Paul Klee Notebooks, Vol. 2: The Nature of Nature ed. by Jürg Spiller (review)

Books 345 Malevich was interested in? Or is this essay a subtle Swiftian satire, a modern version of Dostoyevsky's 'Story of the Great Inquisitor'? The Soviet boycott of 'formalism' in fine art is still in force, but not in the 'decorative' arts. One can find subtle and sophisticated attacks on 'formalism', based on separation ofform and content, in recent texts by Marxist critics offine art in the U.S.A. I find the views of Malevich, a voice from more than 50 years ago, as important and timely today as then. They should help to preserve a balanced critical opinion and be useful and interesting to serious artists. Paul Klee Notebooks, Vol. 2: The Nature of Nature. Jiirg Spiller, ed. Trans. by Heinz Norden. Lund Humphries, London, 1973. 454 pp., illus. £12.00. Reviewed by Frederick S. Levine* Paul Klee must certainly rank among the most cryptic and elusive artists ofthe 20th century. His work is permeated with an aura of mystery, a magical quality that stems frbm the depths of the artist's imagination and that ultimately impels viewers into a confrontation with unconscious processes that are difficult to enunciate in rationalized terms. 'Creative power', he said, 'is ineffable. It remains ultimately mysterious. And every mystery affects us deeply.' This book represents one of the artist's major undertakings, that of exploring and probing the origins of the artistic creative process as analogous to the creative principles that exist in the natural world. For Klee, an artist was the god of pictorial creation, one who could rival the God ofGenesis in the process of bringing forth order from chaos, understanding from meaninglessness, sense from nonsense. 'We are ourselves charged with this power', he said, 'down to our subtlest parts. We may not be able to utter its essence, but we can move towards its source, insofar as at all possible.' Such is the point of departure for the present volume, which comprises essentially the notes and illustrations for Klee's General System of Pictorial Media Combined with Nature Study, on which the artist lectured at the Bauhaus during the winter of 1923-24. The text is copiously illustrated with more than 600 examples ofthe artist's works and there is a most noble (and generally successful) attempt on the part of the editor, Jiirg Spiller, to match the illustrations with relevant portions of the artist's words. Bernard Karpel's bibliography ofover 600 entries referring to Klee, his career and work is masterful. Ironically, the one failure ofthis visually impressive volume lies in the confusing and often indecipherable writings of the artist himself. The limitations inherent in presenting any instructor's lecture notes are enormous, for the notes are often no more than shorthand comments or key terms that eventually will be broadened into meaning in the course of the lectures themselves. Here, the notes are presented as notes and one is left with statements that seem at best baffling, at worst mystifying. (Just one example: 'Another solution to the problem: the structural and individual elements might also be located by a process in which the individual experiences a structural articulation in his own body.... Vitally represented, say, by the weights of univalent to quadrivalent tonalities, with greater contrast at the centre and less disparity elsewhere.') Perhaps most revealing and informative of all this presentation is the underlying indication of Klee's recognition that he could not attain what he had sought at the beginning, for a rational codification of the natural origins of creativity was simply not possible. Towards the end of his search he wrote: 'Please draw no wrong conclusions from the symmetrical arrangement ofthese schemes-as though one could not manage very well without them. The reverse would be better-such strict symmetry should be avoided, precisely because it is rigid in character. In general, these examples have only specific meaning, serving to clarify insight by way of orderly orientation. They touch upon and open up many elements of the creative armamentarium but that does not mean that they breathe that deeper life that stems only from inner inspiration.' *Dept. of Art History, College of Arts and Sciences, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL 60201, U.S...