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Artist or Maker: Paul Klee (1879-1940)
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Provenance: Baron Albin Prybram von Gladona, Vienna, a gift from the artist, and thence by descent to the late owner.
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Exhibited: Prague, Haus der Künstler, Tvrdosijní a hosté, January - February 1921, no. 104; this exhibition later travelled to Brünn, Kunstgewerbemuseum, and Kosice, Ostslowakisches Museum.
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Literature: The Paul Klee Foundation (ed.), Paul Klee, Catalogue raisonné, vol. 3, 1919-1922, Bern, 1999, no. 2510 (illustrated p. 232).
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Notes: PROPERTY FROM THE COLLECTION OF THE LATE CHARLOTTE PRYBRAM VON GLADONA
While Klee had many artist-admirers in and outside Germany who belonged to various modernist cliques, his mercurial styles and techniques, his admixture of cosmic insight and irrepressible humour, were so idiosyncratic that his manner defied imitation. Klee influenced many artists, especially during the 1920s as a teacher at the Bauhaus; however, he founded no 'school', nor did he collect followers. Like the similarly Protean Picasso, he remained above and apart from the fervent factionalism in the modernist movement, even if he maintained close affiliations with other artists and was open to new creative ideas. Nevertheless, it is instructive to view his work in relationship to what was happening around him, for it reveals a surprisingly rich symbiosis, in which Klee and his fellow artists were mutually knowledgeable about what each other was doing, and were closely attuned to a shared Zeitgeist.
Klee's drawing Der Stolze P'rrrsch is a useful guidepost, to the received influences that Klee had assimilated and made his own, as well as his own impact on the scene, in 1920. In May of that year Klee's exhibition at Hans Goltz's Neue Galerie in Munich opened; it included 362 works, the artist's largest showing to date, and it attracted much attention. Later that year Klee published his Creative Credo in an anthology of artist's writing, and Leopold Zahn and Hans von Wedderkrop published the first monographs on Klee's work.
Klee was well-known to the Dada artists and poets. Hugo Ball, who founded the Dada movement at the Café Voltaire in Zurich in 1916, hailed from Munich, where Klee had been living since 1906. When Ball moved the headquarters of the nascent Dada group to the Galerie Dada in the spring of 1917, he included Klee's work in two inaugural exhibitions. The art critic Waldemar Jollos delivered a lecture about Klee in March and curated his own show of Klee's pictures at the Galerie Dada in May. Dada artist Marcel Janco called this exhibition a 'great event' and understood Klee's relationship to the Dada agenda: 'In his beautiful work we saw the reflection of all our efforts to interpret the soul of primitive man, to plunge into the unconscious and the instinctive power of creation, to discover the child's pure and direct sources of creativity' (quoted in A. Temkin, 'Klee and the Avant-Garde', Paul Klee, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1987, p. 14).
The Dada poet and manifesto-writer Tristan Tzara included examples of Klee's work in his 1919 Dada Anthologie. In the same year Max Ernst and Johannes Baargeld featured Klee in their Bulletin D exhibition in Cologne, in which they arranged paintings and drawings by Dada artists alongside art made by children and folk painters, together with African sculpture and found objects. The exhibition was intended to be outrageous and iconoclastic, and was probably the most overtly Dadaist context in which Klee participated.
This mischievous, thumb-your-nose Dada attitude may be observed in Klee's Der Stolze P'rrrsch ('Proud P'rrrsch'), with its humourous scatological reference. The figure of a standing man has been re-invented as a machine, which functions by means of gears and belts, right down to his heart and genitalia. The mad inventor appears at lower right, and the scene is attended by odd, Leonardo-like flying machines. 'P'rrrsch' is the sound made by this mechanical man as he breaks wind, or blows off his exhaust. One may note parallels with Francis Picabia's mechanical drawings of 1918-1919, done while he was active in the Zurich Dada movement, including the use of words in the composition.
The humour in Klee's drawings usually goes beyond mere irony and satire, to connect with deeper insights into a spiritual conception of human existence, just as Dada antics often masked a serious concern for the state of the human spirit following the devastation of the Great War. In his Creative Credo Klee wrote: 'Art is a likeness of Creation. It is sometimes an example, just as the terrestrial is an example of the cosmic... Symbols reassure the spirit that it need not depend exclusively on terrestrial experience with its possible enhancements... Art plays an unwitting game with the ultimate things and achieves them nevertheless' (quoted in W. Grohmann, Paul Klee, London, 1954, p. 181).
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