THE MAGICAL FEATS OF KLEE

“Art is the equivalent in American society to what the appendix is in the human body,” said Alfred Steiglitz in 1916. Today, judging by the lines for the Paul Klee exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, art has become a less expendable organ, maybe the adrenal glands.

Anyone who has liked modern art since it was an esoteric pursuit suited only to weirdos and misfits in black turtlenecks is bound to be heartened by what appears to be a quantum leap in its general appreciation. At the same time, the devotee misses his sense of being privy to cabalistic secrets and trading serenely empty galleries for hordes of citizens in a ruminative conga line.

Oh well, tempus fugit or something. Besides, this time all those jostling bodies turn out to harbor mute wisdom casting light on the art itself.

Wait a minute. Why is anybody doing a Paul Klee show now? Of all the great modernist innovators, he is among the most beloved. Even people who still don’t understand modern art now that its legacy is classic and fixed get a kick out of his wittily titled “The Twittering Machine.” But it is neither the anniversary of his birth in 1879 nor of his death in 1940, so why has the Modern organized this 300-work show (on view to May 5) along with the Kunstmuseum in Bern and the Klee Foundation? According to Carolyn Lancher, MOMA’s curator of painting and sculpture, the idea is to clear up “a tendency, critical as well as popular, to see his work as peripheral to the mainstream of 20th-Century art.”

Is that what we thought? Sometimes when museums tell us that they are out to straighten out our thinking we wind up feeling they are really up to straightening out their own.

As long as anyone can remember, Paul Klee has played the role of the Tinkerbell of modern art, a tiny magical presence who made small, glowing abstract watercolors. At first they were ink drawings, sardonic mythical satires like the “Aged Phoenix” of 1905. It shows a plucked chicken who is also a grotty female nude leaning on a skull-topped staff. According to the present catalogue, she is Klee’s send-up of traditional allegorical victory figures like Delacroix’s “Liberty Leading the People.” They say such work grew out of Klee’s youthful left-wing political convictions. That’s probably right, but we always thought it was something more general about men’s fear of women.

Essays like O.K. Werckmeister’s “From Revolution to Exile” pour out convincingly detailed documentation arguing that Klee, for all his obliqueness and irony, was responding to the social and political upheavals of his day. After Hitler assumed power in 1933, the Bauhaus, where Klee had taught, was closed. Klee was dismissed from his job at the Duesseldorf Academy by the new Nazi director. He hoped--along with other avant-garde artists--that some accommodation would be made between the two “revolutionary” groups. Evidently in the beginning no one realized the extent of the oncoming horror and hoped to be left to work in peace. That was before modernist works were confiscated and put to ridicule in Hitler’s “degenerate” art extravaganza. Klee finally despaired and fled to Bern, his birthplace, but nonetheless a city where he felt himself in exile. Works of the period, such as “Mask of Fear,” are said to be direct responses to these circumstances and probably they were.

Other essays are at pains to put Klee directly at the hub of modernism, admired by the Surrealists, influencing the young Miro and Andre Masson, central to the thinking of artists of the Munich avant-garde. He was supposed to have been an inspiration to the early New York School and works like “Intention” of 1938 predict both Gottlieb and Pollock, while his chromatic watercolors connect to such abstract mystics as Rothko and Newman. He certainly was crucial to the development of Saul Steinberg and William Steig, and anyone who thinks his power to teach is over is invited to note the striking similarities between his 1939 “Outbreak of Fear” and the recent work of L.A. artist William Brice.

This solidily Teutonic approach to Klee rings with sonorous accuracy, but the attempt to make him a heavyweight is like trying to weigh a dandelion puff on a truck scale.

Those rapt crowds at MOMA really tell us what it is all about. The first three or four galleries are lined with work up to about 1924. It’s all small, rarely much bigger than a kid’s notebook page. People are absolutely riveted to it. They stand tolerantly waiting for the guy ahead to get finished so they can have their turn getting lost in it.

You start to realize that these are pictures of the inside of our minds, uniquely predictive of not only the substance of much other art but of the notion of conceptualism and wordworks to boot.

The myths and visions that float here are more timeless than any temporal event. The kid we all used to be is alive in there and when he sees “The Great Kaiser Armed for Battle,” it isn’t Wilhelm or Adolf, it is the universal bogyman no matter what inspired the vision. What some smart people really think about Klee is that he was ultimately a light-weight because there is so much charm and humor in folk-surrealist works like “Carnival in the Mountains.” When you look, though, the work is a very particular reinvention of a Germanic talent for setting its art exactly on the border between absurdity and horror so you don’t know whether to laugh or shriek. The way Klee plays it, you are the kid making up his mind if the bogey is ominous or silly. It’s up to you. It’s a test.

There is something about Klee that draws us back to him for skeptical re-evaluation, probably an irritating personality that seeps out of the work, a brand of European ironist we still don’t see often in this country. Klee draws us into his magical landscape with a courtly bow and a slight smirk, but he keeps a dandified distance himself.

Klee knew an extraordinary amount about what he was doing. His “Pedagogical Sketchbook” is one of the most intelligent documents ever written about the mechanics of picture-making. His pictures are obvious demonstrations of the theory of visualgrammar. (“Stricken Place” looks like the prototype for Steinberg’s famous New York poster.) So Klee was a virtuoso in miniature, a Prospero who makes a land of enchanted poetry and glass-chime music while telling us exactly how the trick is done. The kid, the teacher and the magician are all working at once, just as they are in every adult mind.

His greatest achievement is the evocation of the mental landscape, disembodied and limitless. He tells us how he does it in “Actor’s Mask.” The face, with its horizontal lines, is also a vast desert at a time of green sunset when the shifting sands become the surf of oceans.

Smart as Klee was, there had to be an element of intuition in his genius or he could not have grasped such marvelous visions or made such dumb mistakes.

Around 1930 he started to make bigger pictures. When the crowd that was hypnotized by the little works gets to them, the spell is broken. Everyone meanders around as at any other painting show. There are wonderful images here like “Colorful Meal,” with its tipsy pink bunny and syncopated tick-tock space, but Klee evidently forgot that small scale, with its suggestions of shyness and imaginative concentration, is the perfect metaphor for both his fantasy and his theoretical notation.

The catalogue suggests that Klee was following a ‘30s tendency to move up in scale to recapture the old historical importance of art that communicated to the masses through murals. The Mexican muralists painted big public pictures. Picasso made the huge “Guernica.”

If that thesis is true, it is a fine negative lesson for the hordes of present artists who put ambition before personal integrity. Klee’s big pictures are masterful but lacking the aqueous magic of watercolor. They look dry and stuck on their surfaces like wallpaper on stucco. Intimate themes of confusion and delicate mental balance had a cosmic impact when small. Brought up to normal scale they look like over-played gags. Secrets should be whispered.