Klee is a master of color. Like many (many?) before him, he knows what color is. Even before 1938, he could well have made the same remarks to an observer that Vincent once wrote to Theo:
“But tell me, black and white, may they be used or may they not, are they forbidden fruit? Rembrandt and Hals, didn’t they use black? and Velásquez???” (Vincent puts three question marks). “Les vrais peintres sont ceux qui ne font pas la couleur locale—that was what Blanc and Delacroix discussed once. Always and intelligently to make use of the beautiful tones which the colors form of their own accord, when one breaks them on the palette, I repeat—to start from one’s palette, from one’s knowledge of color-harmony, is quite different from following nature mechanically and obsequiously. Much, everything depends on my perception of the infinite variety of tones of one and the same family.”
But here, in Klee’s case, the point of departure is primary—not a canvas, but a page of newsprint that itself becomes a color. But forget color for now. Choose a page from the newspaper and look at it not to read it, but to use it for some simple, everyday purpose. Do you choose a page at random, or after a moment’s thought? It’s an easy situation to imagine. Take the most common example: a housewife. Take a common place: Danzig. Take a common woman: Johanna Trosiener. (Klee’s catlike eyes widened a little.) Mid-morning, Johanna Trosiener looks up at the grandfather clock in the kitchen (or an hourglass, if you prefer), and says to herself—or rather, to the little one growing in her belly, she’ll name him Arthur—she says to him out loud (or in her head): today it’s going to rain, so I’m going to make potatoes. She grabs the basket of potatoes with the dirt still on them and then Johanna (by now, she’s no longer Johanna Trosiener, it’s no longer 1788, we’ve been deep in the twentieth century for a while now, the century of great innovations) goes to get the potato peeler and a newspaper to collect the peels. She opens the paper to get a page to lay out on the table. Her choice won’t be totally indiscriminate, casual, even if its agent isn’t yet Arthur’s mother, even if she’s far from believing in the equation il pleure dans mon coeur COMME il pleut sur la ville: can WILLING make it rain, make Jove thunder, God dawn, objects be imbued with pain? So no one is to blame, so unhappiness is immanent to life? So “Bagnacaval does well to have no sons.” No, it won’t be an unexamined choice. A twentieth-century Johanna Trosiener, 99.9% of the Johanna Trosieners in the world, won’t choose the obituary page. It’s instinctively inappropriate to take the death announcements, the ink still “fresh” with the names of people who, in the early stages of decay, haven’t even been nipped by the first worm yet, then crumple that potato-peel-covered page into a ball to toss in the trash. It’s LIKE tossing yesterday’s deaths in the trash. If, instead of the humble potato, dear to the humble Van Gogh . . . if Johanna Trosiener had WANTED to clean the floor, and now WANTS to put the newspaper on the floor, she’ll be doubly mindful. You can’t walk properly, or with impunity, on the obituary page, on graves, on the buried—on the dead.
Johanna Trosiener puts back the obituary page and pulls out another section. For her, any other page would be fine, one with bad (or good, depending on your point of view) news from Vienna—she has nothing to do, technically speaking, with politics. It takes her just a few minutes to read the local news—skimming the headlines is sufficient, on April 19 there’s really nothing new, and like every other Monday, it’s almost all sports. A Johanna Trosiener from Lugano sees out of the corner of her eye that at the Splendido (formerly Splendide, until the name had to be Italianized to protect the “italianità” of the Ticino) they show movies “100% deutsch gesprochen,” and what else? A twenty-four-hour pharmacy? Wille wants us to all be in good health, long live Wille!
Yet not all, but many of the Johannas who live in the civilized places of the world, in Switzerland for example, have to take into account their husbands who, when they come home for lunch, before sitting at the table, grab the paper and flip through it, a bit anxiously, going straight to the sports page as always—he’s a sporting husband, who Sunday after Sunday gets ready to give his support, his ration of cheers and whistles, to his favorite team. And there are other factors that a knowing housewife must take into account. There’s the daughter who keeps up with fashion, the boy who does the crossword and rebus, and then the oldest, on the hunt for a job because the one he has is repulsive (that’s how it is, it’s not his fault—in the century after Arthur’s, the century of Taylorism, work is often repulsive, or as he actually says, is shit!), is also looking for a room to rent because, as he says, he’s sick of living in a zoo. Et ceteri et cetera. Life is made up of many things, the newspaper responds to all of them, it’s the encyclopedia of the quotidian, and Hegel says—rightly so (even if Arthur Schopenhauer thinks Hegel is half charlatan)—that reading the newspaper is the modern form of prayer.
Did Klee have anything particular in mind when he chose the sports page of the National Zeitung? Or was it all the same to him? And the fact that it’s page 13? It’s highly unlikely that Klee would have let himself be persuaded by esoteric beliefs related to the number thirteen. But then, did Klee avoid page 5 intentionally? Five, in fact, weds the divisible number two with the indivisible number three. And in the masonic kabbalah, the number five indicates the female sphere: two is woman and three, the perfect number, is man. Five, a combination of the first even number and the first odd whole number, would therefore be the female element of the pair, the fertilized female, the number of Venus as the goddess of fertile union, of generative love, the archetype of creation. It took guts to think of creating a work of art on a day like April 19, 1938. A double five is nature’s abacus: the fingers on both hands. In Roman numerals, X, which forms St. Andrew’s cross, the two slopes of an hourglass, spokes on the wheel of time. Two fives (V: hands, funnels, tabernacles) meet at the vertex (X) and form a chalice, like in the poetry of the English Mannerists, great jugglers of the word, like Dylan Thomas: they form the Holy Grail. Its defining points make up the ideal design for planting. The archetypical nature of 10 manifests itself from decimals to decimations. Thus spake Zolla. Was Klee thinking of the decimations of the Jews, their imminent and radical elimination? And 13? Did Klee know that for a Baroque poet like Tasso the central pillar of a twenty-canto poem wasn’t 10 but 13? It’s impossible to say whether Klee was thinking about archetypes at the time. One can only make random guesses, which someone like Snoozy over here at the bar calls, without hesitation, idle, nugae, in Latin, before surrendering to the sleep that, like lead, presses down on his forehead and lowers his eyelids. Did Paul Klee follow sports? Was Paul Klee a reader of national and international sports news? You’d have to ask someone who knew him, his son for example. Otherwise, do as the historian does when he finds himself faced with something he doesn’t know: say you don’t know.
But this matter is inconsequential. Of great interest, on the other hand, is trying to give (give?) meaning to the signs, the hieroglyphics (from what depths they emerge) that Klee painted on that page of the National Zeitung.
– Mr. Klee! Can one speak of hieroglyphics without falling into heresy?
– Without falling into heresy! Klee replied, closing his eyes enigmatically, with the good-naturedness of a cat happy to show the good side of his feline soul.
One of the group, who worked at the Wind Factory (i.e., taught school), Mr. Window, the only one in the group wearing a tie, was instead preoccupied with the preoccupation of the formalists, for whom trying to confer significance on what resists significance is arbitrary. Like trying to break down a door when there’s nothing to break down. The door is open.
But Klee calmed everybody down. The word “hieroglyphic” is a thrice-blessed word. It is in se and per se so infused with the sacred, with memory, with religion—we could rest easy.
Klee glanced over at Snoozy, laughing at the paradox. But the problem (as happens with all problems, to the delight of those who love to drink in company, gathered around
the table at the osteria) remained unresolved.
– Take—it was Scribe O/17360’s turn to speak—what appears to be the simplest sign to read in Klee’s painting: Klee’s O is the letter O, thirteenth in the Italian alphabet—another 13! Or is it a zero—or, more precisely, if you prefer, the mathematician Georg Cantor’s aleph-0?
Could Klee’s great O be a retort, a challenge? To Mondrian? Who knows! Curved lines, as says Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli—Arthur’s Wille sent him a nice Easter egg for Easter: he was summoned to be Hitler’s guide at the Uffizi when Hitler made his glorious iter per Italiam in the spring of ’38, a few days after the April 18 Swiss Cup at the Wankdorf in Bern—anyway, curved lines, says Ranuccio, are charged with a unique sensitivity—easily calligraphic, and sensuous too. Snoozy cracked open his left eye. Whoever follows them is lost. A Dutch abstract painter fled Siena once he noticed that he kept seeing Duccio’s angels on the street—alive, dressed as little girls. He was overwhelmed by their ovals.
Mondrian, inspired by Spinoza, completely focused on his own Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata from ’31–32 on, achieved the perfect intersection of straight lines. Order and purity, centuries-old Flanders linen. Mondrian the Platonist, the chaste, the ascetic. The most Calvinist of the abstract artists. If he’d been a philosopher and not a painter he would have been capable of taking after Origen, blinding himself so as not to be distracted from his contemplations by women. By their ovals.
Lust for curves. And was Klee lost over them?
Klee laughed heartily, and in honor of the Mediterranean in general, of Siena and the Sienese Hills in Switzerland, threw back a good half-glass of Merlot, from Mendrisio. But Klee’s O, what was it?
At first glance, yes, it’s an O, a circle, but not a perfect one, no, no no no no, it’s not Giotto’s O—it wasn’t made with a compass. Is it an O like a beat-up old ring, a jilted lover who took it out on a promise ring from the fair? A frame that got warped in the wasteland of refuse?
Interpreting an O is like interpreting a note on a trumpet, a solitary note that breaks through a pastoral solitude, in a trumpet concerto or Christmas oratorio, spurted out by a tuba mirum spargens sonum per deserta regionum, by a Stravinsky; and a furious hand turns off the radio, and there it lingers, in the dark, that single note, all night long.
In that most German night the blare of a horn made all the children, women, and elderly within range start in their beds. All the men were in barracks. They were expected on the field, as says the Mondrianesque Ariosto:
in groups of ten, twenty, four, seven, eight.
No one—save perhaps, by secret coordinates, Mondrian—protested the indecency of that honking sound coming from that black Mercedes. And anyway, the car had already taken off with a copious screeching of tire treads on the asphalt’s grainy surface—until we meet again.
The degenerate painter Paul Klee, somewhere else on the famous page 13 of the National Zeitung, not far from the place he’d flung his fulminous O, had placed, as you can see, a timid H; maybe it was a rack, the kind you’d see in a gym, to which gym teachers, the kind who sleep with a whistle in their mouths, not exactly the favorites of the backwoods mountain kids who’ve moved to the big city, send the new guy fresh from the valley, already a bit hunched, awkward, dopey, like a hobo, a hick, with a peasant’s limping gait; and they stick him up there on the rack to straighten out the damned spine on this Mediterranean peasant heedless of the Hellenism that should still be alive in him yet instead has been extinguished—by God, you’ll learn to stand at attention like a real soldier and look people in the eye with a steely gaze. Like the guys in the Wehrmacht.
Then—after the Mercedes passed by with its blaring horn that not even a Stravinsky would have been able to imitate with the Stravinskian intention of splitting the well-trained ears of gentlemen in tails, monsignors in purple, lovely ladies with rape-tempting décolletage in the blindingly bright concert hall—came a long silence in the long Germanic night. It was, that silence, deep in the heart of the night, the night of the heart without time, the intempesta nox: is it one in the morning? Two? Is it three, four, she wonders, tossing and turning, though she wouldn’t switch on the lights for a million marks, a twentieth-century Arthur Schopenhauer’s mother adrift in the Teutonic night without a lifeboat, without an Arthur, without help. And with her, all the plump, clumsy mothers of poor Little Tramps everywhere. Prison? Interrogation? Where? Where? God, God, lama sabachthani. Thinking, with boundless nostalgia, of the roar surging from the stadium, through the radio, when someone scored a goal.
Those were the days of peace, and a husband could, as the women would say (religiously), stick his head in the radio and follow the game, minute by minute.
– I don’t know what they see in that thing, she would say afterward to a neighbor one Monday as they hung the laundry out to dry (oh, the linens of peacetime)—but my husband likes it too, it must be something.
These are the trifles that come to mind in times of war. Yet that was how men spent their Sunday afternoons during peacetime. Lying awake in bed, a twentieth-century Johanna Trosiener could pray to the wooden angel she’d bought before they came to disturb the peace in Düsseldorf—ask him to send more games, many more, every Sunday, with the stadium emptying out little by little, the streetcar ringing its bell at turns and intersections, bringing the men home from the match just in time for dinner. Yes, war is absence, loss of imagination.
Or was Klee’s O the circumscription of a privileged space? The creation of a theatrical space—the theater!—of oblivion, yet also of openness for the viewer? But do visitors at the Zentrum Klee in Bern see it?
Snoozy wasn’t the only one snoozing. Then a proclamatory voice in the desert insistently proclaimed: it is the space of a Greek or Renaissance temple. What kind of show do you want? One that incites the will to power? The pursuit of happiness? A sense of fatality? Of possibility? Or is it the temple that remains to be discovered, a place to be delivered to God so that He will return to dwell there? A dream?
Klee’s O occupies a significant space. The black ink spares the Grasshoppers’ lineup: Huber, Minelli, Weiler; Springer, Vernati, Rauch; Bickel, Rupf, Artimovics, Xam Abegglen, Chrismer.
The barkeep, as he was drying the glasses, went back to his question:
– Is it true that the Grasshoppers are completely financed by the Jews?
Whereas Klee’s O had mutilated Servette, obliterating half of them, Servette who in fact would succumb inexorably in the rematch of the final—necessarily, one would say, fatefully, for lack of Wille. Was Klee thus the mere executor of a message that had come down to him from celestial space, from Iris descended through Bern’s gray skies? Klee had traced the demolition, the cancer, that was to consume half of Geneva’s lineup. The names erased belonged to the goalkeeper, the right fullback, half of the traditional center half and the left-wing halfback. Of the forwards, only the right wing’s name was effaced. The survivors were the center forward, Belli (a Frenchman who, as such, was able in time to enjoy several months of hospitality in Germany’s Stalag IV-F, as prisoner number 36293) and the left pair, Trello Abegglen and Georges Aeby.
Klee’s most curious mutilation befell the inside right, Genia Walaschek. His name was erased above the waist, the line that demarcates the high and low energy fields, while Klee’s fulminous gesture—Klee, the crimson Creator who flits here and there, squat like a sparrowhawk just alighted from its perch—spared the last part of the name: schek, the part that most recalls Masaryk and Beneš’s poor Czechoslovakia—a foretaste of its fate, now that Austria’s all in tatters.
Walaschek’s name, split in half. You can see all of him from the waist down. With his eagle-soul flown away. The inside right’s number 8 split in half and reduced to a 0.
– So Mr. Klee’s O could be anything! the barkeep remarked abruptly from behind the bar. It could be one of those Japanese torture d
evices, from that Japan which, ominously, was sidling up to the Nazifascists of Europe. In the spring of 1938, a certain boy from the mountains, born on October 30, 1928, knew little or nothing—actually, nothing—of what went on in the world. There wasn’t a book in the house, his only education outside of school came from his parents’ osteria, from the regulars. Some brought in news, snippets of facts and commentaries; others contributed their own two cents before downing their glasses and going off on their way. One day, the carpenter was talking about different systems of punishment. Not all of them, he said: – Goodness no! He only knew some. Addressing the boy directly—because he was the only one who’d listen, because everybody else said that one drink was all it took, from one day to the next, to bring back his problem, that is, his being constantly and melancholically drunk—he said that one type of punishment was the Chinese method.
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