PAUL KLEE AT THE MUSÉE DE L’ORANGERIE IN PARIS

par Branko Aleksić

There is real relevance in the fact that the Paul Klee (1897-1940) exhibition at the Musée national de L'Orangerie is organized, from April to July 2010, by the Musée national de L'Orangerie (general curator: Emmanuel Bréon, director of the Musée de L'Orangerie, and Marie-Madeleine Massé, curator at the Museum) and by the Beyeler Foundation in Riehen / Basel (Philippe Büttner, curator at the Beyeler Foundation of Switzerland), in exchange for an important group of Douanier Rousseau paintings (purchased at the time by collector Paul Guillaume on Guillaume Apollinaire's suggestion), loaned for an exhibition devoted to the latter by the Beyeler Foundation (February-May 2010)... The works of Douanier Rousseau, once perceived, like those of Klee, as "works of child or madman," will be defended, following Apollinaire, by Picasso, Aragon and especially Wilhelm Uhde, as well as André Breton. Before citing Klee in the Manifesto of Surrealism of 1924 (OC I, p. 330n) among those painters who have "heard the surrealist voice" and who exempted themselves from the "harmonious sound" of traditional painting, Breton had insisted that Jacques Doucet, famous couturier and patron, "buy a little Paul Klee" (might this not be the painting under glass that Simone Kahn-Breton possessed...?). If we return to the footnote in the Manifesto of Surrealism, we note that many of the painters cited by Breton: "...Picasso..., Duchamp, Picabia, Chirico (so long admirable), Klee, Man Ray, Max Ernst and, so close to us, André Masson." (OC I, 330n), found themselves reunited – with the exception of Chirico and Duchamp – in the first collective exhibition "La Peinture surréaliste" at the Galerie Pierre, at 13 rue Bonaparte, on November 13, 1925, at midnight. There were exhibited paintings by Picasso, Chirico, Arp, Ernst, Masson, Miró, Klee, Tanguy, and Pierre Roy (the only one who remained unknown, despite a monograph that André Masson had devoted to him). Klee had known since the Dada period, and Arp and Ernst, who had visited him in Munich in 1920. Regarding the Picasso/Klee rivalry, the two Parisian exhibitions were thus the first opportunity for Picasso to see Klee – their meeting in Bern, where Picasso, after his retrospective in Switzerland, will visit the sick painter, in 1937, perhaps left a pictorial trace: Philippe Büttner detects a sort of ironic allusion in a work by Klee entitled Skepsis dem Stier gegenüber ("Mistrust toward the bull," 1938): "it shows a very dominant, very Spanish bull, and beside it a small, somewhat tortured face, like that of Klee" (Catalogue of the exhibition at L'Orangerie, p. 6).

Let us say that it is on the occasion of his double presence in two Parisian galleries that four drawings by Paul Klee, no more no less, were reproduced – without any commentary – in the review La Révolution surréaliste, no. 3, of April 15, 1925, an issue placed under the responsibility of Antonin Artaud. Since the table of the twelve issues of LRS (summarized in no. 12 of 12.12.1929, p. 77-80), had omitted to mention the names of the illustrators (imitated in this by the Indexes of the facsimile reprint at J.-M. Place, 1975, p. XII-XIX), the titles have since lent themselves to confusion. An excellent notice on Klee in the Dictionnaire général du surréalisme, P.U.F., 1982, specifies that Klee "collaborates with a [sic] drawing, Départ des bateaux to La R.S. no. 3" (p. 232); as well as a notice by E-A. Hubert in the Complete Works of Breton, t. I, p. 1704, and the preface by Pierre Klosowski to Klee's Journal which evokes (p. 8) "several of his drawings reproduced in La Révolution surréaliste." Let us note here once and for all these four titles by Klee in LRS, no. 3: p. 5, Château des croyants; p. 19 untitled (heart and man-bird figure); p. 21, Paroles parcimonieuses de l'avare [letters: Krg, Wrt, Sp.]; finally p. 27, Dix-sept égarés. This last drawing bearing at the bottom left the number 17 and at the top toward the left, the letters: IRR (probably the acronym for "IRRWEGEN," these "false paths" on which Klee moralizes not without irony in his Journal, p. 81, citing a satirical composition of 1901 entitled "Moralisierend auf Irrwegen," "Moralizing on false paths"; these paths and ravines to which Simone Collinet will allude in 1965), the title of the drawing presented by Klee in the 1925 collective surrealist exhibition is an error when cited by the title "IRR" (Dictionnaire général du surréalisme, loc. cit.)

In their preface for the exhibition at the Galerie Pierre, Breton and Desnos make a descriptive relation of the catalogue, starting from the titles of exhibited works. Thus, the titles of the two respective works: Un homme, by Arp, and La montagne entr'ouverte by Klee, justify the sentence: "Very far away a man prepares to climb the half-opened mountain. He is visited nightly by miracles [...]" The other titles, and the two painters cited (Arp and Klee), lend themselves to the game of the following sentence: "...You will soon leave this strange country caressed by too many wings: wings of birds that we no longer know – birds in an aquarium [Arp] -, changing wings of bird alighting [Klee] on the grass of clearings," etc. (OC I, p. 915; E.-A. Hubert's notice, p. 1704, specifies that the Oiseau s'abattant belonged to Jacques Doucet. Let us add that it was reproduced in LRS no. 3, where this single drawing had remained untitled).

Let us also conclude that it is with a view to making Klee participate in this very first collective surrealist exhibition, in November 1925, that Breton had immersed himself in Zahn's monograph, the Goltz gallery catalogue and the review Der Sturm. Whatever the case, the poetic descriptions by Breton and Desnos of 1925 do not touch the heart of the pictorial flight of the Icarus-Klee figure!

One should emphasize the scope of Klee's collaboration with surrealist publications. His drawings were reproduced in LRS no. 3 without any commentary and no chronicle in these pages marked Klee's first personal Parisian exhibition. Only the context of the reproductions leaves room for speculation: is it by a secret affinity with the quotation from Lao-Tzu on writing and ropes, at the end of Theodor Lessing's essay on the opposition between Europe and Asia (trans. from German by Denise Lévy, future wife of Pierre Naville), that one chooses to publish at the bottom of this same page 21 Klee's drawing-writing, "Paroles parcimonieuses... [Kg – Wrt – Sp.]"? Is it as a paradox that Dix-sept égarés is reproduced below Pierre Naville's article entitled "Beaux-Arts" stipulating that "No one any longer ignores that there is no surrealist painting." ? (LRS, no. 3, 1925, p. 27). It is in no. 4 of this same review, July 15, 1925 – the last issue directed jointly by Benjamin Péret and Pierre Naville –, that Breton, who takes over the direction of the review, begins his essay "Le Surréalisme et la Peinture" (p. 26-30). But for the promise given at the end of the article to be fulfilled: "to be continued"..., one had to wait for the first edition of the essay Le Surréalisme et la Peinture, in 1928, for Breton to contradict Naville and, among other things, problematize Klee's "(partial) Automatism." On a full page of LRS, no. 11, March 15, 1928, spreads the advertisement for the GALERIE SURRÉALISTE at 16, rue Jacques-Callot, for a "permanent exhibition of works by: Arp, Braque, Chirico, Ernst, Klee, Malkine, Masson, Miró, Picabia, Picasso, Man Ray, Tanguy, etc." (p. 2).

Now, if surrealist painting exists, can the technique of automatism be applied to it? One of these surrealist painters, Juan Miró will declare "that he had felt, thanks to Paul Klee, that in all plastic expression, there is something more than painting-painting, and that one had to go beyond to reach zones of deeper emotion" (quoted by Noëmi Blumenkranz, article "Klee" in the Dictionnaire général du surréalisme, 1982, p. 232).

Furthermore, Bjerke-Petersen will write Symbols in Abstract Art (1941), following Klee's methods at the Bauhaus; symbols that he will associate with Miró's signs, prototype of a "non-realist" surrealism; we would say today: non-figurative. (La Planète affolée, Surréalisme, dispersion et influences 1938-1947, catalogue of the homonymous exhibition organized by Germain Viatte, co-edition Musée de Marseille-Flammarion, 1986, curiously lists Klee in the articles on Quebec and Denmark..., but finally, it is thanks to the article on Freddie by Pete Shield that we learn of Klee's participation in the Cubism-Surrealism exhibition in Copenhagen in 1935. An extract from Bjerke-Petersen's work, Surréalisme-Abstrakt Kunst, Aalborg, 1941, is quoted p. 204 and 211.)

The discovery of Paul Klee's work began in France in 1925, on the occasion of this first personal Parisian exhibition at the Galerie Vavin-Raspail, whose catalogue was presented by Louis Aragon, in October, and the first collective surrealist exhibition in which he participated at the Galerie Pierre, in November of the same year. Klee's works then circulated in the successive collective surrealist exhibitions organized in France and abroad, England, Belgium, Denmark, United States. Thus Klee's work, in its full maturity of means, after the First World War, finds echo among a dozen French and Spanish surrealist poets, writers and painters: Valentine Hugo, Aragon, Breton, Crevel, Desnos, Duchamp, Éluard, Limbour, Masson, Vitrac and Miró... It seems to me that it would be interesting to examine the relations maintained by the writers and painters of the surrealist movement with their German elder, relying on Klee's illustrations published in the surrealist publications of the time (1925-1929), as well as on various texts – including Aragon's mentioned preface which appeared in the catalogue of Klee's first personal exhibition in Paris, accompanied by a poem by Éluard of which Klee is the object, as well as the correspondence exchanged between Éluard and Klee in 1928; a preface by Breton and Desnos written for the collective surrealist exhibition in which Klee participated, as well as the mentions of Klee by Breton in the Manifesto of Surrealism (1924), in the Almanach surréaliste du demi-siècle (1950) and in the essay L'Art et la Magie (1957), then the texts by Limbour (1929), Crevel (1929/1931), André Masson (1946), Duchamp (1949), etc. The presentation of this proximity relationship could bring together a certain number of documents that have only recently resurfaced from the heritage of Paul Éluard, then of Louise and Michel Leiris, finally of Simone and André Breton (associated with Philippe Soupault in the sale of paintings): we discover that three surrealists possessed Klee's works at the time: Simone Kahn-Breton a painting under glass, Paul Éluard several paintings and drawings, and the Leiris a painting.

At the level of the "rigorous" painting theory developed by Klee, it would be instructive to confront it with the theories of Surrealism and Painting (1928) and L'Art magique (1957), two works by André Breton to whose pitch Klee's "partial" automatism seems integrated.

This reception of Klee by the surrealists then faces two major problems. First, the opacity of the painter's character and the tradition he carries (he made two very brief first Parisian trips in 1904 and 1912, with the very particular aim of seeing the painting in galleries and museums). This explains why the surrealists know nothing of the path traveled by young Klee. The divergences will be lifted thanks to common affinities with painters that Klee esteems and that the surrealists will consider as their predecessors – Alfred Kubin, Klee's friend since 1911, and Douanier Rousseau for example, whose work Klee during his second Parisian stay, will seek to discover in the private collection of painter and collector Wilhelm Uhde, and for others, in the private collection of Daniel H. Kahnweiler, who was not only a great collector of Pablo Picasso and the author of a great study on cubist painting, but also a gallery owner who from 1924 exhibited André Masson presented by Georges Limbour. (Georges Limbour will publish in book form his essay on Masson from the review Documents of 1930: André Masson, Braun, 1951, and André Masson et son univers, Lausanne, "Trois collines," 1947 – with Michel Leiris, but will not reprint the article on Klee of 1929 in any of his other books.)

The customs and habits of the French art market are transparent through texts like those of Robert Desnos (1900-1945) or Simone Breton née Kahn (1897-1980), owner of a gallery Place de Furstenberg. Robert Desnos will leave a poignant document on the sale, in 1921, of the collection of "German citizen Kahnweiler – sequestered as a German in Paris and [at the same time] pursued as a deserter in Germany." (Robert Desnos, "Les ventes Kahnweiler," Nouvelles Hébrides et autres textes 1922-1930, edition established, presented and annotated by M.-C. Dumas, Gallimard, 1978, p. 312.) Later, in the 1925s, Simone Breton-Kahn bought from Kahnweiler among others a painting under glass by Klee. Simone wanted to send as a gift to her Strasbourg first cousin Denise Lévy, several paintings including a Klee, and a Fernand Léger that she thought to exchange "for the little Picasso" from the Kahnweiler collection: "...For the paintings (Klee, etc.) I'll talk to you about it again," she promises in her letter of 20-01-1923; so she has possessed this Klee at least since 1922. Simone still wonders on October 3, 1924 from Paris to Strasbourg: "How to make you receive the Klee which is a marvel. A wooden plate stretched with admirable crocodile skin and the two small landscapes covered with a thick glass plate that protrudes on both sides. It's delightful." Finally, on October 12, 1924, she explains that "the Klee frame is 190 F." (Simone Breton, Lettres à Denise Lévy, edition established by Georgiana Colvile, Paris, éd. Joëlle Losfeld, 2005, pp. 108, 204 and 209). Later, in a conference on surrealist painting given in Latin America, Simone Breton (become Collinet), will explain in 1965:

"Klee could have, through his multiform genius, as happened subsequently, indicated the paths and ravines, as well as the summits of this traditional rally, but although having weighed on Max Ernst's orientation, he was still too little known in France." (op. cit., annex text, p. 266).

Then, the surrealists have their own point of view, from their own cultural milieu. They are interested in the German painter in the themes of primary painting, children's creation, madmen, magic art, finally in automatism in painting – this "partial automatism" that Breton is willing to see in Klee... These problems will be resolved in an extraordinary way, proper to surrealist genius... Thanks to a gift of clairvoyance, Robert Desnos, principal oracle of the "mouth of shadow," of these so-called "sleep" sentences, where he is capable of confusing Max Ernst ("He will play with the mad...") and Giorgio de Chirico (to the question what does he know of Éluard, Desnos answers: "Chirico...," since the poet collects his paintings and drawings), he will resort to an anecdote about Klee teaching drawing to the blind. Georges Limbour who will also point out Klee's arborescent imagination through the image of crystal frozen on windows in winter – "a magnificent crystal background pullulating with prisms, stars, trees with radiations loaded with fruits and flowers..." - another effect of clairvoyance. Limbour will write: "no doubt that Klee must have shown, from his childhood, a surprising skill and taste for this game." (Documents, 1929).

The fact is presented as indubitable: "no doubt...," he affirms! One finds confirmation in Klee's Journal, which Limbour could not yet know, but which he seems able to predict or read over his shoulder:

"In my uncle's restaurant, the fattest man in Switzerland, there were tables with polished marble tops, offering on their surface a tangle of veins. In this labyrinth of lines, one could discern the contours of grotesque physiognomies and delimit them with pencil. I was passionate about it and my propensity for the bizarre was documented there."

Klee situates the event around his nine years; he notes it in the reminiscence part of his Journal (begun in 1899, at the age of nineteen). The importance of the memory resurfaces on the occasion of a theoretical page on oil painting, noted a decade later, in April 1908, in two points:

"1) Arrangement of color spots in various complexes, according to sensibility, indelible, essential principle.

2. Objectively read this "nothing" (the marble tables at my uncle's restaurant), extract figures from it and specify them by a structuring of light and shadow. (...)"

Here are the two "readings": first that of the painter, who from these lines read in the marbling of a first symbolic board of open drawing, arrives at the painting he calls "rigorous" — unlike for example the painting of French impressionists (Journal, ed. Grasset, collection "Cahiers rouges," 1959, pp. 145, 159, 173, documents the rigor of painter Klee), and that of the surrealist seers, who in the lines of Klee's works literally divine his taste for the comic as well as his propensity for the bizarre.

Retrospectively, the Almanach surréaliste du demi-siècle (Paris, special no. 63-64 of la Nef, éd. du Sagittaire, March 1950) that André Breton and Benjamin Péret will compose, will mention, in the "Arts" section for the year 1907, Klee's painting Divertissement musical – the event paired with Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon (p. 211). This Almanach is illustrated with numerous drawings, including a reproduction of L'Homme by Alfred Kubin (1901), with a notice on the painter, insisting on his crises of mental alienation and on his "quest to transcend immediate reality" (p. 79). Klee mentions Kubin in his Journal in the same sense (ed. Grasset, pp. 7, 236 and 332). They met in Munich and became friends. Having chosen the Divertissement musical for Klee's first title, the one that will accentuate the artist's double employment: his musical and pictorial tastes seems to us a capital decision. Retrospectively, one will learn, at the public sale of the Collection of books, manuscripts, photographs and paintings by Breton, that he had documented himself on Klee by means of three publications from the 1920s: the pioneering monograph by Leopold Zahn, Paul Klee. Leben, Werk, Gheist (Potsdam, Gustav Kienheuer Verlag); the catalogue of the exhibition of more than 250 works by Paul Klee at the Hans Goltz Gallery in Munich - the same one that had organized, in 1912, a graphic exhibition of the "Blue Rider" with Kandinsky, Klee and Franz Marc (cf. Klee's Journal, p. 280), finally the Berlin review Der Sturm, devoted to Paul Klee...

But among the surrealist writers and painters, Klee's name is first pronounced by Louis Aragon, whom André Thirion will describe in his memoirs as an "admirer of Klee" (Révolutionnaires sans révolution, Paris, éd. Robert Laffont, 1972, p. 280). Aragon, aware of Klee's teaching at the Bauhaus, wonders in a text sent from Berlin for Littérature, no. 6 (n. s.) from November 1, 1922 if, in Weimar, "youth will prefer Paul Klee to his predecessors." He adds: "Kandinsky lives there..." (indeed, Klee and Kandinsky are both on the Bauhaus project from 1921 until 1931). In a second article, "Paul Klee," which presents only one of the four segments of a panoramic composition published in La Vie moderne on February 25, 1923, Aragon, embarrassed to choose between "the delicacy of his watercolors or [...] the constantly renewed invention of his drawings," speaks of "the great painter of Weimar" to whom he confers "the lightness, grace, spirit, charm that are essentially his own." But Klee's drawings and watercolors, says Aragon, "will doubtless appear to our amateurs [...] works of child or madman." This patent interest of the surrealists in the creative universe of children, or of painters called neo-primitives (such as Douanier Rousseau), will also be expressed by Georges Limbour (1900-1970) in another article in the "Paul Klee" series (second in our chronology of surrealist writings), published in Georges Bataille's review Documents, no. 1, in April 1929:

"While being careful not to push the analogy too far, one could remember certain children's drawings, which are not embarrassed by any concern capable of hindering the momentum of their imagination: perspective, logic, resemblance."

With subtlety for the history of the surrealist movement, Aragon will take up the segment of his 1923 article word for word in constituting his preface for a first individual Parisian exhibition of Klee at the Galerie Vavin-Raspail, on October 20, 1925 (Neuf aquarelles de Paul Klee), while adding a profession of faith by the painter that deserves to be reported here: "One could not conceive of me from Here-below, - he says. – For I sojourn as much among the dead as among those who are going to be born. Closer to the heart of creation than one ordinarily is. And far from being close enough."

These remarks, recorded in 1925, echo the Journal of the end of the First War, where Klee mourns Franz Mark, the lost friend of the Der Bleue Reiter group. These lines present a real break with the real and the engulfment of a state of permanent transcendence – a sort of cosmic mysticism –, which will make possible a rapprochement with the "surreality" proclaimed in the Manifesto of 1924. René Crevel will insist in his monograph on Klee in 1931: "And here is the most intimate and also the most exact surreality. A brush become magnet, the labyrinth of dream, suddenly magnetized, unfolds in long rings." Yet, there is an abyss that separates the notion of "lightness" with which Aragon embellishes Klee's feeling, from the painter's confession recorded in his intimate journal, on the enormous weight of the tragic destiny he has carried since the Great War.

One can link these remarks by Klee, reinforced by a poem on the painter ("...and the blue eyes of love") composed by Paul Éluard in the margin of the catalogue Neuf aquarelles de Paul Klee, then by Robert Desnos's article of 1926, as premonitory of the distance that Klee will take with his Parisian public. Despite displayed affinities, he will never be recruited into the surrealist group... But Klee, twenty years older than the surrealists, reputed master of the Bauhaus, without being a member of Breton's group, willingly participates in several collective exhibitions of surrealist painting: 1st collective surrealist exhibition organized at the Galerie Pierre, in Paris, in November 1925, followed by two exhibitions in Belgium: "Minotaure" Exhibition in the Palais des Beaux-Arts, in Brussels in 1934 and in La Louvière in 1935, then thematic international exhibition Cubism-Surrealism organized in Copenhagen by painter and theorist Vilhelm Bjerke-Petersen (1909-1957) with Breton's help, also in 1935, and the following year, at the International Surrealist Exhibition in London (New Burlington Galleries). After Klee's death in 1940 (which will be marked in the Almanach surréaliste du demi-siècle), Breton insists on evoking him in a last collective exhibition: First Papers of Surrealism, at the Reid Mansion Gallery in New York in 1942. Indeed, for Klee this is nothing of a first. He had his personal exhibition in New York as early as 1929. The Flechtheim Gallery in Berlin announced it in a full page in the review Documents, in Paris, at the end of 1930. Another advertisement from the same gallery in Documents, no. 4 and no. 5 (2nd year, 1930, p. [V]), announces the International Exhibition in the German Pavilion in 1930, in which Klee participates with Baumeister, Beeckmann, Belling, Grosz, Hofer, Kolbe, Lehmbruck and Renée Sintenis. It is to write the monograph of the latter that Flechtheim engages Crevel. From Crevel's correspondence with Mopsa Sternheim (see below), one can conclude that this advertisement in Documents was due to the personal intervention, during his trip to Paris, of Alfred Flechtheim, publisher, director of the gallery that bears his name and of the review Der Querschnitt, where he publishes the articles on painting by his friend Crevel to help him financially. Crevel gives him the unequivocal nickname: "old Arrow."

The symbolic attachment of the surrealists to Klee thus participates, as in the case of Chirico, in a "constitutive" strategy of Breton's group. For, as Jacques Baron will remark, "Klee either – a question of age – was not surrealist to the letter and Chirico, the great surprising one of metaphysical landscapes, refused this quality for more or less well-founded reasons." (Jacques Baron, "Le Surréalisme et Georges Papazoff" - preface to the monograph by Andrei B. Nakov on Papazoff (1894-1972), Bulgarian painter who claimed Klee's influence (pp. 24, 48). After the 1925 collective exhibition, Papazoff participated with Klee, Braque, Lurçat and others in a group exhibition at the Vavin-Raspail gallery directed by Max Berger, Swiss poet from Aaran, in 1928 ("Biographical notice" by Nakov, p. 149).

After the Second World War, this will be a strategy that we can call confirmation: the Paul Klee retrospective at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, and its catalogue prefaced by Georges Limbour, in 1948, was preceded by a special dossier "Paul Klee" in Les Cahiers d'art 1945-1946, with texts and testimonies by Tristan Tzara, Joë Bosquet, Georges Bataille, Roger Vitrac, Valentine Hugo, as well as by an "Éloge à Paul Klee" by André Masson in the review Fontaine, no. 53, June 1946. Among the surrealist painters, and beyond the metaphorical language of the poets, it is Duchamp, Masson, Miró who will lavish the most pertinent observations on the technical aspect of Klee's painting. Thus Duchamp in a condensed text of 1949, will break the legend of the naive painter of infantile scenes, by pointing out all the seriousness of the technical research that is to be discovered behind the appearances of Klee's painting.

Paul Éluard who exhorts Joë Bosquet: "Do you know Paul Klee? His watercolors and his remarks are marvelous..." (Arosa, February 1929), seems to be one of the first surrealists who evaluated these remarks on the art of Paul Klee, famous for his Creative Confession: it is through "plastic means" that a painter "brings back this plunge into the depths...".

Éluard will take up his poem "Paul Klee" from the catalogue of the Galerie Vavin-Raspail (1925), first in Capitale de la douleur (1926; sent to the painter), then in Donner à voir (1939). In the catalogue-book Paul Éluard et ses amis peintres (Centre Georges Pompidou, 1982), this poem was illustrated by Blaubetonter Kopf, painting by Klee of 1933 (oil and gouache, 20.5 X 32.5 cm; private coll., Paris). Annick Lionel-Marie, who composes the part of the catalogue "Rendez-vous des amis" (paraphrase of the famous painting by Max Ernst staging the surrealist group), adds two precious pieces of information. The first concerns the former Éluard collection (p. 130) which included, besides various watercolors and the aforementioned Blaubetonter Kopf, two other paintings: Le Chevalier de Hohen C (1921) and Kairouan, painted around 1933. The second information concerns the Klee-Éluard correspondence: upon receiving Éluard's collection of poems in 1928, Klee thanks him with a letter addressed from Dessau on April 21, 1928, where he expresses the desire to illustrate one of the poet's works, "although, if he refers to his memories of the illustration of Voltaire's Candide – which took him two years of work – illustration is for him a hard combat." (Klee's letter published in the catalogue L'Univers de Paul Klee, Paris, Berggruen, 1955).

Will follow René Crevel with his monograph Paul Klee (N.R.F., Paris, 1930, coll. "Peintres nouveaux"), the author of the preface, under the same title: "Merci, Paul Klee!" for the catalogues of the three exhibitions at the Alfred Flechtheim Gallery, Berlin, 1928; Bernheim-Jeune Gallery, Paris, 1929 and Hanover, in 1931. It was a commission from "old Arrow," as revealed by Crevel's correspondence with Mopsa Sternheim, artist, painter and theater decorator, daughter of expressionist writer Carl Sternheim and his wife Stoisy. (Cf. René Crevel, Lettres à Mopsa, Paris, éditions Paris-Méditerranée, texts established and presented by Michel Carassou, 1997). Furthermore, Alfred Flechtheim, "this old doll" (pp. 55-56 sq) also commissions Crevel articles on Max Ernst (October 1928), Picasso (December 1928) but also a German animal sculptor, Renée Sintenis (1888-1965); "old Arrow wants me to make a book on Renée Sintenis well paid..." (p. 103). But Crevel's interest did not remain ephemeral, for he will castigate Hitler's regime for having "chased, or put in the impossibility of producing modern painters and sculptors such as Klee, Hofer, Kokoschka, Barbach, Liebermann." ("La situation culturelle dans l'Allemagne nazie," Roman cassé et dernier écrits, p. 59); insisting on the fact that "Klee, Kokoschka and many others had only to pack their bags." ("L'art dans l'ombre de la maison brune," Commune, no. 21, May 1935; ibid., p. 97). Klee, for his part, rejoined his native country in Bern in 1933, to die there in Switzerland, in 1940. The Almanach surréaliste du demi-siècle, mentions Klee's death, p. 221, in the "Faits divers" section.

Among the twenty-six paintings and drawings from the Beyeler Foundation exhibited at the Musée de l'Orangerie, the first seven, from the years 1912-1925, with the themes of writing-painting, apparently childish landscapes, states of possession and delirium, belong to the reminiscent period that had caught the surrealists' attention. Hoch und stralend steht de Mond [The moon is there, high and resplendent], watercolor and pen on paper, from 1916, represents the pictorial transcription of the first stanza of a poem by Wang Seng Yu, Chinese poet (fortunately reconstituted in the list of works compiled at the end of the catalogue, p. 92). This watercolor thus belongs to the cycle of "secret writings," as Klee named his ideographic explorations of painted letters; La Révolution surréaliste, no. 3, in 1925 had logically chosen to begin its first reproductions in France with the Château des croyants, drawing-stele scriptory. The Besessenes Mädchen [Possessed Girl], watercolor traced on paper, mounted on cardboard, from 1924, plunges the top of the head into mists and darkness. Klee will take up this same motif in Krankes Mädchen [Sick Girl], illustration for L'homme approximatif, poem by Tristan Tzara, 1931. (Regards sur Minotaure, monograph on the 1935 exhibition published during the retrospective at the Roth Museum, Geneva, and Musée d'art moderne de la Ville de Paris, in 1988, reproduced it, Cat. 313, with the two other Klees, one from 1930, the other anachronistic, from the year 1938). Among the ten paintings from Klee's last period, from the years 1938-1940, that the Beyeler collection privileges, a large oil on paper, Walf-Hexen [Forest Witches], leads toward the tragic torments of the painter who fell seriously ill. Finally, a Diana (oil on canvas, 1930), reopens the track of the use of mythological themes in the surrealism of André Masson, Max Ernst or Dali.

The catalogue of the exhibition Paul Klee 1879/1940, La Collection d'Ernst Beyeler (co-edition Musée d'Orsay, Musée de L'Orangerie and Eric Hazan), on 94 large pages, reproduces the twenty-six exhibited works, plus twelve figures in the text, accompanying the essays by Philippe Büttner and Claude Frontisi. In an interview with E. Beyeler, Büttner evokes Picasso's visit to Klee in Bern in 1937, "which obviously did not take place without a hitch" (a skeptical drawing by Klee testifies to this). Claude Frontisi, in a note to his essay, p. 75, offers an interesting interpretation of the mention of Klee in the Manifesto of Surrealism: "André Breton situates Klee among the "instruments too proud" to act of "absolute surrealism."" (The segments in quotation marks are not extracted from Breton's remarks in 1924, quoted supra.) The chronology "Paul Klee 1879-1940," a true biographical sketch by Marie-Madeleine Massé in this catalogue (p. 82-89), remains attentive to Klee's exhibitions among the surrealists of Paris, to the texts by Aragon, Éluard, and to Klee's illustration for the deluxe edition of Tzara's poem L'Homme approximatif; personal exhibition in Paris in 1938 "at the Simon gallery (Kahnweiler)" identifies the front name of André Simon, former associate of D. H. Kahnweiler, following the war sequestration procedure. The donation of a Klee by Louise and Michel Leiris to the Musée national d'art moderne in Paris, in 1985, probably originally in the same Kahnweiler collection, since Louise Leiris, D. H. Kahnweiler's sister-in-law, had also actively helped the great collector of Picasso, but also of Klee and the surrealists (Masson and Limbour).

Let us finally mention that work on the reception of Klee by the surrealists has been initiated, in a certain way, by Myriam Felisaz-Debodard (Paul Klee en France : poétique d'une mise en texte critique et littéraire, thesis defended at Paris III in 2005).