The Diaries of Paul Klee by Paul Klee

First published:Tagebucher von Paul Klee, 1957 (English translation, 1964)

Type of work: Diary

Time of work: 1879-1918

Locale: Switzerland, Germany, Italy, and Tunisia

Principal Personages:

• Paul Klee, a Swiss-German artist
• Lily Klee, his wife

Form and Content

Paul Klee’s diaries actually consist of four notebooks which he carefully maintained, even edited and revised, throughout the twenty years of his apprenticeship until full maturity. Strictly speaking, they are not diaries but journals containing materials of various kinds, sometimes more revealing for what they do not tell than for what they do tell. Weeks go by with no entry at all; sometimes successive days are covered by one-sentence notes notable only for their banality. There are sharply described vignettes of events, usually involving social activities with friends. There are poems, lists of words that make the end rhymes for unwritten poems, thoughts on random matters, comments on musical events (Klee was an accomplished musician and music critic), and copies of a few letters received, one or two letters he sent, even letters received by other people. In Klee’s mind, the diaries clearly have a coherence that is not always evident to the reader.

Klee was a very private, reticent man. Very few entries fully reveal his private feelings. He makes discreet reference to behavior that he considered less than admirable, but does not describe it. For example, there is one reference to a mistress when she tells him that she is pregnant and another mention when she notifies him that the child has died—and that is all. He obliquely tells the story of his future father-in-law’s opposition to his marriage but only hints at his own deep resentment. The painter Franz Marc was a friend to whom he was devoted, yet Marc’s death at Verdun is simply noted. The fullest description of Klee’s life, diary-style, is of his military service (well away from the front lines). There is virtually nothing about the war itself or Germany’s fate. Events decisive for his development as a painter, such as his meeting with the painter Robert Delaunay in Paris, are simply noted without comment, while there are long paragraphs listing works exhibited and the dimensions of frames for etchings.

Diary 1 includes memories of Klee’s childhood and adolescence and his early years as an art student in Munich—the first twenty-two years of his life. Diary 2 covers his trip to Italy in 1901 and 1902. Diary 3 covers his wedding and the couple’s early years in Munich, then the crucial trip to Tunisia. Diary 4 is devoted entirely to the time of his military service.

Klee was a German citizen, but he was born in Switzerland and his mother was Swiss. After the rise of the Nazis, who considered him among the “degenerate artists,” Klee returned to Bern and remained for the rest of his life.

After the death of Lily Klee, his widow, in 1946, there were extensive legal disputes about the disposition of the Klee estate. The settlement favored Klee’s son, Felix, who transferred many objects and documents to the Klee Foundation (Paul Klee-Stiftung) in Bern. Subsequently, Felix Klee consented to the publication of the diaries, which he himself edited.

Klee had always considered himself a writer and had even considered becoming a writer professionally. While the diary entries are deeply personal, they are carefully reticent, as though he expected others to read them. Since Klee is revealing only as much of himself as he wishes and only in the manner that he himself has chosen, the reader has no sense of peeking through keyholes. His painting is entirely unlike any other, and so is his diary; this carefully constructed literary production is uniquely Klee’s, achieving its purpose by the multiplication of carefully selected detail, from the trivial to the sublime, which could be a description of Klee’s painting style.

Critical Context

Modern artists have been much given to verbal statements of their artistic convictions, reflecting a culture that has no widespread consensus regarding art and its evolution. Many of these statements take the form of manifestos, setting out a polemical position. Of all modern artists, Paul Klee produced the largest body of published statements about art and about his own art.

His diaries are the record of his apprenticeship as an artist and as a thinker. His art reached a full maturity before he turned to public statements about art; once he reached the point of being willing to make such public statements, he abandoned the diary format.

His later notebooks consist of a few brief essays carefully written for publication, the texts of a few public lectures, and several thousand pages of notes for his lectures during his teaching career. The first published selection of these appeared in 1956 as Das bildnerische Denken: Schriften zur Form-und Gestal-tungslehre (Paul Klee: The Thinking Eye, 1961). All of his essays mentioned above are in this volume, which is the one indispensable aid to understanding Klee’s thought and art. The diaries are a vestibule to this commodious edifice, necessary to the understanding of the course of Klee’s development but incomplete in themselves.

The essays appear first, under the general title “Towards a Theory of Form Production”; both critically and philosophically, they are of the first importance. Highly compressed, deeply meditated statements, they are accessible to those who are willing to give them close attention. The remainder of the volume comprises lecture notes, which are more detailed and often highly technical since they were intended for art students and not the general public.

Bibliography

Arts Magazine. September, 1977. Special Klee issue.

Dixon, John W., Jr. “The Optics of the Modern Imagination,” in Art and the Theological Imagination, 1978.

Giedion-Welcker, Carola. Paul Klee, 1952.

Grohmann, Will. Paul Klee, 1954.

Haftmann, W. The Mind and Work of Paul Klee, 1954.

Ponente, Nello. Klee, 1960.