No ray of sunlight reaches down to the depths of the human condition, where I am fond of sojourning. A kind of reading indulged in on the side, like a cigarette, like a daydream at sunset. But then, I do have time for leisurely reading. Aristophanes’ Acharneans, a most enjoyable play. Plautus’ Bramarbas doesn’t stand up next to it, a much poorer sort. I would also like to read Zola’s Rome here. A third person joined us: Schmoll von Eisenwert. Haller already knows him, I had only heard about him from Trappt. I am pleased that he also is an engraver. I hope to benefit from his technical experience. He draws on aluminium plates with pen or with lithographic pencil.
14.1.1902. Yesterday I saw la belle Otero in the Variété Salone Marguerita. First, a half-dozen singers, five of whom were not at all unpleasant. Then Otero; at first she sang in a rather poor voice, posing in exquisite attitudes. When she started playing the castanets she seemed unsurpassable. A short, breathless pause, and a Spanish dance began. Now at last the real Otero! She stands there, her eyes searching and challenging, every inch a woman, frightening as in the enjoyment of tragedy. After the first part of the dance she rests. And then mysteriously, as it were autonomously, a leg appears clothed in a whole new world of colours. An unsurpassably perfect leg. It has not yet abandoned its relaxed pose, when, alas, the dance begins again, even more intensely. The pleasure becomes so strange that one is no longer conscious of it as such. Apart from what is after all of an orgiastic character, the artist can learn much here. Of course there would need to be still another dancer if one is not only to feel the law of movement, but also to understand it. The point at issue is perhaps only the complication of linear relations that subsist between bodies at rest. This topic for the time being constitutes my real field of research.
Italian City, 1928. Ink and watercolour on paper on cardboard, top and bottom borders with gouache, coloured pencils and pencil, 33 × 23.4 cm. Long term loan from a private collection, Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern.
Picture of a Fish, 1925. Oil transfer drawing, pen and watercolour on plaster priming on gauze, on blue, primed cardboard; original painted frame strips, 64 × 43 cm. The Rosengart Collection, Lucerne.
Schmoll is a fine comrade. His drawings of landscapes are undertaken with the greatest love and executed with the utmost delicacy. He is a landscape painter through and through, even in character. A poet who stands in an intimate relation with nature… Haller can’t understand him. I try to feel my way into this sensibility of his, since something can be picked up from him here and there, in regard to the expressiveness of materials, for example. Nöther I only visit out of politeness, at first without my violin. First, take the time to give the place a sniffing-over. But why did God put this sweet, stupid Maria in front of us? Girls, so goes the talk, are hard to come by here. And yet they are more appetising than those in Munich. If only for their clean underwear!
Thursday, January 23rd. I drew a few queerly-shaped tree trunks in the park of the Villa Borghese. The linear principles here are similar to those of the human body, only more tightly related. What I have thus learned I at once put to use in my compositions. Every evening, regular life-drawing course from six to eight at the artists’ association. My earlier studies of the nude are more effective, my current ones are unattractive analyses of forms. Ancient Italy remains the chief thing for me even now, the main basis. There is a certain melancholy in the fact that no present lives up to this past. It is probably ironic that ruins should be admired more than what has been well preserved.
I work with tempera, using pure water, to avoid all technical difficulties. In this way everything goes slowly and well, one thing after the other. Two or three days for a head, a day for each arm and each leg, a day for the feet, the same for the waist, and every appendage a day each. Haller proceeds quite differently, because he is striving for a kind of organic colour effect. In my case the colour only decorates the plastic impression. Soon I shall make the attempt to transpose nature directly into my present creative means. Work goes more freely on an empty belly, but it easily leads to forsaking the sterner kind of morality. To put it bluntly, exactness suffers from it. In particular, I never want to reproach myself with drawing incorrectly because of ignorance.
We spent the 6th of March with Cléo de Mérode, probably the most beautiful woman alive. Her head, everyone knows. But her neck must actually be seen. Thin, rather long, smooth as bronze, not too mobile, but with delicate tendons, the two tendons close to the breastbone. This breastbone and the clavicles (inferences about the bare thorax). Her body is tightly covered, so that it harmonises well with the bare parts. The fact that the hips are hidden is more deplorable in that her virtuoso’s art of movement must reveal the effects of a peculiar logic, for instance when she shifts her weight from one leg to the other. In compensation, her leg is almost bare, as is the foot, which is very shrewdly draped. The arm is classic, only more refined, more variously alive; and then there is the play of the articulations. The proportions and mechanism of the hand reflect, in small, the beauty and wisdom of the organism as a whole. This has to be looked at with precision: here the main lines are not enough, and no substitute of a pathetic sort is available (she seems asexual). The substance of the dance is in the soft-lined evolutions of the body. No soul, no temperament, only absolute beauty. She is the same in the Spanish dance as in the gavotte of Louis XVI. Next to the gavotte, the Greek dance (Tanagra) suited her best. An Asiatic dance was not convincing. After every dance she completely changed costume. The consequence of all this is that she is more difficult to do justice to than Otero; she presupposes an understanding such as the Parisians seem to have. Here it is certainly lacking. The reception was friendly, but a little pig who followed her act was a more spectacular success.
Chorale and Landscape, 1921. Gouache and pencil on oil on paper on cardboard, 35 × 31 cm. Long term loan from a private collection, Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern.
Three Flowers, 1920. Oil on primed cardboard, 19.5 × 15 cm. Donation of Livia Klee, Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern.
Arrival, Sunday, March 23rd, in the morning. That evening, San Carlo: Mefistofele. Monday, the harbour; in the afternoon, Posillipo. Tuesday, San Martino-Corso Vittorio Emmanuele. German Consulate, Aquarium. In those three days I saw so much that my account cannot even remotely keep up with it. Next to Genoa, Naples is indolent, dirty, and sick. Next to Naples, Genoa is one-sided. Naples displays the greatest pomp beside the greatest misery – harbour life, rides along the Corso, sophisticated opera, even a touch of Rome: the Museo Nazionale. In addition, the matchless, paradisiacal scenery. The sea is more powerful in Genoa, but also more monotonous. Here, a real bay surrounded by singular coastal mountains and locked in by colourful islands. And I can see all this from the balcony of my room. It lies at my feet, a giant hemisphere, the magnificent city with its roaring voice. On the left, the old town with the harbours and old Vesuvius; on the right, the modern Villa Nazionale and the Posillipo. Around the house and behind it, gardens with fresh greenery, fantastic shapes and a thousand blossoms. This splendid lookout is called Salita del Petrajo, Villa de Rosa 48, Pensione Haase, Napoli. The sea is gorgeously blue and quiet. The city, an animated mixture of patches, blocks of houses in sunlight and shadow, white streets, dark green parks. The prospect is a reminder of Christ’s temptation. Sheer joy gives me wings, suspends me at the centre of spheric splendour, at the world’s navel. But there is work too, it is not always like this hour of rest. Below at the harbour, you try to make your way through an incredible world that sounds quite different from what it is in the song of “Santa Lucia”. What people they are down there! Ugly and poor, they lie about in the sun, sick, lousy, tattered, half naked. I am neutral – attracted to them without pity, with a kind of knowledge-hungry aversion. One delight of the artist is to let himself be thoroughly infected like this. I smile as I rebel against it, I know my art needs this as a basis. Its blossoms will wilt easily until the great strengthening. May the day of proof come. To be able to reconcile the opposites! To express the great manifold in a single word!
The aquarium is extremely stimulating. Especially expressive are such native creatures as octopi, starfish, and mussels. And snake-like monstrosities with poisonous eyes, huge mouths, and pocket-like gullets. Others sit in sand over their ears, like humanity sunk in its prejudice. The vulgar octopi stare out like art-dealers;