The Big Pictures

ArtForum, Oct, 1999 by Yve-Alain Bois

Such reticence might have to do with the fact that the artist is alive and active, but another recent publication shows that an artist can also be looking posthumously over the editor's shoulder. Paul Klee Catalogue Raisonne: Volume I (Thames & Hudson, $225) covers the years 1883-1912 (eight more volumes are in preparation). As in the case of the Twombly, its 901 individual entries are bare-bones ID cards (unlike the former opus, however, the design of this catalogue does not shine: What is the Swiss fixation on sans-serif fonts?). Begun ten years ago, this is a collective affair (the book is unsigned). Yet, though anonymous looking, it definitely has a main author: Not the last person in charge (Christian Rumelin, who authored the short, informative introduction), but the artist himself, the first cataloger of this oeuvre.

Klee adopted a strictly chronological order, numbering his works in the course of making them, independent of medium. He started recording his works in 1911, and it is also at this time that he retrospectively compiled (signed, dated, numbered, etc.) all his production "since [his] childhood." The Swiss team was wise to follow Klee's model - and augment or correct it when there was evidence for doing so - for it reveals that historical sequencing was more important to the artist than medium, and one wonders whether the rule should not be applied to most artists of this century whenever precise dating is available. This organizational principle demonstrates how much Klee's famous experimentation with subjectiles in his mature years is grounded in a very early to-and-fro between media - and one strongly regrets that more detailed information about Klee's exceptional variety of techniques was not made available to the reader. Since the handful of oils are not isolated in a category of their own, one has a hard time singling them out. As they strongly resemble the much larger number of works on paper or cardboard, they do not jump out at you - which means that from the start Klee conceived his paintings, in some sense, as drawings.

An even more idiosyncratic aspect of the Klee catalogue is that it starts in childhood (the first recorded work dates from 1883, when the artist was three years old - and he is only sixteen at number 100!). No artist, to my knowledge, has ever included in his corpus his work as a toddler (Picasso's first recorded works date from ca. 1890, when he was nine, and he denied their infantile character). Klee's fascination for the "art of children" is well known (a substantial literature exists on the topic), but coming on the heels of the widespread display of de Kooning's late works (at the other end of the biological span, when the artist was ill with Alzheimer's disease), the publication of this dossier will force us to reconsider the nature of artistic agency. I have to admit that Klee always bored me because I found him so predictable: By its very inclusiveness, this first volume changes my mind (I hope the following ones will follow suit).