Paul Klee – his life’s work has been described as the “chamber music of modern art,” and his name is spoken with something akin to reverence by art lovers all over the world. Learning about such a famous personality is like trying to piece together a jigsaw puzzle: you feel like you’re getting nowhere until, suddenly, something clicks and the central image appears. In the case of Klee, one such image is the artist’s love for animals, in particular for cats, evident behind each expressive brush stroke.
Klee’s love for cats started at a young age, since cats were a part of the family when he was growing up. Years later, Klee shared his studio with his feline friend, Bimbo, a beautiful white long-haired cat who followed him everywhere. In her memoir “Kandinsky and I,” Nina Kandinsky remembers Klee’s love for animals, and in particular for cats. “Paul Klee adores cats,” she recollects. “In Dessau, his cat always looked out the window in the studio. I could see him perfectly from my private room. Klee told me the cat looked at me insistently: You can’t have any secrets. My cat will tell me all.” The cat on the windowsill was, of course, Bimbo, who also appears in Marina Alberghini’s book, expressively titled “Il gatto cosmico di Paul Klee.”
Klee was born near Bern in December 1879. He studied music before turning to painting, and attended the Munich Academy in 1900. He was part of the Blaue Reiter group from 1911 onward, and in 1920 joined the Bauhaus school at the invitation of Walter Gropius. He was an energetic artist who often worked on several paintings at once. A student once said: “It’s as if he mass-produced the paintings. He paints ten or twenty at the same time.” As an artist, Klee continuously entered different worlds, and he needed to be able to paint them all at the same time.
With the inspiration of Bimbo in his studio, it is not surprising that cats often made their way into Klee’s paintings. In fact, he produced as many as 28 works referring to cats, including paintings, drawings and nature studies, using his own animals as inspiration. Among these works are “Cat waking up in the morning,” “Thinking Cat,” “Cat and Bird” and the well-known color study from 1938, “Bimbo,” which is in the Paul Klee Center today.
Other animals, including dogs, fish, birds and even camels also feature prominently in the artist’s paintings from the different periods. His animal paintings are full of allusions to dreams, nature, and music. They carry evocative titles, which make the works all the more powerful and meaningful. “Twittering Machine,” from 1922, is a half-surreal work where birds sing out exclamation points. “Howling Dog,” from 1928, shows the whimsical image of a dog howling at the moon in a fantastic exploration of the mysteries of nature. In “Animal Catching a Scent,” from 1930, a sleek, stream-lined animal stands out bravely against a grey minimalist background.
The paintings, and there are thousands of them, stand out as much for their vibrant color and expressive nature as for the mystery hidden behind each brush stroke. Details were important to Klee: he worked on many different mediums and explored countless combinations of lines, circles and arrows in his paintings. Color was always one of the main defining agents in his work, and he is considered one of the greatest colorists ever. After his visit to Tunisia with Macke and Louis Moilliet in 1914, he wrote: “Color has taken possession of me; no longer do I have to chase after it, I know that it has hold of me forever.”
One of Klee’s most thought-provoking paintings, “The Mountain of the Sacred Cat” (1923), depicts an animal very much like Bimbo. In this fascinating work, a pale cat emerges from the red and brown earthy background. It is not a very large painting, only about 19 by 13 inches, but it is incredibly powerful. The painting evokes a very particular mood, intensified by Klee’s attention to detail and shape. In this way, for example, the cat’s ears are roughly the same size and shape as the roof of the small house in the background. The animal’s expression is mysterious and very human, in a brilliant exploration of irony and parody. Looking at it I can feel the power that made the Nazi regime term Klee’s work “degenerate.” They saw something that scared them and reacted by closing the Bauhaus school in 1933, at which point the artist emigrated to Switzerland. But even though Klee himself died of scleroderma in 1940, it is enough to look at this cat’s triangular wink to know that his creative genius lives on.
– Paz Nachon
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