ZWITSCHER-MASCHINE

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DISTEL-BILD AN ALLEGORY OF LOVE & LEARNING

Zwitscher-Maschine

Ann Stephen

Paul Klee DISTEL-BILD, 1924, 73
AN ALLEGORY OF LOVE & LEARNING

Summary

The essay proposes a new reading for Distel-bild [Thistle-painting, 1924], one of Paul Klee’s Sonderklasse (special class) of works that has long eluded interpretation. Painted at the beginning of Klee’s third year of teaching at the Bauhaus during a time of significant change, Distel-bild is no ordinary landscape or garden setting as the thistle, that is not a thistle, is a double-coded object. Adopting an allegorical mode, Klee casts the divisive debates of the early Bauhaus years in the language of a Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale. The essay argues that the painting both gently mocks and celebrates Johannes Itten’s role as a Bauhaus master and imagines how such ideas would spread. This new interpretation that aims to unlock the mystery of the painting’s organic and geometric forms, is informed by the broader reassessment of Klee as an intellectual engaged with contemporary ideas and avant-garde movements, rather than as a remote, naïve romantic. 

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Notes

  1. Distel-bild, 1924, gouache and watercolour on linen, laid down on thin card with traces of ruled ink and pencil, 21 x 40.6 cm (image) 38.1 x 54.3 cm (card), Paul Klee Stiftung, Catalogue Raisonné No. 3441, National Gallery of Victoria (NGV). The painting was exhibited in 1925 at the Paris-based Galerie Vavin-Raspail of Max Berger. See Baumgartner u. a, pp. 8–39. In 1953 the painting was purchased by the Trustees of the NGV from Reide and Lefevre Ltd, London. 
  2. See Plant 1968, p 127.
  3. See Kersten/Okuda/Kakinuma 2015. The catalogue combines a relatively small group of less than 300 works of the Sonderklasse (Special class), a ranking Klee used between the years 1925 and 1933 for his production between 1901 and 1933, in an oeuvre of nearly nine thousand works.  
  4. See Kersten/Okuda/Kakinuma/Frey 2015, p. 128. The four pre-Bauhaus thistle paintings are Distelgarten (Thistle Garden) 1918, Arkansas Arts Center, Distelblüte (Thistle Bloom) 1918, location unknown, Stillleben mit d. Distelblüte (Still Life with Thistle Bloom) 1919, location unknown, and Das Haus zur Distelblüte (The Thistle Flower House) 1919, Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main. 
  5. See Itten 1978, p. 220. Also see student work from Itten’s course, Joost Schmidt, Thistles, 1920, charcoal drawing, in Wingler 1978, pp. 281, 283.
  6. The cartoon by Bauhaus student Karl-Peter Röhl appeared in the Bauhaus edition of Mécano, No. Blue, 1922. See also Christoph Wagner u. a., Das Bauhaus und die Esoterik: Johannes Itten, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Leipzig: Kerber, 2005.
  7. See Forgács 1995, pp. 71–2.
  8. See Forgács 1995, pp. 63–64. 
  9. This convincing interpretation by Cathrin Klinsöhr-Leroy is made through close reference to Klee’s own lectures. See Klinsöhr-Leroy 2016, pp. 126–130. 
  10. See Klee 1923, p. 17.
  11. See Plant 1978, p.10.
  12. See Klee 1925, p. 33.
  13. See Weber 2009, p. 78. 
  14. See Andersen 1869. Hans Christian Anderson, »Hvad tidselen oplevede« (»What happened to the Thistle«) 1869, translated by Jean Hersolt, H.C. Anderson Centre website, (andersen.sdu.dk/vaerk/register/index_e.html) cited 20/04/2017.
  15. Dollerup concludes his study of the two-way translation between the tales of the German Grimm brothers and the Danish Hans Christian Anderson, writing: »The emergence of the literary fairy-tale genre is an early (perhaps even the earliest) situation in which translations create, influence, and promote national literary output, for the simple reason that the genre was considered primarily as literature for children, who would be unfamiliar with foreign languages.« See Dollerup 1995, pp. 101, 102. 
  16. See Bourneuf 2016, p.10.
  17. Andersen/Kubin 1922. I am grateful to Walther J. Fuchs for his many helpful suggestions including drawing my attention to the exhibition “Zwei Zwei Künstlerphantasten. Paul Klee und Alfred Kubin, Kunsthalle Mannheim, 23.11.1924-10.1.1925. 
  18. See Haxthausen 2016, pp. 159–160.
  19. Haxthausen 2016 quoting Greenberg, p. 160.

Bibliography

Andersen 1869
Hans Christian Andersen, »Hvad tidselen oplevede« (What happened to the Thistle) 1869, translated by Jean Hersolt, H.C. Anderson Centre website, (andersen.sdu.dk/vaerk/register/index_e.html), cited 20 April 2017.

Andersen/Kubin 1922
Hans Christian Andersen and Alfred Kubin, Die Nachtigall ; Die kleine Seejungfrau ; Der Reisekamerad, Berlin: Cassirer, 1922, Vol. 11.

Baumgartner u.a.
Michael Baumgartner u. a, »Paul Klee und die Surrealisten. ‚In Weimar blüht eine Pflanze, die einem Hexenzahn gleicht’. (Louis Aragon)«, in Paul Klee und die Surrealisten, Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz-Verlag, 2016.

Bourneuf 2016
Annie Bourneuf, Paul Klee The Visible and the Legible, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016.

Dollerup 1995
Cay Dollerup, »Translation as a Creative Force in literature: the birth of the European Bourgeois Fairy Tale«, The Modern Language Review, Vol. 90, No. 1, Jan. 1995, pp. 94-102..

Forgács 1995
Ēva Forgács, The Bauhaus idea and Bauhaus politics, Budapest: Central European University Press, 1995.

Haxthausen 2016
Charles W. Haxthausen, »Klee’s Parodic Genres«, Paul Klee. Irony at work, ed. Angela Lampe, Prestel: Centre Pompidou, 2016, pp. 159-165.

Itten 1978
Johannes Itten, »Analysen alter Meister«, 1921, in Johannes Itten. Werke und Schriften, ed. Rotzler, Zurich: Orell Füssli, 2. ergänzte Aufl., 1978. 

Kersten/Okuda/Kakinuma/Frey 2015
Wolfgang Kersten, Osamu Okuda and Marie Kakinuma, Stefan Frey (Mitwirkende), Paul Klee: Sonderklasse. Unverkäuflich (Special class Unsaleable), ed. Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig, 2015.

Klee 1923
Paul Klee, »Wege des Naturstudiums« (Ways of Nature Study), Staatlisches Bauhaus Weimar, 1919–1923, Munich 1923, reprinted in Paul Klee Creative Confession and other writings, London: Tate Publishing, 2013, pp. 15-17.

Klee 1925
Paul Klee, »Pädagogisches Skizzenbuch« (Pedagogical Sketchbook), Bauhausbücher 2, Munich 1925, reprinted London, Faber and Faber Limited, 1968.

Klinsöhr-Leroy 2016

Cathrin Klinsöhr-Leroy, »In Equilibrium. Paul Klee at the Bauhaus«, Paul Klee. Irony at work, ed. Angela Lampe, Centre Pompidou, Prestel, 2016, pp. 126-130. 

Plant 1968
Margaret Plant, »The Modern European Collection«, in National Gallery of Victoria: Painting Drawing Sculpture, ed. Ursula Hoff, F.W. Melbourne: Cheshire Publishing Pty Ltd, 1968.

Plant 1978
Margaret Plant, Paul Klee Figures and Faces, London: Thames & Hudson, 1978.

Weber 2009
Klaus Weber, »Lothar Schreyer, Death House for a woman, c. 1920«, Bauhaus 1919–1933: Workshops for Modernity, eds Barry Bergdoll, Leah Dickerman, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2009.

Wingler 1978
Hans Wingler, The Bauhaus. Weimar Dessau Berlin Chicago, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: The MIT Press, 1978.