PAUL KLEE by René Crevel

Would the bravest of men dare to look right in the eye of a seahorse, that horse-headed question mark, freshly surging from the depths to the surface of dream?

This handsome son of the sea, rising more vertically than the latest model elevator, this centaur whose mere presence is disturbing enough to put everything into question, what other could better symbolize Klee’s work?

For compared to this fateful and solitary little Pegasus, how much less impressive we find the weightily affirmed mastodons.

That is because there has always been, and will always be, a certain Reality to act as shepherdess to the monstrous flock.

The whales graze peacefully among the iciest of liquid steppes.

If I can trust my memories of natural history, these good substantial mothers, as clumsy at diving as the roly-poly ladies on middle-class beaches, because they do not have (like those roly-polies) the resource of shops in which to rumple ribbons, silks and trims, spit great gouts that transform water into sprays like plumes, so striking on regionalist headgear, for, thank heavens, the wives of subprefects, solicitors and colonels have not all, despite the present century, lost their sense of majesty.

Whale, empress of the polar oceans, as the rose is the queen of flowers, and the leek the asparagus of the poor, lovable cetacean, sovereign without prince consort, giantess too wise to ask for the moon, between your ice floes you sweep, free of all care, and you fatten more and better than a Batavian queen, for the icebergs spare you all temptation, even that of tulips.

Because your destiny is ceremonial, persuaded that everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds, you conclude: to each his own trade. For you have more than one ace in the blowhole and you are fond of sayings. Worldly and frivolous with your proverbs as M. de La Rochefoucauld with his maxims, you forget that both can be turned inside-out like gloves. Let’s speak of trade. For city children are thin enough to have the right to tell you that there are none but foolish ones. And, in fact, since modern science has kindly taught us that cows themselves are subject to tuberculosis, we scarcely care whether they are a little more or a little less ill-watched.

We like neither the poor man’s asparagus nor the rich man’s leeks.

Tearing off the mask of easy metaphor, we will find fine insults to throw like acid at the wisdom of nations.

And above all, no more of the mewling sensitivity that is the Sunday best of pseudo-intellectuals and pseudo-artists.

We have already a fine revenge, a fine positive joy: the gulfs that your fear seems to disdain, whale, blossom with the subtlest mysteries.

The deep-sea divers of Europe, it is true, have clumsy fingers, and Polynesian divers free of the martyrdom of lead soles harvest, as they stroll between the waves, only smooth, round pearls, like the eyelids of their innocent sleep.

Then how can we not call miracle, Paul Klee, that excursion to the secret heart of the seas whence you returned with hands full of mica, comets, crystals, a harvest of hallucinatory wrack and the gleam of submerged cities?

Everything you brought back from the abysses is worthy, in its transparency, of anglerfish. The crabs, yes, the crabs themselves have wings.

A painter opened his fists and from between the lights of his fingers incredible aviaries escaped that now populate canvases fortunately obedient to that magic.

And that is why not a single line, frail as it may be, lacks a quality of shivering thrill.

The nail-scratches that score, by cyclopean caprice, rocks and pebbles, all the graffiti of the beyond, the creatures of hypnosis and the flowers of ectoplasm have been drawn, photographed, without tricks of lighting, without fraudulent romanticism or grandiloquent expressive lies.

Here is the most intimate and also the most exact surreality.

A brush having turned magnet, the labyrinth of dream, suddenly magnetized, unfurls in long rings.

How timid the legend that made wild beasts obey Orpheus’s voice, for, now, plants and stones are moved, can no longer be still.

A world in motion, a universe of palpitating twigs, anthills freed of all policy, all constraint, because the eyes of sharks beheld their birth, a sovereign rhythm, beyond regulation, beyond time, space, precipitates the three reigns of this creation.

Then listen to me, whales and all other megalomaniacs, listen to me and remember, those fabulous animals that would gladly have fed on coil springs (1) to grow still longer and wider, those prehistoric monsters, so simple they knew not what to do with their skins (2), have left on our globe, and rightly, only their skeletons as souvenirs.

And yet, at the dawn of the ages, the family Diplodocus must have believed itself destined to reign over this globe, usque ad vitam aeternam.

I am neither prophet nor preacher, but I can tell you that there will be fleas until the Judgement Day, while the last descendant of the Diplodocus family, who must have scorned his mammoth cousins and, even more so, the elephants, his poor relations, the last and the most colossal of the fabulous quadrupeds, I say, I have only to go to the Museum, if I care to, to tickle his bones.

Paul Klee, because you have freed the infinitely small this winter, the harvest mites will sing a siren song and Europe and the two Americas will at last blush to have been seduced by the metric system. Do not give way to the temptation of the nebulous Orient, made fashionable by major newspapers and distinguished periodicals, by the paradoxes of parlor philosophy.

Stock quotation smelling of printer’s ink or Nirvana perfumed with Armenian paper, this is, if not too good, at least too easy to be true.

We know the image dear to M. Maeterlinck of the two lobes of the brain, the oriental and the occidental, one impenetrable to the other.

This metaphor, inoffensive in its aimable simplicity, exhorts the West to dream of the East. It appears, on the other hand, that the Orient buys from the Occident rifles, hats, celluloid collars, sock garters and psychological novels. We must note that these two impenetrables are—although hopelessly, like Héloïse and Abelard—in love with each other.

Europe, Asia.

The most optimistic among us hope the two might form a couple whose union could be celebrated by a song of the type that, after having racily affirmed:

The sheath is made for the knife,

concludes:

And the girl for the boy.

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No, although Paul Klee, with three grains of sand, has proved to us that the skyscrapers of New York, the Galeries Lafayette of Paris, the astonishing noctambulant bulimia of Berlin, the illuminated signs of London, are nothing for the eyes of the mind, nothing for the ears of the imagination, although he has blown up limitless eyes in the visages of the most minuscule creatures and, despite the seaweeds he has freed from their rocks, despite so many beings, plants, things less possible to deny in their imponderable surreality than our houses, our gas jets, our cafés and the meat of daily or weekly loves, according to the means of civilized temperaments, all the marvels he dispenses must not be bastardized, perverted, utilized for one cause or another.

We refuse to see in him one of those simplistic fakirs. He is the very opposite of those music hall illuminati or prophets designed for theosophic old British virgins.

Let the young European sing the brand new and already classic song of his anxieties, let the cosmetic Adonis celebrate his love of suitcases, sleeping cars, speed, and let his bronzed brother of the Antipodes play dead or living Buddha, the phraseology of rhetorical journalists, the distinctions of critics and their sophisticated postulates, all this architecture in the void cannot prevail against a drop of spontaneity.

Paul Klee, oriental?

Yes, of course, as some of his pictures seem woven in homage to the freshest visions of the Thousand and One Nights.

But let him take us amidst flowerbeds, leading by secret paths to the cavern whose walls the Stone Age animated with aurochs and reindeer. And we return with our arms filled with a bouquet of fossils, gathered in the incandescent shadow of trees of salt.

Klee’s work is a complete museum of dreaming.

The only museum without dust.

Ash itself turns to meadow around miniature villages, like those children build with their blocks.

Space, that old prejudice, is finally denounced, for cosmogonies will be the streets and the Milky Way the river of this lilliputian and magnificent paradise whose animals and their men, all nerve and sinew, salute the conflagration of flying fish.

In this light, not a pebble will be hard-headed or turn a deaf ear.

Everywhere: surprising flowerages.

And as a painter once drew on his thumbnail city walls worthy of Babylon and Palmyra, on the ceiling of their sickroom, invalids who have read his canvases will avenge their fever, silence, immobility, discovering kilometers and kilometers of stories. A bit of scaling plaster, nothing more, unveils the most dizzying secrets.

Paul Klee knows this and is tempted neither by arabesques nor by virtuosity.

The simplest material, words or paint, bridges the beyond and the beholder. Poetry is the discovery of unsuspected relationships between one element and another. The painter gifted with poetry can find in the driest geometry ladders for his dives. He rises, descends, rises again and, on the highest landing, because the key is lost that should open the door onto the sky, onto the wind, Paul Klee has only to look through the keyhole to discover, in two gaping centimeters square, a world of stars that men thought lost.

There is no more measurement. I mean that units of length, weight, volume are no longer measures. We no longer believe in the metric system. Dreams, desires cannot be paced off.

◊◊◊

Even better, I no longer believe in those metaphoric commonplaces our laziness was accustomed to enjoying without fear of surprise.

At the age of twenty-nine, I am even beginning to disbelieve in the raven, bird of ill omen, since this morning one of those nevermores settled not on a bust of Pallas, but on my balcony.

This somber character had a beak of finest yellow, canary yellow. He was so smartly red-booted that despite myself I thought of a paradoxical bride, among whose veils her face appeared farded with emerald and her feet shod in purple.

This raven of the heights answers to the remarkable sobriquet of Choucas, as though he were merely a cocaine-addicted demimondaine.

Decidedly, curators go too far, and, if they had the slightest sense of justice, they would not be astonished that Paul Klee scorns 4,810-meter mountaintops, Niagara Falls and all animals whose reputation is too well established, even if they pass for ferocious, such as lions, those traveling salesmen of the desert with their fancy ties.

Let romanticism in the taste of the day celebrate scrap iron, reinforced concrete and all those metallurgies that claim the broad-jump record. Paul Klee, vertigo-free, follows a single hair drawn between heaven and earth. His eye has grasped the miracle of colors, the whole miracle of all colors, in a drop of water, the famous, simple drop of water that overflows the jar, the ocean and, on the day of glorious wrath, the unplumbable resignation of men.

Paul Klee’s painting is proudly post-deluge, after the deluge we await to achieve the sadly incomplete work of the other.

And long live the flood.

◊◊◊

In tribute to a poet you were right, Paul Klee, to dedicate that red ladder lost in the bosom of dove-colored ether.

That ladder is the staircase, the only one that can lead us to the trampoline from which we will jump into the impossible, finally unhooking the moon.

But, if a house for fish is an aquarium, and that for palm trees a palmarium, in memory of miraculous netfuls, squirming fish become bouquets of stars, I will call heavenarium the palace of which each of your paintings is a room.

Then, even exiled in the land of custom, of flesh and blood men, of stone mountains and too-realistic trees, I need only close my eyes, as in childhood, when one discovers that darkness is a lie, because, under hermetically closed eyelids, there ignite a thousand fires, minuscule and yet larger than our patented stars

Touching brotherhood of poets.

To illustrate the delicate and powerful magic of Paul Klee, sing this line by Saint-Léger-Léger (3):

The sun is unmentioned but his power is amongst us (4)

René Crevel

Leysin, October 1929

NOTES:

1 The French term, ressorts à boudin, translates literally as “sausage springs.”

2 A literal translation of ne pas savoir quoi faire de sa peau, “to not know what to do.”

3 More commonly known by his nom de plume, Saint-John Perse.

4 Saint-John Perse, Anabasis, trans. T.S. Eliot. https://archive.org/details/anabasispoembyst0000sain/page/18/mode/2up

Translated by Phoebe Green