Odysseisch

In November 1920, Klee received an invitation from Walter Gropius to become a master at the newly founded Bauhaus in Weimar; he left Munich two months later to join this dynamic community of artists, architects, designers, and craftsmen, with its rigorous interdisciplinary curriculum. Weimar had vast advantages for Klee: a steady income, a large studio for his exclusive use, and a rewarding forum to discuss and refine his ideas. Although his teaching responsibilities at the Bauhaus occupied only a small number of hours per week, they forced him to formulate a theory—consistent, communicable, and intelligible—concerning the use of pictorial elements. Christina Thomson has written, "Klee's ten years at the Bauhaus, first in Weimar and after 1925 in Dessau, mark the zenith of his artistic production...[His] creative versatility makes it impossible to identify a specific 'Bauhaus' style in Klee's oeuvre; rather, the continuity in his work of the 1920s exists less at the level of style or motif than in the integration of a deeper theoretical component. Forced by his teaching responsibilities to thoroughly analyze and articulate his artistic practice for the first time, Klee now created art that entered into dialogue with its own theory: intuition met reason, analysis became inspiration, idea found new structure" (The Klee Universe, exh. cat., Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, 2008, p. 254).
Odysseisch is part of a group of whimsical compositions that Klee executed in Weimar, in which delicate, often child-like, line drawings are set either against an independent structure of color units or (as here) within a stained, translucent color field. These playful poetic fantasies were often drawn from the world of theater, ballet, opera, legends and fairy tales. In the present example, the artist ostensibly appropriates Homer’s epic poem Odyssey. However, Klee’s profundity cannot easily be decrypted. As Peter-Klaus Schuster noted, “What Klee, as a poetry-writing painter and painting poet thus sets before our eyes are by no means illustrations of ideas or literary prescriptions. This kind of decodable clarity is utterly lacking with Klee. Klee is not a painter who spells out his thoughts” (ibid., p. 17).
Considered in this context, it is not surprising that Alfred Hitchcock had a profound affinity for Klee—his favorite artist and an abiding influence on his films. He translated to the silver screen the modern, symbolist-inspired sensibility that Klee championed in his art, emphasizing visual effects and mood over exposition and unitary narrative. In both Klee and Hitchcock’s work, recurrent symbols such as birds evoke a fugue of interpretive associations rather than a singular meaning. Both creators, too, were drawn to theatrical themes—actors, puppets, costumes, and masks—that enabled them to probe the nature of reality versus representation. Their work is characterized by a signature mix of lightness and darkness, humor and suspense, that engages the viewer on an emotional as well as an intellectual level. “I’m not self-indulgent where content is concerned; I’m only self-indulgent about treatment,” Hitchcock once told an interviewer. “I’d compare myself to an abstract painter... My favorite painter is Klee” (quoted in D.A. Cunningham, ed., op cit.)