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A week or so ago I sat with a jury for the Pennsylvania Academy show. There came before us a number of what might have passed for Klee paintings; Klees, except that the hand was heavier; Klees except, that one's face didn't brighten, somehow, when one looked at them; Klees, without the unfaltering innocence of Klee.

Aside from the embarrassment which one must feel at such times, I felt also a deep regret that Klee, the painter who had so much to give to other artists, should have had to be robbed!

What I should like to accomplish in this discussion is to make clear somehow what the gifts were (or are) that Klee has passed on to us—what he ought to mean to other artists.

Looking at his paintings and drawings should, I think, do more than merely enrich us with his images, his amusing devices, his gently mischievous interpretations of ponderous classical things; it should serve as a sort of preachment for artists—well, for other people, too—to open the doors upon some of our own inner vistas, that mysterious scenery from which so many of us are shut off by some sense of humbleness, or unimportance, or possibly by the devious workings of our inhibitions.

For Klee, I think, more than any other artist, has given us the depths and reaches of his subjective life. Whoever knows his work well, knows him; knows what he thought and felt about life. Therein, of course, lies the preachment. For every artist, if he has nothing else—not even an Eames chair—has that thing; a wholly separate and individual self with its own dreams and passions, its unique landscape unmapped and unexplored—peopled with shapes and forms unknown to others. And that private, unknown self, wherever it has been realized well—in paint, sculpture, music or words—has been of unceasing value and wonder to others.

The Klee-influenced submissions for the Pennsylvania show did not, unfortunately, reveal new personalities seeking new ways of expression. They were the old personalities who, this year had abandoned Picasso, or Mark Toby, Tamayo or the other great innovators, and had, as you might put it, "gone Klee." There were I guess about thirteen such paintings. Some affected the styles of Klee; some rearranged his characteristic mannerisms; some lifted passages outright from his work. 

What kind of miscalculation lies behind such painting I can't guess. But in each case one may know that the artist has rejected his most valuable asset—himself—to ape whatever artist he believes to be man-of-the-hour.

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[[image]]
7976.66.
# 66, 1916, pen drawing, 9 1/2 x 5 1/8".

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