Régine Bonnefoit: Paul Klee und die „Kunst des Sichtbarmachens“ von Musik

The study examines Klee’s numerous attempts to visualize music through graphic lines. The connection between art and music results from his definition of line as the path made by a moving point. Klee compares this point to a seed from which a line grows like a plant. These ideas have their roots in the romantic conception of the arabesque, which Eduard Hanslick then applied to the field of music. In the same way that an arabesque, as an interminable filigree of line, spreads from a single point, “absolute music” finds its genesis, according to Hanslick, in “pure tone.” In 1913 the musicologist Ernst Kurth defined melodic line as the “course of a tone set in motion.” The essay documents the influence of Kurth’s Foundations of Linear Counterpoint (1917) on Klee’s concept of “pictorial polyphony.” Klee not only translated music into lines; he also sought to invert this process by retranslating lines into music. Already in 1913 the reformist pedagogue Oskar Rainer carried out similar experiments in Vienna. Josef Matthias Hauer, a friend of Rainer, transcribed music into colored lines and sent examples of these trials to Johannes Itten at the Bauhaus, where Klee possibly could have seen them.

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