The Tunis trip

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As the Tunisreise a major in art history trip is called, the three painters Paul Klee , August Macke and Louis Moilliet undertook in April 1914 to Tunisia. On this trip Klee and Macke in particular experienced strong impressions of colors, shapes and light that were to have a lasting impact on their artistic work on the threshold of modern abstract art . The Tunis trip is the subject of numerous art historical considerations and analyzes, which see in this trip the overcoming of German Expressionism to non-objective, abstract and modern art, especially with Paul Klee. It is seen in art history as a key event in the art of the 20th century.

prehistory

August Macke had already dealt with oriental art around 1910, so there are pictures and wall hangings of him showing figures dressed in oriental style. He was inspired by a visit to an exhibition in Munich that presented Muslim art in May 1910 . This exhibition was based on the view and expectations of the Central Europeans on oriental art, which was romantically influenced by legends and fairy tales , as presented by western romantic European painting of the 19th century, in which the Orient as a symbol of wealth, cruelty, sensuality and danger what was shown was nothing more than the projection of the Europeans' own wishes, for example in Eugène Delacroix's picture The Death of Sardanapal from 1822. Henri Matisse , whom August Macke loved, was several times in North Africa (1911/1912 and 1912/1913). His works were represented in German collections, including Bernhard Koehler , August Macke's patron.

Louis Moilliet had already been to Tunisia in 1907 and 1909/1910 and knew a lot about it. He met August Macke on the occasion of his honeymoon in Bern , where the Macke couple stayed in their mother's guesthouse. Paul Klee had known Moilliet since he was in high school in 1903. Moilliet's knowledge of Tunisia consisted of his connection with the Bern doctor couple Dr. Ernst Jäggi and Rosa Jäggi-Müller, with whom he was able to stay as a guest. In 1911 Klee and Macke, who was working in Hilterfingen at the time , met by chance at Moilliet's house in Gunten . In January 1914 they met again, this time at Macke's, and Klee made the proposal to go on a trip to Tunisia together. Since the three were dependent on financial support, sponsors and patrons were sought. The pictures taken during and after the trip should serve as a consideration. After the trip, Paul Klee gave the pharmacist Bornand from Bern works worth 500 francs. Macke was able to convince his collector Bernhard Koehler to support the trip financially. Moilliet's mother, on the other hand, was skeptical, but the Jäggis from Tunis promised to remedy the situation and the three were able to stay in his country house there. Moilliet pumped up travel money from friends. In return for board and lodging, the painters were asked to paint a room in Jäggi's country house.

Paul Klee kept a meticulously precise diary on the trip, which allows an exact reconstruction with its stations. On April 4, 1914, Klee and Moilliet traveled by train to Marseille to meet Macke, who had arrived earlier and had watched a bullfight there. Two days later they boarded the steamer Carthage , which reached Tunis on April 7th. You were picked up by the Jäggi family. Moilliet and Klee were initially able to stay in the Jäggis' city apartment, while Macke had enough money to stay at the Grand Hotel de France .

Stay in Tunis, Hammamet and Kairouan

The artists spent the day outside the city, in the suburb of St. Germain, where the Jäggis had a country house by the sea. One wrote, drew and the first watercolors were created. Macke and Klee began to paint one room in the house. Klee painted an Arab and an Arab woman to the left and right of the fireplace, Macke created a market scene with a donkey in bright watercolors on another wall. Excursions were made to Carthage and Arab cities that did not have such a colonial European character as Tunis, but also the artists' village of Sidi Bou Saïd . On April 14th they were in Hammamet and on the 15th they went to Kairouan . The most important works of the trip were created here. The impressions were so strong for Klee that he wanted to go back to Tunis on April 17th. The other two followed him. On the 19th, Klee returned to Europe. He took the steamer Capitaine Pereire to Palermo, then took the train to Naples and reached Bern on April 22nd. Moilliet and Macke stayed a few more days. Macke was enthusiastic and wrote to his patron Bernhard Koehler: "Now the glory will soon come to an end [...] The further you get away from the Orient, the more you learn to appreciate it."

Works created (selection)

Donkey rider , watercolor by August Macke, 1914, August-Macke-Haus , Bonn
Motif from Hammamet , watercolor by Paul Klee, 1914, Kunsthalle Basel

Macke painted most of the pictures on this trip; In 1982, the art historian Hans Christoph von Tavel spoke of 50 watercolors and “very many drawings”. There were also numerous photos. For Klee he puts the number of 50 works, which are composed of watercolors, pen and pencil drawings, a brush drawing and an oil painting on cardboard. Moilliet painted very little on this trip. He has three watercolors and five drawings. Peter Fischer, former director of the Zentrum Paul Klee, on the other hand, cites more recent figures from research . In his foreword to the catalog Die Tunisreise 1914 he reports 33 watercolors and 79 drawings in three sketchbooks that Macke created on the trip. There are 30 watercolors and 13 drawings for Klee and three watercolors and eleven drawings for Moilliet. Louis Moilliet took on the role of organizer and tour guide on the trip, after all, he had already visited the country before.

Consequences for the artist

Inspired by the abundance of colors, the exotic strangeness and the intensity of the natural light of the North African landscape, Paul Klee and August Macke created watercolors of impressive clarity and luminosity, while Moilliet held back on this journey.

For Paul Klee, the trip to Tunis was a turning point in his artistic work. Up until now he was more of a draftsman and graphic artist, but now he has discovered color. On the first evening after arriving in Tunis, he noted his future concept in his diary: “The synthesis of urban architecture - pictorial architecture tackled.” After his stay in Kairouan on April 16, he noted the familiar words: “I'm leaving work now . It penetrates me so deeply and gently, […]. The color has me. […] That is the meaning of the happy hour: I and the color are one. I'm a painter. "The later so characteristic of Klee rectangular patches of color that he saw in the Arab town architecture, reinforced the already since his trip to Paris to Robert Delaunay existing cubist influence and contract, in variations for a long time through his art.

For August Macke, the color that so sustainably shaped Paul Klee had been part of his art for a long time. He also knew and appreciated the Orphistic style of Delaunay. Macke's friend, Franz Marc, jokingly addressed him in a letter dated August 10, 1911 as August Vonder Farbe , because Macke knew how to paint his pictures effectively with bright colors and confident compositions. The works he created on his trip to Tunis were the highlight of his artistic work. His watercolors completely dispense with perspective and spatial depth. Almost abstract geometric color surfaces, small squares like Klee's, now determine the content of the picture in order to test the effect of adjacent colors. Macke planned to later create paintings based on his watercolors and drawings, but that never happened because August Macke fell in World War I just a few months after his trip to Tunis .

Tunisia was not new territory for Louis Moilliet. He had already visited the country in 1908 and in 1909, on his second trip there, he was so impressed by the vegetation that he stayed there for eight months with a short break. After a winter downpour in the night, he found a field that had appeared parched the day before, in the morning with a 10 centimeter high seed. Using the technique of oil painting , he made pictures that described this vegetation process mainly in primary colors. Moilliet also dealt critically with Cubism, Expressionism (his picture Im Variéte from 1913, Kunstmuseum Bern, shows Berlin influences) and abstraction. Like Klee, he was also impressed by the Islamic urban architecture that appeared to be free of perspective and enabled him to detach himself from the subject. In an interview with the art historian Walter Holzhausen, Moilliet reported that he, Macke and Klee had bought watercolored drawings from Tunisian artists in an Arab village that depicted the tombs of marabouts in a special color. It was only during further visits in 1919/1920 and 1928 that Moilliet began to paint his impressions into his North African watercolors . In contrast to his artist colleagues, he was no longer so impressed by the exoticism of the Tunisian landscape. He therefore limited himself to the role of organizer and tour guide.

The time after the trip

August Macke fell in the First World War on September 26, 1914, five months after the trip to Tunis, in the northeastern French town of Souain-Perthes-lès-Hurlus . Six days earlier he received the Iron Cross . Paul Klee was called up in March 1916, but was able to continue his artistic work during the First World War. In 1916 Moilliet's wife died giving birth to their first child, and he began an unsteady wandering life. In 1917 six of Klee's Tunis watercolors were shown in the Berlin gallery Der Sturm . In 1920 the Munich art dealer Hans Goltz exhibited 362 works by Klee and sold at least 10 works related to the Tunis trip. Moilliet went back to Tunisia from December 1919 to May 1920 and was able to work artistically. Before that, he spent a time with Hermann Hesse in Ticino. Walter Gropius appointed Klee to the Bauhaus in Weimar. In 1921 Klee completed the revised version of his famous diary for publication. Moilliet went to Morocco for a long time. In 1923 Klee temporarily finished his work with impressions from the Tunis trip. In 1925, Moilliet commissioned a glass window with Arabic motifs for the private home of the art collectors Hermann and Margrit Rupf in Bern. In 1928/29 he stayed in Tunisia again and painted more colorful pictures. Klee visited Egypt during that time. Moilliet was the last time in Tunisia that winter, he was now drawn to southern Spain. In 1931 Klee became a professor at the Düsseldorf Art Academy , dismissed in 1933 under pressure from the National Socialists and returned to Switzerland. From 1936 Moilliet only dealt with glass painting. As part of the National Socialist defamation of modern art as "degenerate art", works by August Macke and Paul Klee were confiscated and shown in the exhibition Degenerate Art . Due to protests from World War II officers and his being awarded the Iron Cross, Macke's works were removed from the exhibition. In the Kunsthaus Zurich , a retrospective of works by Louis Moilliet took place 1936th In 1940 Klee died. Moilliet's work was shown in 1961 at the Kunstmuseum Basel and the Kestnergesellschaft Hannover. Moilliet died in 1962.

Significance for art history

In art history, the Tunis trip is considered a myth about the emergence of modernism . The abstraction of painting, which had been developing rather hesitantly up to now, got a new impetus after this trip, although the catastrophe of the First World War also contributed significantly to it. The three painters had previously dealt with the subject of abstraction and non-representationalism, but the trip fueled their development into a new art. The prismatic color decomposition in Robert Delaunay's pictures after 1912, called Orphic Cubism , was known and appreciated by the three travelers to Tunis. With the works created on their journey, Klee, Macke and Moilliet contributed to a new image of the Orient that overcame the ideas of the 19th century. The painting technique they used also gave the watercolor a new meaning.

For the three painters, but especially for Klee, the trip meant, according to Michael Baumgartner, art historian and Klee specialist, a "fascinating inspiration and self-realization". As early as 1921, the art critic Wilhelm Hausenstein dealt with Paul Klee and exaggerated him as an "oriental" who had returned to his origins through the trip: "Klee's move to the east" was the result of his previous stay in Rome, where he took up and Arab influences after the “catastrophe of war”, when “content and meaning were lost”, he took the “only possible path to abstraction, visual negation”. Klee himself had speculated that he could be of oriental descent on his mother's side, since her ancestors came from southern France, and this was also communicated to Hausenstein. Since the 1950s, travel has been the subject of art history and research. Werner Haftmann started with his book Paul Klee. Ways of pictorial thinking , in which he enthusiastically writes: “Klee is now completely full of what has been experienced, it is getting too strong. The restlessness gripped him before the abundance of the stories he saw [...]. ”Walter Holzhausen and Günter Busch published the first monograph of the trip to Tunis in 1958 and were also enthusiastic. Especially with regard to August Macke, the trip is even “a great moment for mankind”. It was only in later years that Paul Klee's diary, which served as the basis for almost all analyzes and considerations, was viewed more critically. The art historian and curator Christian Geelhaar dealt in detail with Klee's notes and saw Diary III no longer as a collection of spontaneous entries created on site, but as autobiographical texts that were compiled in 1920 and 1921 from an original version that no longer exists today. Klee's famous saying “The color has me” was stylized by the chemist Wilhelm Ostwald long after the trip into a kind of “artistic awakening experience” for the controversial debate about a scientifically theoretical conception of color theory that began in the 1920s .

Exhibitions (selection)

  • The Tunis trip. Klee, Macke, Moilliet in the Westphalian State Museum for Art and Cultural History in Münster from December 12, 1982 to February 13, 1983.
  • The Tunis trip: Klee, Macke, Moilliet. in the Paul Klee Center, Bern, April to June 22, 2014.
  • Klee Macke Moilliet - Tunis 2014. in the Bardo Archaeological Museum in Tunis from November 28, 2014 to February 14, 2015.
  • Paul Klee in North Africa. 1914 Tunisia | Egypt 1928. Museum Berggruen , Berlin, March 3 to June 1, 2020.

Reception and literature

  • Uta Laxner: Analyzes of style on the watercolors from the Tunis trip in 1914: Macke, Klee, Moillet. Dissertation Bonn 1967.
  • August Macke, Paul Klee: Die Tunisreise, watercolors and drawings by August Macke ( DuMont's new art series. ) DuMont, Cologne 1978, ISBN 3-7701-0328-9 .
  • Ernst-Gerhard Güse (ed.): The Tunis journey Klee Macke Moilliet. Hatje, Stuttgart 1982, ISBN 3-7757-0177-X .
  • Ernst-Gerhard Güse: The Tunis trip. Münster, Westphalian State Museum until February 13th - Klee, Macke, Moilliet. In: Weltkunst. 53, 1983, pp. 192-195.
  • Magdalena M. Moeller : August Macke. The Tunis trip. Prestel, Munich 1989, ISBN 3-7913-0990-0 .
  • Paul Klee - the Tunis trip. famafilm.ch, 2007, accessed on February 12, 2017 (documentary by Bruno Moll also under the title: Die Tunisreise - Le voyage à Tunis ).
  • Zentrum Paul Klee , Bern (ed.): The Tunis trip 1914 - Paul Klee, August Macke, Louis Moilliet. Hantje Cantz, Ostfildern 2014, ISBN 978-3-7757-3762-3 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Postcard from August Macke to Franz Marc from May 17, 1910 in: August Macke, Franz Marc - Briefwechsel Du Mont Köln, 1964, p. 16 ( Correspondence 1910–1914 at zeno).
  2. ↑ Kyra Stromberg : Everything there is big and rich and often terrible. The image of the Orient in Western art, in: Art and Antiques , Issue 1, 1982, p. 32.
  3. ^ Ernst-Gerhard Güse (ed.): The Tunis journey Klee Macke Moilliet. Hatje Cantz, Stuttgart 1982, ISBN 3-7757-0177-X , p. 18 ff.
  4. ^ Elisabeth Erdmann-Macke: Memories of August Macke. Stuttgart 1962, p. 118 ff.
  5. ^ Felix Klee (Ed.): Diaries of Paul Klee 1898–1918. Cologne 1957, no.515.
  6. ↑ Sebastian Preuss: August Macke, Paul Klee and Louis Moilliet's trip to Tunis is a myth of modernity. In the footsteps of the painters, as in 1914, the tourist comes across a world that overwhelms all senses: the corporeality of the fairy tale . In: Berliner Zeitung . May 27, 2003 ( berliner-zeitung.de ).
  7. ↑ Hans Christoph von Tavel: 1914: Journey to Kairouan. In: Ernst-Gerhard Güse (ed.): The Tunis journey Klee Macke Moilliet. Hatje, Stuttgart 1982, p. 31.
  8. ^ Zentrum Paul Klee , Bern (ed.): Peter Fischer Die Tunisreise 1914 - Paul Klee, August Macke, Louis Moilliet. Hantje Cantz Ostfildern 2014, foreword p. 7.
  9. ↑ Michael Baumgartner: Background: The Tunis trip of Paul Klee and his painter friends. Fama Film AG, 2007, accessed on February 12, 2017 .
  10. ↑ Since Moilliet lived from 1880 to 1962, his works are not yet in the public domain. The watercolors and drawings he made on the trip can be seen on the louismoilleit.ch website .
  11. ↑ Wolfgang Kersten: Diaries: 1898–1918 . Ed .: Paul Klee Foundation, Kunstmuseum Bern. Hatje Niggli, Stuttgart Teufen 1988, ISBN 978-3-7757-0242-3 , p. 151 of the facsimile (text-critical new edition).
  12. ^ August Macke, Franz Marc: Correspondence . Ed .: Wolfgang Macke (=  DuMont Documents: Texts and Perspectives. ). M. DuMont Schauberg, Cologne 1964, OCLC 878189831 , p. 64 .
  13. ^ Günter Busch , Walter Holzhausen: The Tunis trip. Watercolors and drawings. Cologne 1973, p. 35.
  14. ^ Walter Holzhausen : The trip to Tunis. Memory and history . In: The Tunis trip. Watercolors and drawings by August Macke (=  DuMont's new art series ). DuMont, Cologne 1978, ISBN 3-7701-0328-9 , p. 21st f . (Reprint).
  15. ^ Günter Busch, Walter Holzhausen: The Tunis trip. Watercolors and drawings. Cologne 1973, p. 36.
  16. ↑ Anna M. Schafroth : "My thinking grows more and more into my work ..." Louis Moilliet and the Tunis trip 1914 In: Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern (ed.): Peter Fischer The Tunis trip 1914 - Paul Klee, August Macke, Louis Moilliet. Hantje Cantz, Ostfildern 2014, p. 191 ff.
  17. ↑ Rainer Lawicki: chronology. In: Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern (ed.): The Tunis trip 1914 - Paul Klee, August Macke, Louis Moilliet. Hantje Cantz Ostfildern 2014, p. 305 ff.
  18. ↑ Gerhard Mack: The Tunis trip - Bern: Enlightenment or staging? In: art . 2014 ( art-magazin.de ). art-magazin.de ( Memento of the original dated February 22, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.art-magazin.de
  19. ^ Wilhelm Hausenstein: Kairouan or the story of the painter Klee and the art of this age. Munich 1921, p. 84.
  20. ↑ Werner Haftmann: Paul Klee. Paths of pictorial thought , Munich 1950, p. 51.
  21. ^ Günter Busch, Walter Holzhausen: The Tunis trip. Watercolors and drawings. Cologne 1973, p. 18.
  22. ^ Christian Geelhaar: Journal intimate or autobiography? About Paul Klee's diaries. In: Armin Second: Paul Klee. The early work. Exhibition catalog, Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich 1979, p. 246 ff.
  23. ↑ Michael Baumartner: Paul Klee's journey to Tunisia - an art-historical myth. In: Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern (ed.): The Tunis trip 1914 - Paul Klee, August Macke, Louis Moilliet. Hantje Cantz, Ostfildern 2014, p. 109 ff.
  24. ^ LWL - Exhibitions 1980 to 1989. (No longer available online.) LWL Museum for Art and Culture, archived from the original on February 15, 2017 ; accessed on February 11, 2017 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.lwl.org
  25. ^ The Tunis trip - Bern: enlightenment or staging? In: art . 2014 ( art-magazin.de ). art-magazin.de ( Memento of the original dated February 22, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.art-magazin.de
  26. ↑ "Klee Macke Moilliet - Tunis 2014" opened in the Bardo Museum . November 2014 ( goethe.de ).