Mannequin

One of Paul Klee’s very last works, Mannequin is a bold, figurative depiction from the artist’s rich and productive late period which began in 1937 and ended with his death in June 1940. Executed in ‘Kleisterfarben’ - a mixture of coloured pigment and glue - that the artist favoured throughout his last years, the painting is a composed of a few harsh strokes enclosing coloured shapes, with the placement of two black dots and a short line in the upper semi-circular element finally leading us to identify with the formal subject of this work: Mannequin. Klee had once, in 1920, described the creative process of drawing as ‘a certain fire, coming to life, [it] leaps up, runs through the hand, courses onto the paper, and flies back as a spark where it came from, thus completing the circle; back to the eye and on again’ (Klee, 1920, quoted in C. Hopfengart & M. Baumgartner, Paul Klee, Life and Work, Bern, 2012, p. 314).

From Klee’s own fastidious catalogue raisonné, we know that between 1904 to 1940 there are approximately 240 cases where the artist would split the composition through cutting or tearing to create new, independent works. In 1940 there is evidence of just two examples where the work had been cut-up, one of which was Mannequin, originally a unified composition with In Behandlung (In Treatment) (The Paul Klee Foundation, ed., Bern, 2004, no. 9277) (B. von Stefan Frey & J. Helfenstien, op. cit., p. 22), the latter now in the collection of the Kunsthaus Zurich.

With its angular network of lines and burning ochre tones that fuse into pinky-red shading within certain key elements, Klee skilfully uses colour to conjour a sense of fleshy forms, as it takes a more equal partnership with drawing. These forms are joyously balanced in Mannequin, articulating his ability to bring to life his subject through the perfectly economical use of line he adopts in his later works. In other pictures, similar forms may lead to landscapes and non-representational forms, as is the case with In Behandlung (In Treatment).

This elemental and cyclical sense of creation also runs as a central theme throughout Klee’s late works. Mannequin depicts an imitation of the core elements of life, the human form, as a visual experience that has been built from a secret pictorial language of shapes. The title of the work extends this idea of imitation further, with the notion of the mannequin as object, mimicking the human form and withdrawing all life – nature – from it. When describing the sentiment of the artist Klee says: "He [the artist] does not attach such intense importance to natural form as do so many realist critics, because, for him, these final forms are not the real stuff of the process of natural creation. For he places more value on the powers which do the forming than on the final forms themselves. [He says of the world] In its present shape it is not the only possible world … The deeper he looks … the more deeply he is impressed by the one essential image of creation itself, as Genesis, rather than by the image of nature, the finished product” (Klee, 1927, quoted in F. Spartshott, The Theory of the Arts, New Jersey, 1982, p. 81). Indeed, viewed within the context of this statement, Mannequin at once realises it convincingly.

Creating a world rendered solely through simple, but powerfully expressive line, symbol and colour and with its predominantly warm, ochre tones Mannequin provides an extraordinarily persuasive visual evocation of its semi-invisible subject. As a major example of the great originality and power of Klee’s vision in his last years, Mannequin has been shown extensively across a series of key exhibitions of his work from the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam to Kunstmesum, Bern to name but a few.