KLEE GOES TO BALTRUM

What partly prompted this post was my rereading of The Riddle of the Sands, the 1903 novel by Erskine Childers which is set in the Frisian islands and the lagoon which they shelter. It is a classic of the spy/messing about in boats genre. I noticed that Baltrum is mentioned-literally in passing and remembered that Klee had visited the island.

Childers is good at evoking the tides and scenery of this constantly changing land and seascape where tides break on constantly changing sand dunes and channels and boats can go aground very easily.This is a flat landscape. Nowadays tourists are welcome but not their cars or bicycles. How wise!

 Here is Childers' description of what it was like when the yacht ran aground in in the area.

"For miles in every direction lay a desert of sand.To the north it touched the horizon.... To the east it seemed also to stretch to infinity.....To the south it ran up to the pencil line of the Hanover shore. Only to the west was its outline broken by any vestiges of the sea it had risen from. There it was astir with crawling white filaments, knotted confusingly at one spot in the north-west, whence came a sibilant murmur like the hissing of many snakes. Desert as I call it , it was not entirely featureless. Its colour varied from light fawn, where the highest levels had dried in the wind, to, brown or deep violet where  it was still wet..." page 113.

Beach at Baltrum-note waves breaking out to sea from Wikepedia entry
on Baltrum here

On looking  up the island on Wikipedia I found a photo which immediately suggested one of Klee's Baltrum works. It is a characteristic of this landscape to see waves breaking  at a substantial distance from the shore. Look at the row upon row of breakers in Klee's painting and compare it with the photograph above.

North Sea Picture

In North Sea Picture (1923:242) we see again the breaking waves far out from shore. Emphasis on the sky/horizon/sea divide, by now an old trope in modernist art, is found in North Sea Island-looking towards Langeook (1923:180

One or two of the works are more realistic-such as one of the dune views and a  view perhaps from the guest-house where  he  stayed. He made two works which refer in their title to the fact that the dunes were being stabilized-by planting grass or whatever method was in use at that time. These have a more realistic aspect . I have no doubt that Klee would be interested in the contents of rock pools and the structure of seaweed.

Stabilized Dune on Baltrum 1923, 262.

Incidentally Jurg Spiller in The Thinking Eye says that Klee started collecting this sort of material on visits to the Baltic. But I cannot find any evidence that Klee visited the Baltic shoreline.This visit to Baltrum would be a possible starting point for such collecting. A serious chronology of Klee's life is surely needed and I have used the outline provided by Sabine Rewald.

But frequently in  the Baltrum work one could say that Klee responded to the landscape in a more abstract sense. Sky and horizon and the parallel waves of the sea. One notices watercolours in a style closely relating to the Tunisian watercolours made just over 10 years earlier. It's a question of piled up squares of colour plus details such as a house.This is a style which he also develops  in later works relating to his Sicilian holiday. In the Baltrum works there is almost no trace of the Klee whimsy so common in other work from this period-particularly the so-called oil-transfer drawings.

In North Sea Picture  we see again the breaking waves far out from shore. Emphasis on the sky/horizon/sea divide, by now an old trope in modernist art, is found in North Sea Island-looking towards Langeook (1923:180)


Klee took a few holidays especially in the Twenties-which, probably not coincidentally was the period when he was a salaried teacher at the Bauhaus. Many of Klee's later holidays involved trips to coastal or island areas-Brittany, Elba and Porquerolles, Corsica also come to mind. He was often to stay in coastal areas and sometimes in hotter places such as Sicily and Egypt.

View from a Window- North Sea Island 1923, 259

Klee's visit to Baltrum occurred in the late summer of 1923. You will remember that 1923 was the year of the great collapse of the German currency and a period of incredible hyperinflation. This process had already become obvious when Klee left for the island. It was to escalate vastly in November of 1923. Despite any effect this might have had on the family finances I feel that no influence can be detected on his art. But it must have seemed a slightly surreal state to be in nevertheless. On his way home he called on Schwitters and El Lissitzky.

Erskine Childers: The Riddle of the Sands, Atlantic Books, 2009.
Paul Klee: Catalogue Raisonné, Vol 4, Paul Klee Founation, 2001.
Sabine Rewald:Paul Klee: The Berggruen Collection in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1988.

LORDENSHAWS AS SEEN

I thought it might be curious to show different depictions of a scene I know well. It is the entrance to the hill fort at Lordenshaws, just south of Rothbury in Northumberland.The views are all taken from slightly different angles.  Diferent times, different methods.

From Upper Coquetdale by DD Dixon-who also made the drawing circa 1900

Recent photograph by myself

Watercolour by myself-painted circa 1995 on the spot. 

Elsdon Gravestones: Abraham and Isaac

Elsdon: Abraham & Isaac gravestone on left, south transept,nearest nave

In the  Northumbrian village of Elsdon there is a very interesting church and churchyard.It has some of the most curious and primitive gravestones in the county. They tend to be from the Eighteenth Century but you would hardly know it. In style there is something of the innocence of an embroidery of a hundred years before. The Douanier Roussseau might have liked them.

Elsdon Churchyard: Time with Scythe

Elsdon Churchyard:Adam and Eve

I am showing two of them which might be the work of the same craftsman. There is also another carving-even more primitive which I did not know about until last summer when my partner spotted that the back of one of the stones-very close to the church had something carved on it. The carving is difficult to see and photograph but it obviously represents the story of Abraham and Isaac. Because it is so close to the wall of the south transept you cannot easily get behind it to frame a photo. This is one time when I would have liked to have a compact with me. As it is I show a sketch based on some partial images.

Elsdon Churchyard: Abraham and Isaac

This is  a primitive piece of work and the  figures are  presented frontally and parallel to the picture plane in one of the most ancient conventions for story telling in low relief.

On the left is the ram caught in the thicket.. Note the prominent horns. In the original you can see the naive drilling to represent the space between the curling horns. On the right is the kneeling figure of Isaac almost at the point of being sacrificed. In the middle is the patriarch Abraham with sword raised aloft.

Immediately above the Old Testament scene is a conventional cherub's head. Not shown. The carver had his pattern book or schemata to work from in that case and the work was efficient. Not so with the Old Testament scene. Perhaps it was his only effort with this subject and from an academic viewpoint the struggle is apparent.The carver was thrown back on his own invention and produced a clear if crude account of the story.

Elsdon: Abraham & Isaac
Colour photos added Feb 9, 2014

That's Gneiss-Glenfinlas Again

Ruskin in Glenfinlas. This is Millais' portrait of the author.

The Glenfinlas burn, photo by JH . 2013.

I was in Glenfinlas last week, never for long enough, I'm sure.But this time I did get down to view the site of Ruskin's portrait by Millais. I climbed down twice. Once the hard way and then the somewhat easier .The hard way is not to be recommended, for one thing there are bilberries(?) growing on the bank and for another the easy way is just a bit more practical with a DSLR and tripod. Do it the easier way and you get the view which Millais saw.(Hint,turn to the left under a beech as you approach the new viewing platform.)

You can see the rock on which JR stood in the foreground of my photo and the curve of the darker rock which is also visible in the painting behind it.The whole scene was of considerable importance for Ruskin whose geological interests still seem to await attention from someone in that discipline.He said himself that he often stood in such a pose meditating on nature.One notion of Ruskin's which Lutyens quotes is his idea that Glenfinlas would be a good site for Millais to work in because he habitually painted brightly-which this shaded spot would scarcely permit.

There were very considerable practical difficulties in making the painting, certainly in so far as the work that was done in Glenfinlas.There are reports of Acland holding the canvas  at one point while Millais worked on it. There is  Millais' own account of his lonely autumnal sojourn when he had to return and had a kind of makeshift shelter constructed complete with woodburning stove.It wasn't very efficient, he said, but the smell of the woodsmoke was pleasant. It scarcely seems possible that Millais could have worked in such a cramped and uncomfortable area.But toil he did and it is to the credit of Alastair Grieve that the site was rediscovered in the 1960s.

The best acount of the circumstances surrounding the commission is still: Millais and the Ruskins-by Mary Lutyens.

For another post on the portrait look here

ART THEFT

Meijer de Haan-self portrait 1889/90.

The BBC has a news item suggesting that ashes from a stove are being examined to see if traces of stolen paintings can be found therein. This relates to the theft of items on temporary show at the Rotterdam Kunsthal in 2012.It is thought that one of the thieves or an accomplice may have destroyed the paintings. This raises some questions.

How can you tell? Even with modern forensic methods it sounds difficult.Can you analyse ash and conclude that it comes from a 100-120 year old work by Monet, Gauguin or de Haan or a more modern painting by Freud? And if the ashes are all mixed together? I wish them luck. Find some fragments of canvas or stretcher and it will be easier. Shouldn't we also be a bit sceptical? Thieves don't usually destroy assets.it may be just a blind.

There are also questions about the value of art.In this case I personally would be most sorry to lose the de Haan-though in an auction room the somewhat poor Monet or the not particularly special Picasso might do much better.

So why de Haan? His oeuvre is small and he died in his 4Os.This stolen portrait is one of his strongest, most avant-garde works. It is a fine painting in it's own right. And it has an important place in the Pont-Aven school. It has a distinguished provenance and was one of the half dozen or so colour plates in the catalogue for Pickvance's unrepeatable show on Pont-Aven in 1966. So take it away and we have lost  a key work . It would be hard to make that case for the Monet, Picasso or Gauguin which of course you wouldn't want to lose either.Here is the link to the BBC story.