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

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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 k 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 ad . ithin 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. 4
iental carpets, the weavers too turned to nonestern textiles for inspiration. 10 a grid. Smith further points out that, just as Klee adapted the forms of ancient writing and the compositions of Or W In 1924, Klee was likely looking back over his career and the ways travel had influenced it: at that time, the recognized modernist was preparing for his second major retrospective, which would be held at his dealer Hans Goltz’s Munich gallery in 1925. Before the fall semester of 1924, Klee journeyed south once again, but this time he stopped just short of North Africa, traveling only as far as Sicily. The reference to the south in Collection of Southern Signs is broad enough to encompass the Tunisian journey of 1914 and this new trip of 1924; the work’s desertlike colors could evoke either the Tunisian or the Sicilian landscape. Collection of Southern Signs thus testifies to the artist’s initial and expanding interests in unfamiliar places and cultures and the ways they sustained and enriched his work as his professional circumstances changed. That is, it suggests how Klee’s journeys south facilitated the metaphorical travel of artistic influences from wide-ranging “Oriental” cultures to his own modern European art. 10 Ibid., 119. 5
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Paul Klee, Zeichensammlung Südlich (Collection of Southern Signs ...

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