Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Paul Klee
German, Swiss; 20th-century
New York, NY: Jewish Museum (Exhibition: Paul Klee: Other Possible Worlds)
84%
Untitled (Last Still Life). 1940. Oil on canvas
Klee is one of the few modernists for whom a playful sampling of other artists' idioms (rather than a combative appropriation and transformation of their styles) was not a limitation on, but a source of his greatness. That's because his symbolical mysticism was so wholly elaborated — so complete and so singular a way of seeing — as to have been capable of transforming even the barest and least developed quotation or allusion into an unequivocal expression of the artistic mind of Paul Klee, and Paul Klee alone. This painting is obviously a riff on the interiors of Matisse, but it's remarkably un-Matissean in its substance. That black ground, for instance, isn't vying for the picture plane: it's a cosmic field entirely removed from the sculptures and vases set before it, teeming with little runes and squiggles. Likewise, all the flat circles and ovoids in this scene (teapot's spout; sculpture's arm; both ends of that worm-form; sun) refuse to jump towards the painting's surface even though they're all aiming right at it: instead they engage each other in a sort of floating tribal dance somewhere halfway between the background and the very front of the picture. Sure, there's a degree of solipsism — or at least hermeticism — to the way Klee constructs his images, and arguably this painting is missing a fulcrum point. But there's a logic here that's undeniable, no matter how ineffable. (TFS, 2026)