What is Art? (Part III)

Paul Klee’s Bauhaus studio resembled a magician’s workshop. Plato would not have been surprised; art was deception, the artist a conjurer. Klee believed in many worlds, or levels of reality. Jeffrey Howe calls these the “unseen world of ghosts, somnambulists and witches” (in Paul Klee. Philosophical Vision: from Nature to Art, edited by John Sallis. McMullen Museum of Art. Boston College. The University of Chicago Press. 2012:184). His art was an attempt, in Klee’s words, to make visible these worlds. It remained just as enigmatic as his writing. Because he was attempting to uncover, through his art, the essence of reality, it could be said he was a Platonist. And, because his art was certainly not a reflection, or mirror, of reality, Plato could not accuse him of being at “third removed from truth and reality”. Here was a creative artist; an artist making things on par with the carpenter.

Paul Klee begins his famous lecture of 1924, “On Modern Art”, with a…