Page 68 - Studio International - November 1973

actually amounted to a self-justifying body of disturbingly intense fantasy. One is tempted to Even Münter drew enough strength from her
objectively established knowledge. say that the entire effort and its product are association with Kandinsky and his friends to
Unconvinced, one is tempted to reject the unique, until one recalls Duchamp's (much do full justice to her relatively limited gifts.
whole exercise as futile. Yet Klee, we are told, mote laconic and consciously artful) Green Box. Without the Blaue Reiter no-one would have
meant these notes to be published. Would he, Klee's correlative is nature, an unreal nature paid any attention to Schoenberg the composer
on the other hand, like the way it is being done ? remote from facts; Duchamp's is an whose paintings, although amateurish, reflect a
Spiller's way with Klee's notes and records is anachronistic, clockwork technology. The powerful personality and must be seen as a
both wilful and haphazard, one minute unreal made real, the irrational rational, as substantial footnote to the history of
idolatrous, the next interfering. Volume 2 Hertel said: navel as universe. Expressionism. And Klee, one of the
consists principally of material prepared by One is left wondering how many students dominant figures of the 192os and 193os,
Klee for classes given during October 1923 to knew what Klee was at. To them, and now to us, owed much to his association with the Blaue
January 1924, but taken out of sequence and he issues an occasional warning. For instance: Reiter, and especially to his friendship with
incorporating sections from the notes of other `The remarks I am about to make are intended Macke and Kandinsky.
years. The editor knows better than the teacher to give you courage, for they will show how Most of the Blaue Reiter artists were
in which order to present the lessons. What else simple the matter really is. I ask, however, that blessed or cursed with an incurable itch to write
has Spiller done ? Has he suppressed anything ? you do not slavishly follow the schemes that and theorize, and one of the most tantalizing
Why does he on several occasions repeat are shown but merely take them as models for questions posed by their careers is whether
sentences and paragraphs, sometimes even on your own vivid creation. They are to serve their painting seems more significant than it is
adjacent pages ? By way of explanation we get merely to give you ideas'. On 14 December 1928 because of their theories, or whether the
this : 'Related areas, problems and notes have Klee notes one kind of reaction in his teaching energies devoted to so much writing ultimately
been included, giving the book more of a diary: 'only one student, exercise called off'. q sapped their strength as painters. Kandinsky's
workshop character and presenting parts of the NORBERT LYNTON theories we know even if we cannot understand
voluminous posthumous theoretical papers for them. But Marc and Macke also committed
the first time'. One wonders what exactly that their ideas to print and their essays help to
means. 'The dates of the lectures have been left The Bauhaus and the blues make the Blaue Reiter almanac one of the
unchanged'. Well, thanks. The Blue Rider by Hans Konrad Roethel. 174 pp essential documents of modern art.
One wonders, too, about the translation. plus 100 plates. Praeger. £7.25. Paul Klee and the The most fascinating aspect of Dr Roethel's
Translating Klee is no joke. His language is Bauhaus by Christian Geelhar. 174 pp with `The Blue Rider' is its use of lengthy
rarely precise. It is incantatory while using the 24 colour plates and many illustrations in black quotations by the artists concerned and by
words of science. Translating him means first and white. Adams and Dart. £8.25. contemporary chroniclers and critics. They are
choosing his meaning out of the several that well-chosen gobbets, printed without comment,
seem to be on offer. Ralph Manheim made a It was a motley lot that made up the Blaue which clearly and quickly illustrate the major
fair job of it for the first volume, 'The Thinking Reiter. Russians joined with Germans, ideas which forged the strongest link between
Eye'; Heinz Norden, responsible for the second, Austrians and a Swiss to exhibit their own the various painters, and they appear beside
is less careful and a good deal more obtrusive. work and that of Frenchmen, other Germans large reproductions of the work of their author.
He likes using difficult words, for an appearance and Russians. Kandinsky, Jawlensky, Marc, All the work comes from a single collection:
of up-to-dateness perhaps; 'endotropically', for Macke, Münter, Kubin, Schoenberg and Klee that of the Städtische Galerie in Munich, the
instance, where Klee combines a couple of had little in common with each other and with city's municipal museum, which houses the
ordinary words to indicate inner space. On one the artists invited to participate with them, world's greatest collection of Blaue Reiter
occasion Norden misreads Klee's not especially save for the belief that they were a happy band work. Most of this came from Gabriele Münter
unclear handwriting and proves that he hasn't besieged in the fortress of modernism by the who, living on in the house in Murnau after
looked at the drawing to which the words armies of darkness and the conviction that art Kandinsky had left her to return to Russia and
belong. He mistakes flüssig for flächig and was a quasi-religious and life-enhancing another love, was the proud and virtually
translates it 'planar' instead of 'flowing'. The activity. Few of them actually lived in Munich secret possessor of a treasure-trove.
very title of the book seems ill-judged. The and most of them were either essentially light- Dr Roethel secured the collection for the
German title, provided by Spitler, is weight talents or else too young to have reached museum of which he was, until a year or two
Unendliche Naturgeschichte which fits much any kind of real maturity. Even the group ago, the Director. Indeed, his book is
better and might have been rendered 'Creation itself was little more than a figment of the essentially a translation of his catalogue of the
without End'. As 'The nature of nature' it imagination. Der Blaue Reiter was never more body of work of which the Münter bequest forms
emphasizes yet again the notion that Klee's than a very loose association of those artists the nucleus. 3o pages, located behind the
lectures were an attempt at an anatomy of invited to show at exhibitions organized by the many plates and quotations, are devoted to a
nature for artists. But Klee's spiritual home editors of the Blaue Reiter almanac (Kandinsky check-list of the Blaue Reiter paintings in the
was with the romantics, with Goethe, and Marc). Even this almanac, an anthology of Städtische Galerie and it is difficult to see the
Schelling and Schlegel, not with late- essays, music scores, illustrations and one purpose of this. The catalogue has existed for
nineteenth-century, let alone more modern, stage-play, only appeared once, in 1912. some time in a more handy form, albeit in
scientific and philosophical thought. The Yet this disparate group produced a body of German, and the value of this English
natural world he presents is a world of the art which, central to Expressionism, represents translation lies not in the check-list, which is
imagination owing surprisingly little to science, Germany's greatest contribution to the redundant, but in the new introduction (which
a cosmos in the head peopled not by external development of modern art. The beginnings tells the fascinating story of how the Münter
realities but by archetypal concepts similar to of the Blaue Reiter coincided with Kandinsky's bequest was secured) and in the long quotations.
and descended from Goethe's ur-plant, the ideal heroic period : with his arrival at expressionist These make this book the most useful on its
growth on which no sun shines. abstraction and with the writing of subject available in the English language. It will
Klee's describing of the inner workings of `Concerning the Spiritual in Art'. The 'group' serve as a useful adjunct to the first English
nature by way of metaphor for the creative also gave Franz Marc the necessary strength to translation of the almanac promised for months
interaction of the artist and the means to his transform himself from a half-hearted, Fauve- by Thames and Hudson, but still no more than
hand is thus no more, and no less, than a poetic inspired painter of sentimental animal scenes a twinkle in the pages of their list of
fancy, though in quantity it comes at times to a into a complete and convincing modernist. forthcoming books.

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