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拍品专文
Referred to in English as Sextet of Genii or as in William Grohman’s 1954 monograph Sextet of Spirits, Klee approaches the folkloric subject of the genie in the present work. Historically, genies were shapeshifting creatures able to take the form of other animals or people at will, originating from the Middle East and appearing within Roman history as the more omnipotent entities of genii, the spirits or guardians of man, the feminine equivalent assuming the term juno. Klee’s avid enthusiasm for the subjects of mythology and folklore is here evident, so too his characteristically humorous tendency to appropriate this subject matter into his own distinctive artistic language. Between 1916 and 1925, Klee made a series of hand-puppets for his son Felix, including Untitled, Genie of the Matchbox (Ohne Titel, Zündholzschachtelgeist) from 1925 whose facial features in some way resemble those shown in the present work, which have been significantly further abstracted in Sextett der Genien. The composition correlates stylistically to Figure in the Garden (Figur in Figur in dem Garten) also created in 1937, suggesting that the genies may be situated within a natural, magical, landscape.
Drawing from multiple sources of tribal art, hieroglyphs, folklore and medieval applied art, Klee blends these influences and incorporates them within his modern, Bauhaus-infused theory of form and color. His use of pastel colors, separated by starkly contrasting black lines and radiant glimpses of ground that were customary within Klee’s late oeuvre, gives a vibrant, immediate potency to his composition, demonstrating his refined understanding of chroma, as Grohmann has written:
“A last group of the works of the same period and type are the mysterious pastels on white cotton or jute, sometimes on paper. The colored chalks are frequently applied on a damp ground that absorbs them so that the colors disappear behind the surface. Klee liked the luminosity of pastels, their capacity for rendering sunny brightness and nocturnal dark. They maintain their radiance over the full range of the scale and on every level of intensity, and admit of monochromatic combinations of greens and blues which in a strange way suggest the whole spectrum, even the refractions that our eye cannot catch. The pastels display the same heavy contours as the other works of these years, and treat the same themes. In the figure subjects such as Child in Red (1937) and Sextet of Spirits (1937), the contours and colored planes are strongly linked together; depending on where the main emphasis is placed, they produce effects that recall stained glass windows with heavy leading, or tapestry-like fabrics with a few scattered linear accents” (Paul Klee, London, 1969, p. 336).
The curvilinear motifs of the heads of the genies and their surrounding atmosphere have a distinct sense of movement and energy to convey the shifting presence of his subject. These arabesques bring a tempo, each different in its force depending on at which point of the circle it begins and ends. This, in combination with the active color contrasts, directs the eye rapidly around the composition, making for a lively sense of activity; a labyrinth of plastic interrelationships that directs the narrative of the picture, providing a powerful, abstract animation to Klee's magical scene.
By presenting a distinctly quantifiable number of genii described as a "sextet," Klee makes literal his ethereal entities whose presence he has counted and named, as if an otherworldly biologist, studying spirits in their natural habitat through a microscope. Animating each genie into a creature with its own expression, captured by Klee’s frame, he presents this lively gaggle of magical spirits with uniformly mask-like visages that suggest their related species, floating in imaginary space, in a parallel cosmos, made visible only by the majestic power of the artist.
Drawing from multiple sources of tribal art, hieroglyphs, folklore and medieval applied art, Klee blends these influences and incorporates them within his modern, Bauhaus-infused theory of form and color. His use of pastel colors, separated by starkly contrasting black lines and radiant glimpses of ground that were customary within Klee’s late oeuvre, gives a vibrant, immediate potency to his composition, demonstrating his refined understanding of chroma, as Grohmann has written:
“A last group of the works of the same period and type are the mysterious pastels on white cotton or jute, sometimes on paper. The colored chalks are frequently applied on a damp ground that absorbs them so that the colors disappear behind the surface. Klee liked the luminosity of pastels, their capacity for rendering sunny brightness and nocturnal dark. They maintain their radiance over the full range of the scale and on every level of intensity, and admit of monochromatic combinations of greens and blues which in a strange way suggest the whole spectrum, even the refractions that our eye cannot catch. The pastels display the same heavy contours as the other works of these years, and treat the same themes. In the figure subjects such as Child in Red (1937) and Sextet of Spirits (1937), the contours and colored planes are strongly linked together; depending on where the main emphasis is placed, they produce effects that recall stained glass windows with heavy leading, or tapestry-like fabrics with a few scattered linear accents” (Paul Klee, London, 1969, p. 336).
The curvilinear motifs of the heads of the genies and their surrounding atmosphere have a distinct sense of movement and energy to convey the shifting presence of his subject. These arabesques bring a tempo, each different in its force depending on at which point of the circle it begins and ends. This, in combination with the active color contrasts, directs the eye rapidly around the composition, making for a lively sense of activity; a labyrinth of plastic interrelationships that directs the narrative of the picture, providing a powerful, abstract animation to Klee's magical scene.
By presenting a distinctly quantifiable number of genii described as a "sextet," Klee makes literal his ethereal entities whose presence he has counted and named, as if an otherworldly biologist, studying spirits in their natural habitat through a microscope. Animating each genie into a creature with its own expression, captured by Klee’s frame, he presents this lively gaggle of magical spirits with uniformly mask-like visages that suggest their related species, floating in imaginary space, in a parallel cosmos, made visible only by the majestic power of the artist.