Collections & Critiques

The Germanic Museum, that rather grim looking building which periodically comes forth with some of the best art exhibits around town, is once more to be congratulated upon the quality and interest embodied in one of its presentations. Its current exhibit of Paul Klee's paintings deserves the special attention of anyone interested in the problems characteristic of contemporary Continental art. Klee is considered by many to be the ablest exponent of recent German painting.

There is a certain difficulty involved in adjusting one's self to Klee's style in order to make his work resemble anything like a communicative medium. It cannot be denied that to understand him as a painter requires much concentration and intellectual exercise, for a few traditional cobwebs must first be cleared from our minds, and a sympathetic desire to go hand in hand with the artist on his own ground must be substituted. Klee is not a literal painter. His colors themselves are intended to contain a certain emotional content, and the total effect of each of his paintings depends primarily on the manner in which the colors he uses are combined and applied. What da Vinci, by using a real woman's face, expresses in his "Mona Lisa," Klee would express by varying the hues, intensities, and values of certain color combinations. Thus, it is easy to see how the transition from a literal form of expression to an abstract one might involve a brief process of receptive adjustment on the part of the spectator.

We finally come to what looms large as an all-important question, one which most people ask themselves when confronted by a work of abstract art: "What is the artist trying to say?". This is a much less important question than the number of times that it has been asked might indicate. But it must be dealt with. First of all, what is any artist trying to say? Is the content of any good painting so entirely divorced from the form in which it is expressed that it can be separated from the form and set up as the idea or intention in the mind of the artist? I think not. But for the purpose of discussion, we must divorce the content from the painting itself. Now it is difficult, almost impossible, for a literal artist, one who does not paint in what we consider abstract terms, to convey a feeling or idea about an impersonal universal in a successful manner. For example, even so great an artist as El Greco could not, if he worked within his own limits, express the idea, "geometry is beautiful," without detracting from the central idea by using in his work people and extraneous matter, for he is a literal painter, and an idea such as the one suggested cannot be fully expressed in a literal manner. It requires what Plato would call a closer approach to the essence of a thing, in short, abstraction. So we see that the abstract method is primarily an intellectual way of painting, designed to express certain aspects of life and the world which can be only laboriously touched upon if the older, more accepted manner of painting is employed.