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

production in Tunisia—including the carpets on display at the bazaars—likely
fueled what would become for him a lifelong engagement with “Oriental” and non-
Western
art.
ly
h-century Persian poet Hafiz, whose writings the artist likely
new in translation. 8
Over the course of the decade between the Tunisian journey of 1914 and making
Collection of Southern Signs in 1924, Klee alluded to Tunisia or to the “Orient” in the
titles of many of his paintings, such as In the Style of Kairouan (1914), which refers
to a city he visited in Tunisia, Oriental Experience (1914), Moonrise in St. Germain
(Tunis) (1915), and View from St. Germain (Tunis), Looking Inland (1918). What is
more, even as he continually returned to his earlier Tunisian watercolors and his
memories of that exotic journey for subject matter, Klee also began to draw wide
from various forms of non-Western artistic production, including poetry. A poet
himself, in 1916 Klee began a series of painted poems entitled Chinese Poems that
were inspired by German translations of Chinese poetry. 7 And in 1917, he painted
the miniature-like Persian Nightingales, which scholars agree was inspired by the
verses of the fourteent
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Klee’s investigation of the ways various artistic media could inform painting
intensified during his ten-year tenure as a professor at the Bauhaus from 1921–
1931. His job there was not only to teach students of the applied arts the basics of
composition and color, but also to make art himself that could inspire his pupils’
designs. During the mid- to late-1920s, he had an especially fruitful artistic
exchange with those of his students who specialized in weaving. As T’ai Smith
argues in the 2009 Bauhaus: Workshops of Modernity exhibition catalog, the
weavers learned from their professor’s attempts to improvise within a given
structure. a
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.
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9 For instance, in Collection of Southern Signs, Klee adapts the format of
medallion surrounded by a border common in Oriental carpets, but his allusions to
ancient writing and his bold assertion of the material qualities of watercolor painting
also bespeak his wider artistic project. This was significant for the weavers who h
to work within the limits of the gridlike warp and weft structure of their medium
Klee in turn saw the weavers’ task as similar to his own: in 1923 he painted the
watercolor In the Style of a Carpet Design, in which he varied colors and forms w
7 For an in-depth analysis of Klee’s most famous work from the series Chinese Poems, “Once emerged from the
gray of the night…” (1918), see Joseph Leo Koerner, “Paul Klee and the Image of the Book,” in Rainer Crone and
Joseph Leo Koerner, Paul Klee: Legends of the Sign (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 55–65.
8 For example, Wolfgang Kersten and Osamu Okuda cite Hafiz’s poetry as an important reference for Persian
Nightingales in “Vogelkunde, Vogelbilder, 1917–1923,” in Paul Klee: Im Zeichen der Teilung, die Geschichte
zerschnittener Kunst Paul Klees (Stuttgart: Hatje Cantz, 1995), 66–67. On Klee’s likely familiarity with Persian
poetry, see Baumgartner, “Paul Klee und der Mythos vom Orient,” 135.
9 T’ai Smith, “Unknown Weaver, Possibly Else Möge, Wall Hanging, 1923,” in Bauhaus: Workshops of Modernity,
ed. Barry Bergdoll and Leah Dickerman (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2009), 116.
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