Impressionist & Modern

Provenance:
Lily Klee, Bern, 1940, acquired as a gift from the artist.
Klee Gesellschaft, Bern, by 1946.
Hans & Erika Meyer-Benteli, Bern, by 1950.
Private Collection, Switzerland, by descent from the above.

Literature:
J. Spiller (ed.), Paul Klee: The Thinking Eye, The Notebooks of Paul Klee, New York & London, 1956 (illus. p. 5).
S. Wada, Paul Klee and His Travels, Tokyo, 1979 (illus. p. 136).
Paul Klee Foundation (ed.), Paul Klee Catalogue Raisonné, vol. 9: 1940, London, 2004, no. 9395 (illus. p. 237).

Exhibited:
Basel, Kunstmuseum, Paul Klee 1879 – 1940: Ausstellung aus Schweizer Privatsammlungen, 19 June – 20 Aug. 1950, no. 101.
Bern, Kunstmuseum, Paul Klee: Ausstellung in Verbindung mit der Paul-Klee-Stiftung, 11 Aug. – 4 Nov. 1956, no. 193.
Bern, Kunstmuseum, Paul Klee im Kunstmuseum Bern, 11 April – 28 June 1970, no. 251.
Bern, Kunstmuseum, Paul Klee: Das Schaffen im Todesjahr, 17 Aug. – 4 Nov. 1990, no. 337.

Paul Klee was an experimentalist, who used an exhaustive analytical method to examine the world around him and, self-reflexively, to examine his own creative practices. In Mann mit Fisch, we find Klee circling an idea with concision and compositional clarity.

The imagery of the fish was pregnant with significance for Klee. Despite his abiding preoccupation with formal creativity, Klee was highly responsive to the associative potential of enduring cosmic symbols such as this. The stylised image of a fish has origins in the Christian catacombs, a symbol of resistance among those who had converted to the new faith in pagan Rome. Rather than explicitly responding to this precedent, Klee imaginatively reordered the associations of the image, retaining the fish ‘look’ while channelling through it his own original ideas.

In Klee’s oeuvre the fish tends to call up an imaginative territory beyond predictable reality, as seen in his celebrated Fish Magic. It has been suggested that Klee was attracted to the imagery of both fish and birds because, unlike humans, they move in a way that defies gravity: the bird floating through the air and the fish through water. Movement was a primary consideration in Klee’s approach and, for him, the appeal of these animals lay in their inhabitation of a sphere in which movement is ‘truly dynamic’, uninhibited by the ordinariness of having one’s feet on the ground. In Mann mit Fisch, then, the imaginative power of the fish lies not in its literal qualities but, rather, in the type of movement which Klee associated with the fish.

This association is by no means exclusive in a consideration of Mann mit Fisch, however. As Klee simplified his pictorial style at the end of his life, he also intensified and complicated the broader cosmic ideas associated with these images. In this regard, Mann mit Fisch can be seen to encapsulate some of the theoretical concepts Klee had wrestled with throughout his career. In its attempt to address some of these themes, it has an experimental aspect as well, one that may lie closer to the spirit of his initial creative impulse.

Klee’s philosophy is appealing for its boundless scale. The visual field of his work is a laboratory for a wordless discussion about motion, growth and birth, among other sprawling concepts. In Mann mit Fisch, the intersection of the man and the fish is a locus for such thoughts. Indeed, the formal unity of the two figures might suggest the interwoven fabric of being. Other ideas can be associated with this visual moment in the work, but it is clear that here (as in other works) Klee has forged the key to a panacea of loaded, complex ideas.

Painted in 1940, the final year of Klee’s life, Mann mit Fisch does not adulate the fish; instead, celebrates the unity of man and Nature. The salient passage of this work is the intersection of the man’s pelvis with the horizontal axis of the fish, a confluence that suggests a moment of resolution at the end of the artist’s life – a time when he could draw together this potent imaginative subject, the fish, with the life of humankind which, for Klee at least, was drawing to a close.