Was Paul Klee the godfather of installation art? David
Sylvester seemed to imply as much. He had been writing about Klee since seeing
an exhibition of his work in Paris at
the Musée National d’Art Moderne in February 1948, publishing an article in
response to the exhibition in New York ‘abstract-expressionist periodical’ Tiger’s Eye later that year after it was
rejected by several London journals. ‘Absorbed into a symposium on the Sublime,
sandwiched between contributions from Robert Motherwell and Barnett Newman’,
Sylvester’s ‘Auguries of Experience’ (it’s a William Blake reference) described
a Klee painting as something you don’t just look at, but journey through:
‘A Renaissance picture is a scene set before your eyes. A
Klee is a landscape through which you journey. Of the first you are a
spectator, in the second you are a participant. One moves you to exaltation,
the other to communion.’
This was not, in fact, a question of physical movement so
much as a visual journey:
‘With a Klee, the relationship between the picture and
yourself is reciprocal; you touch a loose rock with your foot, it falls from
under you and you are left dangling in space.’
The essential point was that Klee employed what Sylvester
termed ‘afocalism’, the absence of a focal point which gave Klee’s late
pictures a maze-like quality. Sylvester's objection to Calder's mobiles was in fact that in moving themselves, they removed the exploratory incentive from the viewer:
'the full solution does not lie in making the work of art move, but in compelling the spectator to believe that he is moving about in the work of art- be it a sculpture by Giacometti or a picture by Klee'. (1951)
'the full solution does not lie in making the work of art move, but in compelling the spectator to believe that he is moving about in the work of art- be it a sculpture by Giacometti or a picture by Klee'. (1951)
Sylvester began his selected essays, About Modern Art with two texts about Klee (‘Auguries of Experience’
and ‘Paul Klee. La Période de Berne’ published in Les Temps Modernes in 1951’) which itself demonstrates his
continued regard for them as his most important early writings. And in the
decade following the 1948 Klee exhibition, he kept finding ways in which Klee’s
legacy manifested itself. Firstly in young British sculptors like Eduardo
Paolozzi and William Turnbull of whom he wrote in 1950 that they were:
‘perhaps the
most notable exponents, among the youngest generation of European artists, of
the new method of composition informing the later paintings of Klee and Masson
among others (including Victor Pasmore), and the group sculptures of Alberto
Giacometti.’
Then, finally
coming around to the significance of Pollock and his fellow abstract-Expressionists
after the landmark show of American art at the Tate in 1956 (when Sylvester
recycled a passage about Klee as equally useful with regards to Pollock). But
most unexpectedly he wrote in a review of 1957’s Hamilton/Pasmore/Alloway
collaboration An Exhibit at the ICA that:
‘modern art
tends increasingly to make the spectator not so much a distant observer as a
participant in the work, a necessary agent in the completion of the work […] it
is partly in order to achieve this that painters since Klee have tended towards
the deliberate elimination of the focal point, and ‘an Exhibit’ is organised as
freely and meanderingly as a Klee, and to the same purpose’.
The review
from which this comes was written in response was written at the time of An Exhibit’s first showing but not
published until 1998 when it appeared in Modern
Painters in homage to Pasmore, who had recently died. Sylvester applauds An Exhibit, and at the same time sees it
as a natural continuation in three dimensions of what Klee was doing in two. Fortunately for a short time this year both Tate Modern's Klee exhibition and the ICA's reconstruction of An Exhibit were on simultaneously, so it was possible to check, and I could see the resemblance!
