The book Kairouan or how Paul Klee became a Painter was written in 1921 by Wilhelm Hausenstein, one of the first to recognize the singular genius of the artist. In this 2020 re-edition in English (Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.de), Hausenstein’s son in law, Kenneth Croose Parry, wrote the preface. Unfortunately, he did not live to see the publication of this work. In addition to Kenneth Croose Parry’s new foreword, the book contains the full original text by Wilhelm Hausenstein from 1921 in an English translation as well as 32 illustrations of works by Paul Klee.
For Paul Klee, the impressions of his famous Journey to Tunis (Tunisreise) with fellow painters August Macke and Louis Moilliet to Tunis in 1914, especially of the city of Kairouan (Kairuan in German), were fundamental for his artistic career. He sumed it up in the words: “color and I are one. I am a painter” (ich und die Farbe sind eins. Ich bin Maler).
In his foreword, Kenneth Croose Parry reminds readers that the first recorded item of correspondance between the painter and the writer and art critic dates back to December 19, 1914. Paul Klee asked Wilhelm Hausenstein to come and help him select drawings for publication in the then popular German magazine Kunst und Dekoration.
Paul Klee won the jackpot when Wilhelm Hausenstein became art critic of the principal Munich daily newspaper in the fall of 1917. The artist wrote to his wife Lily describing this appointment of a known admirer as “a miracle”.
Klee and Hausenstein shared the fate of being liberal German intellectuals in a country embracing Nazism. Both were pilloried in the 1937 Degenerate Art (Entartete Kunst) exhibition in Munich which reflected the philistinism of Hitler, writes Kenneth Croose Parry.
In 1933, Klee was forced to resign from his position at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, which he had taken after ten years at the Bauhaus. Together with his wife he returned to his country of birth, Switzerland. He suffered from sclerodermia and died in 1940, the Swiss citizenship he sought only being granted posthumously (his father was German, hence German citizenship).
Kenneth Croose Parry writes that Hausenstein, who refused to (describe modern works as “degenerate art” and) remove Jewish names from his Kunstgeschichte, a major work of art history first published in 1927, was dismissed from the Reich Literature Chamber (Reichsschrifttumskammer) in November 1936, which meant that his writings could no longer be published. Hausenstein was fired without notice from his position in the editorial team of the Münchner Neueste Nachrichten. From 1934 until 1943, Hausenstein was responsible for the literary supplement and the women’s section of the Frankfurter Zeitung. But in 1943 he was excluded from the Reich Media Chamber (Reichspressekammer). Therefore, he lost his job with Frankfurter Zeitung which, because of its international readership, had been tolerated by the Nazis to employ Jews or people with Jewish connections until then. In 1943, Hausenstein was prohibited from publishing anything and lived in constant fear that his Jewish wife Margot would be deported.
While the voice of Hausenstein was silenced in Germany following Hitler’s election and Klee lost his job, the relationship between the Klee and America burgeoned. In 1930, he was the first European artist to be given a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. After Klee’s works were eliminated from German public collections, his promoters in the USA ensured that many of his best works were to enrich private collections and museums, and inspire the work of numerous American artists. Kenneth Croose Parry notes that, today from his oeuvre of some 10,000 works, over 1,000 are to be found in the United States.
Regarding Hausenstein’s unconventional book Kairouan or how Paul Klee became a Painter, you have to wait until page 51 to find biographical information by Hausenstein about Klee. The author stresses that the artist was both a painter and a musician. His father was a music teacher, a tutor of choral singing and instrumental music in a training college and, outside the school, a teacher of soloists. His mother was half of Basel origin as well as of exotic connections that can be traced back via the Mediterranean region of France towards the Orient. The musical inheritance is obvious. The gift for visual art can be identified among the antecedents with an almost legendary great-uncle, who is said to have been a successful portrait painter in London.
Hausenstein mentions Professor Löffitz who disapproved of Klee’s landscape drawings submitted to enter the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. Löffitz recommended preparatory school. Klee went to Heinrich Knirr. Under the guidance of this highly experienced teacher, Klee became one of the best pupils in drawing from the model, according to Hausenstein. After two years, in 1900, Klee was accepted in the class of Franz von Stuck, who combined vehement radicalism with a tolerance regarding the special possibilities and desires of the individual student, and with a joie de vivre unkown since the Venetian days of Franz von Lenbach.
Let’s jump to page 103 and the chapter entitled Kairouan. Hausenstein writes about the importance of Cézanne as the master of the transition and Matisse as the master of radicalism. The poetry of Christian Morgenstern was another notable influence on Klee. At the beginning of the following chapter, The Beyond and War, Hausenstein writes: “In Kariouan the painter-draftsman Paul Klee became completely himself.”
This and much more you can discover in Kairouan or how Paul Klee became a Painter.
Kairouan or how Paul Klee became a Painter. Hirmer Verlag, 2020, 176 pages with 32 illustrations, 15.5 x 21 cm. Order the English edition from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.de.
Order the 2014 German edition/deutsche Ausgabe Kairuan: Eine Geschichte vom Maler Paul Klee from Amazon.de.
For a better reading, quotations and partial quotations in this book review are not put between quotation marks.
Book review added on September 19, 2020 at 13:42 German time.
