Main path and side paths
Hauptweg und Nebenwege is one of the most famous paintings by Paul Klee . It belongs to the group of his numerous layer and stripe pictures and was created in January 1929 after Klee's second trip to Egypt. On loan from Werner Vowinckel, it was first shown in the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne and can now be seen in the Museum Ludwig .
theme
The title of the picture and its connotations correspond to its structure. In the middle runs the straight, contoured main path, divided several times, differentiated by color contrasts, which mainly range between blue-orange and red-green, almost aligned with the middle and tapering in layers in its horizontal internal structure. The main path is not only a path, but also a “strip of fields that is divided 45 times across to the high zone of the streaky blue and purple”, more like a “picture of the sky-bearing staircase of a step pyramid”. To the left and right of it, the small-scale side paths run much more irregularly than twisted and disordered paths, which partly end in nowhere, partly also at the same blue-gray horizon that seems to give the main path its clear destination.
technology
Hauptweg und Nebenwege is one of the artist's largest -format works. Notable numbers of even larger oil paintings were not made until the 1930s. In addition to the format and the programmatic title, the technique is also unusual: oil on a plaster-primed canvas stretched onto a stretcher, which Klee only used in a few cases, at least up to 1929, and not very often later. The main way and side ways are therefore - and of course due to the many ingenious interpretations - unreservedly a key work of Paul Klee.
To build up the image of the main path and side paths , most of the line structure was scratched into a fresh plaster base, in the case of the two boundaries of the main path with a sharp stylus and with the help of a ruler, in almost all other cases with the free hand and a coarser instrument. that has left warps and ridges in the primer in some places.
The assignment to the striped pictures, a group of a good five dozen drawings, colored works and an etching, the formal shape of which is largely based on a horizontal arrangement of picture fields and a more or less consistently applied construction principle, derives from the picture fields layered one on top of the other as well as from Klee's own nomenclature.
The structural law, which Klee also referred to as "cardinal progression", on which the painting Hauptweg und Nebenwege and almost all pictures in the same group of works is based, can be characterized as follows: The starting point of the picture construction is the position, a horizontal picture field of mostly elongated dimensions, understood as a norm, which is halved when it meets an irregularly placed vertical or inclined line. Each time the now divided layer meets with verticals or slopes, it is halved again, resulting in further subdivisions in the rhythm of 1/4, 1/8 and 1/16. Klee understood the subdivision based on the oblique and vertical lines positioned irregularly in the picture surface as an individual principle, and the regularly layered layers themselves as a dividing principle. The individual is thus associated with irregularity, the dividual with regularity. Preforms of this layering of layers and arrangement of lines are known from earlier works by Klee and from his Bauhaus classes. But it wasn't until 1929, after his return from Egypt, that Klee arranged the arrangement of horizontal parallel lines and the color fields in between according to the rule of division referred to as “cardinal progression”.
reception
Horst Keller, director of the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, called the main route and side routes an “indescribable magic picture”. It shows an immeasurable landscape, expressed with “the most sublime painting”, “which does not seem to have been conceived by a human being and not written down by a hand-held brush”.
The art critics largely agreed that the painting Hauptweg und Nebenwege breathed the optimistic spirit of the south. It reflects direct light and color experiences that Klee (like other artists before him) had gathered in the Mediterranean countries, in the region of origin of Western culture, in this case in Egypt. Their colors testify - according to the prevailing opinion in the older literature - of the atmospheric impressions experienced in Egypt and show traces of an ancient culture. The blue is reminiscent of the water of the Nile, the earth colors of its mud, the yellow-orange of the Egyptian sun, the layers of color on ornamental bands in the burial chambers of Aswan. The branched byways can also be related to the branches of irrigation canals, which Klee himself describes in a letter from Egypt. After his return to Dessau at home, the artist reported to his wife in another letter about the special atmosphere while working on his watercolor monument in the Fruchtland , about which he said the following: “I paint a landscape like the view from the wide mountains of the valley of the kings into the fruitland. The polyphony between background and atmosphere is kept as loose as possible. "
Inspired by the painting, the Swiss composer Christian Henking composed his guitar solo Sillis in 1992 . Thomas Blumenthal recorded it on the CD 8 Pieces on Paul Klee from Creative Works Records in 2002 .
In 1998, the composer Michael Denhoff wrote an almost three-hour piano quintet, which, deliberately borrowing from Klee, bears the title Hauptweg und Nebenwege - Aufzüge, Op. 83 . The work was premiered in 2000 at the International Beethoven Festival in Bonn by the Auryn Quartet and Birgitta Wollenweber (piano). A CD recording was released in 2005 on the label col legno with the Vogler Quartet and Birgitta Wollenweber.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Horst Keller: main path and side paths. In: The Golden Palette. A thousand years of painting in Germany, Austria and Switzerland (Stuttgart / Hamburg, 1968)
- ↑ See on this and on the following sections Frank Zöllner : Paul Klee, Hauptweg und Nebenwege, 1929 (PDF; 146 kB). Wallraf-Richartz-Jahrbuch 61, 2000, pp. 263–290.
- ↑ Horst Keller: main path and side paths . In: The Golden Palette. A thousand years of painting in Germany, Austria and Switzerland (Stuttgart / Hamburg, 1968), p. 475.
- ↑ Catalog of works (PDF, p. 5)
- ↑ Catalog of works by Christian Henking (PDF; 427 kB)