations and blind alleys do not a tendency make. In a catalogue essay, art historian Pamela Kort rightly notes that “Klee neither explicitly drew nor illustrated the National Socialist revolution.” But then she insists, using pretzel-like logic, that “the artist gave the National Socialist revolution a new face by parodying what characterized it: above all, demagogy, antisemitism, violence, and militarism.”We all bring our own baggage along when looking at art. But art isn’t a sponge or a mirror, it’s a sounding board imbued with its own stubborn integrity. The basis for the show at The Jewish Museum is well-intentioned but loosey-goosey, a fiction prompted by curatorial overreach that attempts to render an apolitical artist an ideological firebrand whose notions — fancy that — correspond to theoretical trends of our day. Artists are products of their times. The works of art they create — that is, if they’re any good — transcend those circumstances. Paul Klee will survive the slight that is “Other Possible Worlds” and so will museum-goers who hold the exhibition’s thesis at arm’s length. The vanity of theoretical fashion should not prevent anyone from relishing the art of this, the most approachable of modernists.

Paul Klee’s Artistic Genius Offsets an Exhibition Rebranding Him as Political Firebrand

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