.jpg?w=1)
拍品专文
In 1901, at the age of 21, Klee noted in his diary, "…thoughts about the art of portraiture. Some will not recognize the truthfulness of my mirror. Let them remember that I am not here to reflect the surface (this can be done by the photographic plate), but must penetrate inside. My mirror probes down to the heart. I write words on the forehead and around the corners of the mouth. My human faces are truer than the real ones" (The Diaries of Paul Klee, 1898-1918, Berkeley, 1964, pp. 47-48). Painted almost thirty years later, Alter Krieger realizes this youthful ambition. Although Klee never became a portrait painter in the traditional sense of representing a real person, he was interested in pictorially realizing a role. In his discussion of Klee's figure paintings of the 1920s, Will Grohmann observes, "when the drama depends on a single figure the structure is more concentrated; that is, where Klee reduces the drama to a single character he simplifies the picture to an enigmatic minimum" (Paul Klee, London, 1969, p. 199).
Here, an old warrior becomes a grotesque, almost spectral apparition. Klee seems to revel in the sinister quality of the portrayed, as with so many of the soldiers the artist drew and painted following his active duty during World War I (fig. 1).
By 1929, when he executed Alter Krieger, Klee had arrived at the peak of his career. He enjoyed international status as a master of contemporary art and was a renowned representative of the Bauhaus, where he had taught since 1920, first at Weimar and then at Dessau. On the occasion of Klee's fiftieth birthday in December 1929, the Berlin gallerist Alfred Flechtheim gave him a large retrospective, which then traveled to The Museum of Modern Art in New York; the Cahiers d'Art in Paris commissioned a massive volume of reproductions of his oeuvre; and he was fêted at the Bauhaus with an enormous package of gifts dropped by parachute from an airplane. Grohmann has written, "Klee was now one of the few artists in a position to decide the future course of art. Every exhibition of his was eagerly anticipated, and critics measured him by international standards" (Paul Klee, New York, 1954, p. 251).
Alter Krieger represents a character type that can be described as melancholy and disturbing but, as always with Klee, there is a sense of whimsy, a genuine delight in the peculiar. Christina Thompson notes, "Klee's observations of the human psyche seldom appear as self-referential character studies in which the individual occupies the attention. Klee instead presents the human being as a creature perpetually in dialogue with his surroundings. As with everything else on earth, the human being can also only exist as a part of the greater whole" (The Klee Universe, exh. cat., Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, 2008, p. 131). She continues, "Klee thereby presents us with character portraits, which in their ambiguity always keep an interpretative back door open" (ibid., p. 132).
Here, an old warrior becomes a grotesque, almost spectral apparition. Klee seems to revel in the sinister quality of the portrayed, as with so many of the soldiers the artist drew and painted following his active duty during World War I (fig. 1).
By 1929, when he executed Alter Krieger, Klee had arrived at the peak of his career. He enjoyed international status as a master of contemporary art and was a renowned representative of the Bauhaus, where he had taught since 1920, first at Weimar and then at Dessau. On the occasion of Klee's fiftieth birthday in December 1929, the Berlin gallerist Alfred Flechtheim gave him a large retrospective, which then traveled to The Museum of Modern Art in New York; the Cahiers d'Art in Paris commissioned a massive volume of reproductions of his oeuvre; and he was fêted at the Bauhaus with an enormous package of gifts dropped by parachute from an airplane. Grohmann has written, "Klee was now one of the few artists in a position to decide the future course of art. Every exhibition of his was eagerly anticipated, and critics measured him by international standards" (Paul Klee, New York, 1954, p. 251).
Alter Krieger represents a character type that can be described as melancholy and disturbing but, as always with Klee, there is a sense of whimsy, a genuine delight in the peculiar. Christina Thompson notes, "Klee's observations of the human psyche seldom appear as self-referential character studies in which the individual occupies the attention. Klee instead presents the human being as a creature perpetually in dialogue with his surroundings. As with everything else on earth, the human being can also only exist as a part of the greater whole" (The Klee Universe, exh. cat., Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, 2008, p. 131). She continues, "Klee thereby presents us with character portraits, which in their ambiguity always keep an interpretative back door open" (ibid., p. 132).