Paul Klee
We present today's painting thanks to Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern. :) Enjoy!
Especially during his last creative years from 1938 to 1940, Paul Klee painted and drew dozens of animals, mythical and hybrid beings, and other creatures. During this time, he was attempting to capture all his impressions of the world, so of nature and society, in pictures. Klee’s close observation of how animals and humans behave is revealed in thousands of drawings and hundreds of paintings. He tried to identify and reveal the mechanisms of the world. He wanted to hold a mirror up to us humans, and in turn present to us how we function. For him, the boundaries between the different beings—humans, animals and even plants—were fluid. Klee anthropomorphized animals and animalized humans.
Enterprising Animal is one example of this. In 1940, the year of his death, Klee drew this creature in pencil and colored paste. As is typical of this late phase of his work, Klee’s pictorial language is very reduced and consciously childlike here. He has used only the absolutely necessary visual elements to focus on the essential. His figures and creatures are outlined by just a few lines. What makes this creature the enterprising animal of the title? It is its determination! How does Klee try to represent this determination? By showing a creature that is proudly marching in a clearly visible direction, with a purposeful look on its face. While Klee could not represent movement directly, the posture of the legs makes it quite clear that this animal is moving and walking to the right.
We humans would not usually consider animals to be determined. Instead they seem to wander around, driven by their instincts. In contrast to this, forward-thinking action is reserved for humans. Klee’s Enterprising Animal was probably intended as a satire on the way people act.
P.S. It was not only Paul Klee who adored and painted animals. Read here about Franz Marc, a painter who loved horses.