Paul Klee - Beginning of a Poem, 1938

Zentrum Paul Klee EN

In 1938, two years before his death, Klee worked intensively with writing, characters and generally sign-like pictorial elements. He produced several works with the title «Alphabet», in which a pile of letters is scattered apparently at random over the picture surface. Klee even painted one of the alphabet paintings on newspaper. In «Beginning of a poem» Klee again distributes letters over the picture space. Towards the lower edge of the picture they seem to be more crowded, and more loosely distributed towards the top. Most of them are consonants. With five numbers Klee identifies words at the edge of the forest of letters. Read in sequence they produce the phrase: «Then begin it secretly.» Together with the title of the work, «Beginning of a Poem», Klee seems to be putting precisely this beginning of a poem in front of our eyes. The rest of the text of the poem is still hidden in the forest of letters, it is yet to be shaped. The phrase «Then begin it secretly» refers to Johann Sebastian Bach’s aria «Would you share your heart with me», the first verse of which reads as follows:Would you share your heart with meThen begin it secretlySo that none can guessOur thoughts.Our love must alwaysBe discreet,So close your greatest joysWithin your heart.Alongside the numbered words and among them several shapes emerge, as if Klee did not only want to show the act of making a poem, but as if a picture, a landscape perhaps, could be depicted at its beginning in exactly the same way. Once again Klee places the artist’s act of creation in relation with growth and change in nature. In the 1920 essay «Creative Confession» Klee writes: «The genesis of writing is a very good analogy for movement. The art-work too is primarily a genesis, it is never experienced as a product.» And in his Bauhaus teaching notes he says: «Writing and image, that is writing and image-making are one at root.» This adds a further level: on the one hand Klee shows a poem coming into being, and apparently growing like a plant. At the same time, during the evolution of the poem an image is formed, image and writing have become one.