Lozenge and Paul Klee

[Lyle]

While rooting around looking for pictures of Halberstadts, I came across this article and found it to be intriguing--polygons on lozenge fabric would influence a painter in the post-war period. Is this a valid theory, or is this common knowledge among the artists here? It'd be great to hear more about this...
Thanks, Lyle

The Colors of War

[PeterL]

I don't kow his work so I did a quick Google. There are lots of his paintings on the web and it appears he was painting in that geometric style before 1914 and so could it not have been the influence of lozenge fabric as suggested, at least not initially. A couple of works are very similar to the one in your link and to my eye represent mountain scenery, perhaps as seen from the air but artists have known that trick for centuries. The placing of geometric shapes of different colours against each other for visual effect was also well known before the war and may have been influenced by cartography. You can follow its progress to abstract expressionism and ultimately to Jackson Pollock. Just my sixpennyworth.

[Craig]

Thanks for that link - very interesting, as it lies where my art career and main hobby intersect.

[Barker]

Originally Posted by PeterL

The placing of geometric shapes of different colours against each other for visual effect was also well known before the war and may have been influenced by cartography. You can follow its progress to abstract expressionism and ultimately to Jackson Pollock. Just my sixpennyworth.

For my nail, you find it first in Cezanne, later works.


I don't know about cartography - I believe Impressionists and Post-Impressionists were thinking elsewhere.

Could you elaborate?

Klee's work is valued for its uniqueness.
(which is self-evident, really, but anyhoo)

After his marriage in 1906 to the pianist Lili Stumpf, Klee settled in Munich, then an important center for avant-garde art. That same year he exhibited his etchings for the first time. His friendship with the painters Wassily Kandinsky and August Macke prompted him to join Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), an expressionist group that contributed much to the development of abstract art.
A turning point in Klee's career was his visit to Tunisia with Macke and Louis Molliet in 1914. He was so overwhelmed by the intense light there that he wrote: Color has taken possession of me; no longer do I have to chase after it, I know that it has hold of me forever. That is the significance of this blessed moment. Color and I are one. I am a painter. He now built up compositions of colored squares that have the radiance of the mosaics he saw on his Italian sojourn. The watercolor Red and White Domes (1914; Collection of Clifford Odets, New York City) is distinctive of this period.
Klee often incorporated letters and numerals into his paintings, as in Once Emerged from the Gray of Night (1917-18; Klee Foundation, Berlin). These, part of Klee's complex language of symbols and signs, are drawn from the unconscious and used to obtain a poetic amalgam of abstraction and reality. He wrote that "Art does not reproduce the visible, it makes visible," and he pursued this goal in a wide range of media using an amazingly inventive battery of techniques. Line and color predominate with Klee, but he also produced series of works that explore mosaic and other effects.
Klee taught at the BAUHAUS school after World War I, where his friend Kandinsky was also a faculty member. In Pedagogical Sketchbook (1925), one of his several important essays on art theory, Klee tried to define and analyze the primary visual elements and the ways in which they could be applied. In 1931 he began teaching at Dusseldorf Academy, but he was dismissed by the Nazis, who termed his work "degenerate." In 1933, Klee went to Switzerland. There he came down with the crippling collagen disease scleroderma, which forced him to develop a simpler style and eventually killed him. The late works, characterized by heavy black lines, are often reflections on death and war, but his last painting, Still Life (1940; Felix Klee collection, Bern), is a serene summation of his life's concerns as a creator.

[PeterL]

I am acutely aware that I am now addressing someone who knows what he is talking about. So forgive me if I talk out the back of my head for a moment.

Cartographers were faced with problem when colour coding a map showing political borders, the idea being that no two adjacent areas should be the same colour. Fewer colours cut costs and made their work easier to use. It was discovered (mathematically) that four colours were sufficient to the task. Same problem with lozenge fabric, same solution.

This is where it gets airy-fairy. Artists too are interested in working with limited palets and also dabble in mathematics from time to time. All this was going on at a time when artists were experimenting with form and colour in a big way and it must have been of interest even if not influential.

Just my uneducated sixpennyworth.

[EricGoedkoop]

Originally Posted by Barker

I don't know about cartography - I believe Impressionists and Post-Impressionists were thinking elsewhere.

There is a very interesting intersection here and I think I smell a subtle subconcious connection - I would say we're looking at two expressions of humanity's exploration of vision and how it works. In the mid- to late nineteeth century, the advent of photography fundamentally changed what "art" was and how it was experienced. Painters were no longer "needed" to produce representations of life - landscapes and portraits and such. Photography satisfied our desire to have realistic likenesses of people, places and things, and this allowed value to eventually be seen in paintings that didn't look exactly or even very much like their subject matter. Painting became more about the experience of the subject than the subject itself. Cezanne's later work is a terrific example of this, and I see a very clear evolution from it to Analytic Cubism in the use of patches of contrasting color to suggest form, without the fluid blending of tone that we actually see. It's a language, and an exercise in communicating by simpler means. These guys figured out or sensed that it worked because of how our brain processes what our eyes see. They didn't have to keep doing what photography was at that point doing better and easier than they ever could, and I think the impact of Impressionism, Post-Impressionism and Analytic Cubism was in part that it made us think not only about what we're seeing, but how we're seeing it. They were playing tricks on us - exploiting the gap of interpretation between what's refected on our corneas and what our brain recognizes. Lozenge camouflage - most camouflage - is the same idea: it's a trick. Whereas a Cezanne, for example, can be described as what we see that's not there, an effectively camouflaged aircraft is the other side of the coin - what is there that we don't see.

I think it's no coincidence that there are parallels between the two. It was where we were in our understanding of ourselves and how we work at that time.

[Barker]

Originally Posted by PeterL

This is where it gets airy-fairy.

Hey man, I been slapped around for bringing up Cezanne to Arty Types (uh).

"Nay. Georges Braque."
Etherly, one may find many oily elements of this in Nederlanders, 200 years prior or in other cultures, Any Years one selects.

Or something.
More fun than squabbling about pixels v. oils v. earls v. red bare ones.

Eric said the same thing:
As far as it got, to that point.

Way O Looking At Things: Pablo does the Multiple Perspective, Multiple Time Frame and the rest is Purple Haze.


Since all these guys table-talk like musicians, hard to say who did what to whom when.

[EricGoedkoop]

Originally Posted by Barker

hard to say who did what to whom when.

So did Klee incorporate the lozenge motif into his work?

You bet.

The thing that separated the Impressionists from the Post-Impressionists (which is to say, early Cezanne from late Cezanne) was that the former explored a new way of painting, but still painted landscapes and still lifes and pretty things that people liked to look at. The Post-Impressionists painted what happened to them. Guys like Klee, Chagall, Munch, Van Gogh (is he hip again or still passé?) were autobiographers, and that was new.

Freed to tell their own tale by all the other guys who had cameras and made pretty pictures.

I don't see Klee exploring the visual trickery of the lozenge pattern and the Cezanne/Braque/Picasso experiment. It was different for him - he was too late for that chapter in Figuring Out How To Be Humans. He was painting his experiences on earth and the lozenge pattern was symbolic of part of them - like sick and lonely people for Munch. These guys painted what they went through.

[Lyle]

Here's one for the Dali fans--seems he knew the eye can create images from seemingly 'random' elements.

[Barker]

Originally Posted by EricGoedkoop

Van Gogh (is he hip again or still passé?)

Know what?
I never give a flying fcuk.
I love the guy.
Nutty as an outhouse rat but as direct as it gets, per your point, here.

For that?
He gets the big yellow paint tube and a cookie.
For life.
In Chicago, looking around a room of giants and there sits Vincent, glowing off the wall in green, and I swear, I got all manner of automomic reaction off that surprise.
Only guy to do it.
I staggered down the steps of that Musée du LookOutNow...


So.
I don't care what others say.
Unique in the field.

I don't see Klee exploring the visual trickery of the lozenge pattern and the Cezanne/Braque/Picasso experiment.

Me either.
I think Paul just wanted to paint inside out.

the rest were homos.

everyone knows that but won't say.