The Blue Hour in Paul Klee

(17.5.2022) Paul Klee is a demanding painter – inspiring and demanding. This is perhaps not so obviously so, because Klee is rarely agressive or loud. But at least three aspects have constantly taken into consideration with Klee: 1) a constant reflection about the means of painting (the question: what can I do as a painter, and with line and color in particular?); 2) a reflection on whatever he is concerned with thematically (nature, music, theatre and opera etc., or a specific combination of things); 3) a specific openess for viewer participation, since the level of abstraction is often quite high, and since Klee might have chosen titles according to his associations, but seems to leave it to the viewer to follow this path, or to observe ›Klee in following his associations‹ in completely free ways.

The phenomena of dusk, twilight and dawn, features prominently in Klee. And perhaps Klee is even to be named the painter of the Blue Hour, because his approach is not superficial at all, but combines diagram and color fields, as here, in his picture Scheidung Abends of 1922 (water color; pencil):

(Picture: abebooks.de ; from a book cover)

This is obviously reflected (how, as a painter, can I arrange color fields, so as to evoke the natural processes of sunset and dusk?), but since color fields as well as two arrows arrange as a kind of diagram, this picture can also be read, apart from evoking something that can be seen in nature, a process that is not, as such, mimetically reproducable in a single picture.
And what Klee had in mind – a division of darkness and light perhaps – is one thing, since this picture can also be referred to a representation of what a Blue Hour is, as physicists see it today (upper parts of air are reflecting the light of the sun, which is actually, for a viewer, already below the horizon). Thus the lower part of the picture would represent something that can be thought, but would not be seen by a viewer, while it can serve as an explanation why we can see dusk – in transition – as being blue. The lower arrow pointing upwards would, thus, get a sense that Klee could not have had in mind, but which still would make sense.

If we look at Feuer Abends (of 1929; an oil painting; see picture below), we can realize what abstraction means even more intensely. Because here the fire in the title probably refers to a single color field, a field that (without the title) could be associated with other things, and while nature organizes visibility at dusk as an disappearence of specific form in direction of more unspecific masses of things, painterly abstraction organizes visibility – away from specific mimesis of individual form – in direction of free handling of color, and also towards interpretational freedom, which, here, might have its limits only in terms of a title (associations of Klee’s journey to Egypt might be interesting, but are not specified by the picture itself, which shows, itself, also as a demonstration of what a painter can do with color).
A single blue strip might evoke the blue of a blue hour here, but might also – turning our discussion towards painterly shoptalk – raise the question of how much blue is already in the other color fields (adding to red, green or brown, resulting in purple, blue-green or grey), and in raising the questions, what, on a level of visibility, is happening in a blue hour, what this could mean to a creative human being, and how what we see as well as think, could find its expression in a picture. Klee, here, is (as always) most intelligent and most inspiring. While he is rarely loud, agressive or unreflected.

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