What Do You See? The Collection of Sidney Rothberg, Part I

Paul Klee painted Kronen-Narr (Crown Fool) in 1938 at the start of World War II, a time of great personal and professional turmoil for the artist. A pillar of the Bauhaus School, Klee had been teaching at the Bauhaus in Weimar, and later in Dessau until 1931, when he was appointed professor at the Akademie in Düsseldorf. In 1933 the Nazis forced Klee to leave his position, and he returned to Switzerland where he lived for the remainder of his life. Seventeen works by Klee were exhibited in the infamous Nazi exhibition of “degenerate” art in 1937.Beginning in 1935, the artist also struggled with a debilitating disease that left him bed ridden for long periods of time. In the later 1930s, Klee recuperated and was able to manage his symptoms, initiating a period of intense creative production for the artist. He wrote: “Productivity is accelerating in range and at a highly accelerated tempo; I can no longer entirely keep up with these children of mine. They run away with me. There is a certain adaptation taking place, in that drawings predominate. Twelve hundred items in 1939 is really something of a record performance.” Many of these drawings, like the present example, were painted with gouache on newsprint, continuing to work in abstraction and representational modes alike, and conveying his feelings about the political situation around him, as well as his thoughts as he neared the end of his life.While Klee incorporated themes of fantasy, humor and satire throughout his career, he employed these themes in the 1930s in particular to explore his social and political concerns. The crowned fool often stands for a certain freedom from societal norms, a playful character whose crown here may also point to a mockery of traditional power structures. Exploring the dire circumstances of his time, Klee places his fool on top of the daily news at a troubling and frightening moment in history.