CHARLES W. HAXTHAUSEN

Easily the most unconventional monograph on a living artist to be published in Germany during the interwar period, Wilhelm Hausenstein’s Klee monograph, Kairuan (1921), is paradoxically at once an encomium to Klee and a bleak jeremiad of cultural despair about modern art. Critic and artist operated from vastly different and incompatible presuppositions – and aspirations – about the possibilities for art in modernity, and the tension between the two epitomized the gap between Klee’s attitudes and practice and the utopian hopes of the avant-garde in Germany. Ultimately Hausenstein’s Klee monograph is a tale of its author more than of the painter, a product of the critic’s struggle to theorize his strongly positive aesthetic response to an art that was antithetical to his hopes and most deeply held values. It is Hausenstein who is the focus of this essay; this is a tale about him, about his evolving response to Klee’s art and the conflict it generated within himself.