ТРАНСФОРМАЦИЯ РОМАНТИЧЕСКОЙ ТРАДИЦИИ В ИСКУССТВЕ ПАУЛЯ КЛЕЕ: ТЕМПОРАЛЬНЫЙ ПОВОРОТ

Following the guidelines laid down by P. Klee in his diary, where he designates his art as “cold Romanticism” or “Romanticism without pathos”, we explore his relation to the Romantic tradition. We focus on the Romantic view of an artist and his destiny. Drawing on the literary texts written by Klee as a commentary to his pictorial oeuvre, we analyse how the theme of destiny is transformed into the theme of time. Temporal structures underlying all creation become the object of his art. This approach complies with the principles of the “Romanticism without pathos” whose notion was coined by Klee and which withdraws itself from mundane and historical circumstances. It also resonates with the shift from figurative painting to abstraction. The Romantic dialectic of ideal and its embodiment is replaced by Klee with ambivalence of the universal, or cosmic, and the individual. Universal temporal structures, however, remain the structures of the individual consciousness, which engenders anxiety and the feeling of the fragility of our existence.