Date: 30-11-1999
Owning Institution: The Burgi Collection
Publication:   Sunday Telegraph Features  
Subject: 20th Century    

Hitler and his friends thought Paul Klee the very model of the mad modern artist. In 1933, when the National Socialists came to power, the painter and draughtsman was dismissed from his post as a professor at the Dusseldorf Bauhaus and denounced in the newspapers as a “Siberian Eastern Jew and a dangerous cultural Bolshevist”. In 1937, his work was given a starring role in the massive touring exhibition of “Entartete Kunst” (“Degenerate Art”) organised by Hitler and Goering to reveal the decadence into which Jews, negroes, modernists and left-wing intellectuals had plunged German culture. No fewer than 17 of Klee’s delicate, idiosyncratic bizzareries were included in this supposed freak show, gathered together under the rubric “Art of the Psychopath”.

By that time the artist, who was born in Switzerland but always thought of himself as being “spiritually and aesthetically German”, had returned, reluctantly, to live in his native town of Bern. He was safe from the SS and the death camps there but, despite the odd supportive visit from fellow artists, including his exact contemporary Picasso and the pioneering abstractionist Wassily Kandinsky, he was not happy. He thought of the place as a cultural backwater, and hostile with it. After all, when the Bern Kunsthalle had staged an exhibition of his work in 1931 it had been panned by the conservative local press, the Neue Berner Zeitung thundering that “we will not tolerate the walls of two rooms in our Kunsthalle being hung with artful dodges like the disasters by this Mr Klee. Praise the Lord we are far too healthy to accept such stammering reflexes of an infantile brain as art.” The Swiss might not have been Nazis but their art critics still stamped about in jackboots.

Not everyone in Bern was like that, however, and Klee’s one consolation for having to move back late in life was the presence of his first and most loyal supporter, an interesting and unusual woman called Hanni Burgi whose unparalleled collection of the artist’s works – still owned by her descendants and never previously exhibited in Britain – goes on display this summer at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.

Unlike nearly all of her contemporaries, Hanni Burgi had steadfastly refused to be shocked by the artful naivete of the artist’s work and his cultivation of a self-consciously “innocent” art. She had taken to him almost from the moment they met, when he was still an art student and she was a young mother-to-be. Their friendship was to last until her death in 1936, Klee himself dying just four years later from a rare skin disease.

The daughter of a country innkeeper and his wife, Frau Burgi escaped what she thought of as her dull and provincial origins by marrying into one of the leading upper-middle class families of Bern. Her husband, Alfred Burgi, a wealthy builder and construction engineer, took an open-minded if not exactly enthusiastic approach to her artistic inclinations. It was he who paid for her to take singing lessons from Klee’s father Hans, a musician. She met Paul too and began buying his drawings. Over the years the large suburban neo-Baroque mansion house which she shared with her husband and children, the grandly named Villa Burgi, began to fill up with Klee’s enigmatic avant-garde creations: spidery, doodle-like line drawings of mythical beasts and personages; designs for impossible machines; colour-saturated, Cubist-influenced depictions of landscape.

The Bernese haute-bourgeoisie did not know what to make of Hanni’s strange taste in art, as her son Rolf later recalled: “My mother had the courage to hang Klee’s works in her own home despite energetic protests from family and friends. My father will certainly also have had his doubts.” For his part, Klee was eternally grateful for her support and encouragement. Every year he would persist in offering her pictures “at the old price” of just 60 francs each, long after he had been taken up by the prestigious Kahnweiler Gallery in Paris. Rolf Burgi too continued to make acquisitions after Hanni’s death and the family collection eventually came to number more than 150 separate works of art, acquired over almost half a century. Although it only comprises a fraction of his prolific output – during the course of his career Klee produced some 9,000 drawings, watercolours and oils – overall it presents a remarkably full picture of the artist’s creative personality and development.

“I want to be as though newborn, knowing absolutely nothing about Europe, ignoring facts and fashions, to be almost primitive,” Klee declared in one of his many manifesto statements. This was not an uncommon ambition in the early years of the twentieth century, when all kinds of painters and sculptors were attracted to the art of the so-called “primitive” cultures of Africa and Oceania, but Klee pursued it with a rare and unswerving devotion. He subscribed to the old Romantic idea that artists should seek to preserve in themselves the child’s intensity of vision. From the start of his career to its very end, he preferred working to the small scale of children’s art, and often cultivated the slightly cack-handed facture associated with it. But what sometimes seems at first sight like mere clumsiness or eccentricity turns out to be a form of sophistication (and Klee was certainly capable of producing extremely proficient pictures of a conventional kind, as several moodily atmospheric albeit somewhat cliched landscapes from the early part of his career attest). The apparent frailties of his mature technique were, in part, his way of describing the tragi-comic pathos of human existence. Smudged figures on dirty grounds loom into view in his art, looking not so much drawn as formed, accidentally, from the wanderings of some insect with inky feet. They seem, often, baffled by their own imperfect formation, these comical clowns in inchoate circumstances, the bit-part players in some impenetrable theatre of the absurd.

The slightness and frequent obscurity of Klee’s art have led some – and not only Nazis and Swiss reactionaries – to dismiss him as a petit maitre. He is certainly hard to place, occupying a strange hinterland of his own making somewhere between Romanticism, Surrealism, Cubism, Expressionism and graphic satire (while some of his spikier creations can also recall the Northern Gothic and Renaissance art traditions). One of the earliest drawings in the Burgi Collection shows an angel with stunted wings and its arm in a cast, while another reimagines the splendid phoenix of myth and fable as a scrawny cockerel with ideas above its station. This slightly acerbic, sceptical view of those who aspire – and, by implication, of all human aspiration – is quintessential aspect of Klee’s character. It may have held him back, in some respects, but it also made him virtually unique. Klee remains one of the few serious artists of the twentieth centuiry never to have made the mistake of taking himself too seriously.