Paul Klee, Zeichensammlung Südlich (Collection of Southern Signs ...

to Oriental carpets, and in the relationship between the material and the spiritual
in
abstract art, developed in the context of the Blue Rider artist’s group in Munich,
which Klee joined just after its founding in late 1911. These artists, whose members
included Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc, thought that academic art grounded in
classical antique and Renaissance tradition had become too regulated and sterile,
leaving no room for personal expression. Although they largely abandoned idealized
religious subject matter, which had heretofore been represented as realistic scenes
composed according to one-point linear perspective, they thought that art should
still facilitate contemplation of the spiritual or the intangible. They therefore turned
to non-Western objects like masks, carvings, and textiles—which they believed
conveyed
a sense of the otherworldly—as models for their own abstract art.
The artists who founded the Blue Rider in 1911 had become familiar with the arts of
the so-called Orient at the 1910 Munich exhibition, Masterpieces of Mohammedean
Art. It was there that they saw Persian miniatures, which often combine text and
image, and Oriental textiles and carpets displayed against white gallery walls, as if
they were modern European art. Kandinsky’s and Marc’s writings of 1910 indicate
that they thought these works achieved what they themselves hoped to in their own
abstract painting. ly
f its
ural
3 As Klee scholar Michael Baumgartner has surmised, it is unlike
that Klee attended the famous exhibition, as he was in Switzerland for most o
duration, but his enthusiastic colleagues most likely told him about it later. 4
Significantly August Macke, prior to his 1914 trip to Tunisia with Klee and Louis
Moilliet, had made several works inspired by “Oriental” textiles after seeing the
exhibition. 5 In Tunisia, both Klee and Macke painted works inspired by the loose,
gridlike compositions of Tunisian textiles. 6 While Klee’s colleagues may have been
inspired by the 1910 exhibition, his own encounter with Islamic and Berber cult
3 See, for example, Kandinsky’s laudatory review of the 1910 exhibition: Wassily Kandinsky, “Brief aus München
V,” Apollon 11 (October / November 1910): 13–17, reprinted in Wassily Kandinsky: Gesammelte Schriften 1889–
1916, ed. Helmut Friedel, trans. Jelena Hahl-Fontaine (Munich: Prestel, 2007), 369–73. Franz Marc later
compared Kandinsky’s abstract paintings to the Oriental carpets on display at the 1910 exhibition, claiming that
both challenge traditional European concepts of painting. See Franz Marc, “Zur Ausstellung der ‘Neuen
Künstlervereinigung’ bei Thannhauser,” in Franz Marc: Schriften, ed. Klaus Lankheit (Cologne: DuMont, 1978),
126–27.
4 Michael Baumgartner, “Paul Klee und der Mythos vom Orient,” Auf der Suche nach dem Orient, ed. Michael
Baumgartner and Carole Haensler (Bern: Zentrum Paul Klee; Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2009), 137.
5 On August Macke’s Orientalist paintings from before 1914, see Ernst-Gerhard Güse, “Vor der Tunisreise,” in Die
Tunisreise: Klee, Macke, Moilliet, ed. Ernst-Gerhard Güse (Stuttgart: Verlag Gerd Hatje, 1982), 23–27.
6 The artists’ third traveling companion, Louis Moilliet, later recalled how Macke painted Vendor with Jugs (1914)
in the style of a Tunisian textile. See Moilliet as told to Walter Holzhausen, “The Visit to Tunisia,” in August
Macke, Günther Busch, and Walter Holzhausen, August Macke: Tunisian Watercolors and Drawings,
trans. Norbert Guterman (New York: H.N. Abrams, 1959), 19. For more on Klee and Tunisian textiles, see my
forthcoming essay, “‘The Carpet-like Aspect in his Representations’: Paul Klee’s Tunisian Watercolors in
Context,” in Der Künstler in der Fremde. Wanderschaft–Migration–Exil. Vorträge aus dem Warburg-Haus, ed.
Uwe Fleckner (Berlin: Akademie Verlag).
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