Psychic Penmanship

THE DIARIES OF PAUL KLEE, 1898-1918, edited by Felix Klee. 424 pages. University of California Press. $10.

"I am abstract with memories," was Paul Klee's artistic credo, and he propelled 20th century art away from the imitation of nature toward the imitation of the human mind. He was mainly a draftsman, and his sharp pen point pricked out tense traceries of squiggles dots and arrows that are hieroglyphs of the heart. Now fully published in English as edited by his son, Klee's diaries sketch the memories that his art made abstract.

Becoming a Man. His childhood in Switzerland was as sheltered as an artist could hope for. The major trauma of his early recollections was being forced to wear overlong underwear at age three, and even that incident he treasured as an early assertion of his "aesthetic sensibility." And if he needed any corroboration, he was simultaneously registering "very precocious, yet extremely intense impressions of the beauty of little girls. I was sorry I was not a girl myself so I could wear ravishing, lace-trimmed white panties."

At 18, he decided that though "art would follow inevitably, I had first of all to become a man." His father, who was a music professor, indulged him with a tolerance far in advance of the times. In the next four years, his family picked up the tab for drawing classes in Munich, "May wine orgies" with the models, a tour of Italy, and conscience payments to a pregnant mistress.

Mostly, though, Klee worked harder than he played, and the "bent for the bizarre" he noted in himself as early as age nine was soon hammered into a credo. "I am not here," he proclaimed, "to reflect the surface (this can be done by a photographic plate), but must penetrate inside." That meant to Klee burrowing into the psyche and borrowing the squiggly insights of children and madmen, not to mention invoking his own unconscious, as in one of his diary's bursts of poetry: "Open thyself, thou gate in the depths . . . / Forth you beautiful pictures, wild beasts, / Spring forth from thy cage . . ."

Dah-Dit Art. Klee's art was once attacked as infantile. Indeed its flat, scrawly appearance has a childlike look, but children are no longer believed to be quite so innocent or so immature. Certainly Klee was fascinated with children. While his wife Lily earned the family living as a piano teacher, he meticulously jotted down a calendar of his baby son's growth. Typical entry: "July 8. Says: Dayi-da; screams: day-dayi-da. This is the way he demands his breakfast in the morning." Klee's art, with its dah-dits and dayi-dahs, became a Morse code of human thoughts.

By 32, Klee had already probed, as he put it, "beyond impressionism" and had become an unwitting prophet of the surrealism to come. More important, after many self-doubting years of dabbling at writing and moonlighting as a violinist, he declared during a Tunisian trip: "Color and I are one. I am a painter." Once he had wondered: "Am I God?" Now he was sure that his creative fire exceeded "white heat. In my work, I do not belong to the species, but am a cosmic point of reference."

World War I brought him up short. As a German citizen, he was subject to the draft. He was ordered to a labor battalion and put to work varnishing airplane fuselages. Of war, he wrote that "the whole business had as much sense to it as a wad of dung on a shoe heel." This led him to embrace abstraction as the only viable affirmation of life possible. "The more horrible this world." he wrote, "the more abstract our art, whereas a happy world brings forth an art of the here and now."

Private First Class Klee leaves his diaries in 1918 as an unhappy warrior. The best was yet to come. After the war, he was appointed to a teaching post at the newly prestigious Bauhaus in Weimar, where he and Gropius, Breuer and Kandinsky rewrote the canons of art and architecture so thoroughly that neither has ever been the same since. His paintings, though they had to wait until after World War II to be fully appreciated, sold well enouah to keep him in comfort until he died in 1940, aged 60 and full of honors, in a sanatorium near Locarno.

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