Paul Klee and
Color Theory
What had already been done for music by the end of the eighteenth
century has at last been begun for the pictorial arts. Mathematics and physics
furnished the means in the form of rules to be followed and to be broken. In the
beginning it is wholesome to be concerned with the functions and to disregard
the finished form. Studies in algebra, in geometry, in mechanics characterize
teaching directed towards the essential and the functional, in contrast to
apparent. One learns to look behind the facade, to grasp the root of things. One
learns to recognize the undercurrents, the antecedents of the visible. One
learns to dig down, to uncover, to find the cause, to analyze. (Paul Klee, Dessau 1929)
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| This is the best introduction to modern art
ever written. -Paul Johnson |
I. Basics
The
Primary Colors (Red, Yellow, and Blue) are the hues that can not be created by
mixing any other colors. They are the root of every other hue. By adding white,
black, or grey they can be turned into Tints, Shades, or Tones.
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The Primary Colors |
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By mixing any two of the Primary Colors three new offspring are
created: Orange, Violet, and Green. |
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When you mix the Main Colors with their
offspring six new colors emerge: yellow-orange, red-orange,
red-purple, blue-purple, blue-green, and yellow-green. |
Historically there has been a confusion between the behavior of
light mixtures, called additive color, and the behavior of paint, ink, dye, or pigment mixtures,
called subtractrive color. This problem arises because the absorption of light by
material substances follows different rules from the perception of light by the
eye.
A
second problem has been the failure to describe the very important effects of
strong luminance (lightness) contrasts in the appearance of colors reflected
from a surface (such as paints or inks). For example, a strong light contrast between a yellow paint and a surrounding bright
white paint makes the yellow appear to be green or brown, while a strong brightness
contrast between a rainbow and the surrounding sky makes the yellow in a rainbow
appear to be a fainter yellow, or white.
A
third problem has been the tendency to describe color effects
categorically, for example as a contrast between "yellow" and "blue" conceived
as generic colors, when most color effects are due to contrasts on three
relative attributes that define all colors:
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Lightness (light vs. dark, or white vs. black),
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Saturation (intense vs. dull)
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Hue (e.g., red,
orange, yellow, green, blue or purple).
Thus,
the visual impact of "yellow" vs. "blue" hues in visual design depends on the
relative lightness and intensity of the hues. Previous to the 1930s, the models adopted in progressive color teaching tended
to derive from Post-Impressionist models, notably the work of Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cezanne, and the later work of
Edgar Degas and Claude Monet.
II. The Bauhaus and Paul Klee
The Bauhaus school, founded in 1919 by Walter Gropius in Weimar, was
dedicated to the idea of creating a 'total' work of art in which all arts,
including architecture would eventually be brought together. Paul Klee
joined the staff in 1922 and taught there until the spring of 1931.
Germany had been ruined by the war, humiliated at Versailles, the Social
Democrats had taken power in the name of socialism and revolution was seeping in
from the Soviet Union. Against that background Walter Gropius, dubbed the Silver
Prince by Klee, wanted to start from zero,
nothing short of recreating the world. The Bauhaus, which was at once
a school, workshop, studio and laboratory, where teachers and students would
forge a new alliance between art and industry. The machine was considered a positive element, and therefore industrial and
product design were important components. There was no teaching of history in
the school because everything was supposed to be designed and created according
to first principles rather than by following precedent.
Simple would equate to beautiful
and the mantra was worker housing (sing: Walter Gropius, Walter Gropius,
worker housing, worker housing).
The 1930s saw the emigration of influential teachers and their students from the
Bauhaus in Germany to
the United States. One major exception was Klee, who returned home to
Switzerland. In the US new approaches which had been developed
at the Bauhaus started to emanate from Moholy-Nagy's New
Bauhaus in Chicago (1937-39) and influenced art schools throughout the US,
as well Europe, by the 1960s.
The Bauhaus style became one of the most influential currents of modern design
and had a profound influence upon subsequent developments in art, architecture,
graphic design, interior design, industrial design and typography.
The Bauhaus architectural movement would lead
the way in the creation of thousands of sterile, boxy buildings in the
US and around the world. On the other hand, artist such as Klee, Kandinsky, and Feininger would have a more positive effect on
the modern art movement.
III. Paul Klee the Newton of color
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"Color
possesses me. I don't have to pursue it. It will possess me always, I
know it. That is the meaning of this happy hour: Color and I are one. I
am a painter."
|
Paul
Klee (b. 18 December 1879, d. 29 June 1940) refined his artistic and educational theories while teaching at the
Bauhaus. The Paul Klee Notebooks, a
collection of his Bauhaus lectures and other essays on art, are considered so
important for understanding modern art that they are compared to the importance
that Leonardo's A Treatise on Painting had for Renaissance artists. One
critic claims Klee occupies a position in modern art comparable to Newton's in
the realm of physics.
Academic art since the Renaissance was based on the Aristotelian system of
deduction from the broad principles of absolute beauty and a conventional color
canon. Klee was devoted to the microcosm, to the smallest manifestations of
nature. Through his inductive scientific exploration of color and the basic optical and structural order of nature, he was able to
play a major role in the formation of the modern art movement.
Klee was impressed with Paul Cezanne's use of color not merely to record the
obvious visual appearance of objects (as the Impressionists had largely done)
but to establish the artist's right to modify naturalistic coloring in order to
harmonize or balance colors within the pictorial composition itself. Klee
also noted that Cezanne appeared to show no embarrassment that his paintings
revealed the manner by which they had been painted and that they had evolved
over an extended period of time; Cezanne painted Mont Sainte-Victoire any number of times. For Klee this building-block approach to composition may have
strengthened his own desire to produce works that placed more emphasis on
formative powers than with the finished forms. Like Cezanne, Klee was no natural painter.
A second major influence stemmed from
Klee's
membership in the
Die Blaue Vier (Blue Rider group),
formed in 1921 with Kandinsky,
Feininger,
and Jawlensky. They lectured and exhibited in the US in 1925.
Wassily Kandinsky, who later became his colleague at
the Bauhaus, published a manifesto, On the
Spiritual in Art (1911), in which color was cast in the role of the spiritual
component of a visual and abstract
language for the communication of feeling.
Klee also had a fascination for paintings by Robert Delaunay which carry on a
perfectly abstract existence without the benefit of motifs drawn from nature.
Delaunay, experimenting with sunlight dispersed through prisms, inspired Klee to consider the question
which confronted many artists of the time: when color is released from its
descriptive role, what might be a basis or structure for in its application in
abstract art?
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In 1914 Klee painted his first
pure abstract, In the Style of Kairouan, (above) composed of colored rectangles
and circles. The colored rectangle became his basic building block.
Klee combined colored blocks to create a color harmony much like a
musical composition. Moreover, his
selection of a particular color palette emulates a musical key. Sometimes using
complementary pairs of colors, and other
times dissonant colors, reflecting
the connection with music.
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Red Balloon, 1922
Guggenheim Museum, New York |
Klee taught at the Bauhaus 1921 to 1931.
There
he acknowledge respect for the 1810 theories of Johann von Goethe and charted an
orderly analysis of color in relation to practical aspects of painting
(specifically in the water color medium) and established a passage from the
theoretical to the practical, so that simple formulas inspire experimental and
open-ended possibilities.
In
order to obtain a useful teaching tool, he modified Goethe's six-section color
circle (above), with red opposite green, orange-red opposite blue, and yellow
opposite violet.
Klee positioned his color circle to form a disc located horizontally within
the color sphere. This three-dimensional arrangement
permitted Klee to arrive at a useful organization of color in which white is
located at the top of the figure and black at the base. Importantly, it allowed
Klee to clarify the relationship between hue, colorfulness (chroma) and tone
(value).
Having rejected traditional methods of
pictorial representation, Klee set about seeking alternative strategies for
holding his paintings together visually. A benefit of utilizing small selections
of colors was that the resulting impression
appeared unified and harmonious. A significant aim of his color
experimentation was to produce a color foundation - the principal aim
of which was to cross from the simple color exercise to the complex work of
art. His strategy was not
only to integrate drawing and painting, but also with
considerations of form, composition, content, and pictorial
imagination.
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German: Grenzen des Verstandes, English:
Boundaries of the Mind, 1927 |
Klee enjoyed the conflicting theories and opinions within the Bauhaus.
Klee also taught at the Dusseldorf Academy from 1931 to 1933,
and there came under Nazi scrutiny. His home was searched by the Gestapo and he was
fired from his job. The Klee family moved to Switzerland in late 1933.
His Ad Parnassum (1932. Oil on panel. 100 x 126 cm. Paul Klee
Foundation, Kunstmuseum, Berne, Switzerland.) is considered his
masterpiece and the best example of his pointillist style. He produced nearly 500 works in
1933 during his last year in Germany. However, in that same year, Klee began experiencing
the symptoms of scleroderma. His output
in 1936 was only 25 pictures. In the later 1930s, his health recovered somewhat,
and in 1939 he created over 1,200 works. He used heavier lines and mainly geometric forms with fewer but larger
blocks of color. His varied color palettes, some with bright colors and others
sober, perhaps reflected his alternating moods of optimism and pessimism. In 1937, seventeen of
Klee's pictures were included in an exhibition in Germany of "Degenerate Art", and 102 of his
works in public collections were seized by the Nazis.
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| Sign in Yellow, 1937 |
He died in Switzerland, on June 29, 1940 and
was buried at Bern, Switzerland. His legacy comprises about 9,000 works of
art. The words on his tombstone, Klee's credo, placed there by his son Felix,
say, "I cannot be grasped in the here and now, For my dwelling place is as much
among the dead, As the yet unborn, Slightly closer to the heart of creation than
usual, But still not close enough."
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Paul
Klee,
Sinbad the Sailor, 1928
(Battle Scene from the comic-fantastic opera The Seafarer
1923); oil transfer drawing, pencil, watercolor, and gauache on paper on
cardboard; 34.5 cm. x 50 cm.
Kunstsammlung
Museum, Basel. |
| Note: In this piece I have only
briefly
dealt with Paul Klee's art relating to his work on the theory of
color. Obviously there is much more to Klee. I have selected two more
works, his mystical
Angelus Novus
and Poor Angel
to, at least, hint at the breadth and depth of
the artist. | Link to Paul Klee's
Angel
More Klee
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