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the world around him. The vaguely associadve, delicately rendered forms inhabiting his work in the early '40s gradually lost their fine drawn lines and reladvely disdna idenddes, becoming soft-edged, inchoate color events, like sdll unformed matter floating in a primordial soup. Rothko continued to avow that his art was about intangibles, and bleak intangibles, at that. In 1945, he wrote that "ttagic experience . . . is the only sourcebook for art" and, in a celebrated 1956 interview, he expressed his pleasure when people wept in front of his paintings, maintaining that these viewers were sharing the "religious" experience of "ttagedy, ecstasy, and doom" that he himself felt when making them. Yet the works in the last galleries of "The Decisive Decade"even the most sombercan also be read as celebrating the faa that the act of painting and the physical substance of paint can be absttact carriers of feeling. Abandoning even the vesdges of allusion seems to have been difficult for Rothko. The so-called Multiforms, with their unbound patches of color, are often overloaded, the sheer number of pictorial events and paint applicadonsscrapes, bleeds, scumblesall but overwhelming the picmre. But the last paintings included in the showsttipped-down works on paper and canvas from 1949, with radiant oranges and yellows, set off by darker "fields" made of ttansparent layersmake it plain that Rothko soon leamed to trust the expressive potency of his materials, eliminating drawing and allowing uncomplicated, large areas of color to speak for themselves. (This new fascinadon with the power of chroma is supposed to have been ttiggered by Rothko's smdy of Henri Madsse's The Red Studio [1911] which arrived at the Museum of Modem Art in 1949.) Next stop, the "Classic" paintings. One of these, an undded work from 1950, ends the show with stacked, weighdess fields of lightstruck gold and diaphanous darkness, their boundary dissolving, hovering against an orange ground implied only at the edges. Harry Cooper, in his percepdve catalogue essay, quotes Rothko writing in 1954 of his "desire for the frontal, for the unveiled, for the experienced surface," a desire that has plainly
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been flilfilled. Untitkd, paradoxically, seems to possess color but not substance, to assert a literal surface and simultaneously suggest limidess space. We mentally enter realms of color whose limits seem defined only by radiance, at the same time that we are aware of the paindng as an accumuladon of scrubbedin touches. Cooper's quotadon illuminates Rothko's evoludon, charting the path from reference to absttacdon, drawing a thread from the flattened figures in the pastoral scene of 1940 through the unmoored organic forms of the early 1940s and the shifdng patches of the Multiforms to the confrontadonal expanses of his best known, most acclaimed works. Unlike most of the quotadons in the exhibidon's wall texts, which are heavy on the rhetoric of "ttagedy, ecstasy, and doom" the emptying out of the Classic paintings is interpreted as "absence" provoked by the death of the ardst's mother in 1949the 1954 comment is about making, about the formal quesdons that preoccupied Rothko when he was working on what many consider to be his most powerful paintings. "The Definidve Decade" brings that search to life and allows us to follow it. Whether it offers evidence of "ttagic experience" or "ttagedy, ecstasy, and doom" is up to the individual viewer.

Exhibition notes
"Paul KleePhilosophical Vision: From Nature to Art" McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College.
September i-December 9, 2012 i aul Klee (1879-1940) may have protested that "we are much too concerned with biography in art," but this revealing exhibidon shows that even the most imaginadve ardst can't escape the influence of his own life and times. The show is organized into eight themadc secdons, ttacing "the ardst's dialogue with nature," "the drama of existence," and "movement, flight, and the balance of forces," as Klee explored them over the decades.

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In the sadrical etching Comedian (1904), a rumpled-faced actor in a plumed helmet sports a mask that looks much like his own face. Klee, an accomplished violinist and music cride, was also an avid operagoer who considered opera the highest form of theater. This grotesque bujfo character presents a maddeningly inconclusive image, but we can still delight in its expressionism and the energy of its pulsating lines. Klee's technique becomes more difRise in the etching Small World (1914). Peering closely at the lines, shapes, and blobs, one can make out a mask, sdck figures, and the year and number of the work drawn in the pate. The energy that Klee has invested in working the plate and the thicket of jittery imagery reinforces Marcel Franciscono's contendon that Klee's "basic impulse was graphic." This undisciplined world gives way to City of Cathedrals (1927), a drawing of such restraint that it moved even Michel Foucault to an unexpeaed moment of clarity: "In order to deploy his plasdc signs, Klee wove a new space." This childlike work is decepdvely rich, encompassing Klee's constant experiments with line, structure, rhythm, and language. That Foucault would use the word "wove" is norther intriguing because in 1927 Klee was at the Bauhaus teaching weaving design. In his discussion of the impact of weaving on Klee's work in the catalogue, Claude Cernuschi also cites Andr Masson's Eulogy of Paul Klee in which Klee's grids and interest in language are linked to pre-Columbian textiles and the Inca quipu. (Historians believe that the Inca runners carried the quipu, a group of knotted strings, from village to village to convey news or records of tribute goods.) This isn't so farfetched given Klee's interest in many kinds of language systems, from musical notadon and Egypdan hieroglyphics to simple Xs and Os.
Polyphonic Architecture (1930) is a sample

ment becomes a spadal element. The nodon of simultaneity stands out even more richly." In Polyphonic Architecture, we again see cathedrals as sign-units, but this dme, a grid of richly colored squares threatens to overwhelm the delicate lines. Rhythmic color values send the eye bouncing around the surface ofthe work. The conflict of scale between the varied squares and the tiny cathedrals exists alongside the dialogue between representadon and abstracdon. The fact that the work is watercolor on cotton sends us back to the motion of weaving and the interplay ofthe hand. It is a remarkably cogent example of Klee's "muldple temporalides." liup (1931) is an example of what might be called polyphonic pointillism. Ranks of dots punctuated by black oudined areas and thick black strokes are suspended over a colorful layer of pink, yellow, and lavender. The curators offer litde comment on this piece, faUing back on its decoradve potendal. But Klee scorned decoradon as a dead end, so there must be more at work here. The onomatopoeic dde sounds like "aUeyoop," a phrase that originated among French gymnasts and trapeze ardsts who launched themselves with "allez, hop!" Klee frequently depiaed dghtrope walkers, so it seems likely that he would have heard this phrase. liup might then be the view from high in the big top with the entertainers appearing as stylized scripts over the heads of a dghdy packed audience. The lack of center in the painting and the rhythm created by a sea of dots draws attendon, however, not to what is seen, but to what is experienced. T h e gallery dded "The Failure of PoUdcs" takes a more serious turn. By 1933, when Hider became Chancellor of Germany, Klee was an internadonally recognized ardst. But after having his artwork seized by the Nazis and being (inaccurately) denounced as a Jew, Klee decided to return to Switzerland. The confiscated artworks appeared in 1937 in Goebbels' Entartete Kunst, or Degenerate Art, exhibidon. The works on exhibit from this period are frenzied pencil sketches, what Klee called
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of Klee's "polyphonic paintings" in which he explored simultaneous themes in space and time, just as he had done as a musician, playing melody and counterpoint. But, he writes in his diary, "Polyphonic painting is superior to music in that, here, the dme ele-

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Xhe art of modern China has once again entered the London galleries in force. The Hayward Gaery, which has a long and successfril record of exhibiting work by the world's most adventurous and innovative artists, has now devoted its entire main space to contemporary work from China pictures, sculptures, photography, videos, human statues, and performance art. Across town in the Barbican Art Gaery, hidden away upstairs in a couple of side rooms in a large photography exhibition, is the utterly conttasting work of the Chinese phoErstwhile Philosopher, No!, and Stick It Out!, tojournalist Li Zhenshang. Li has given the au from 1940. Although Klee made drawings such as these throughout his life, these three world its most extensive visual record of the disti the formal themes of his body of work horrors of Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution of 1966-76. It provides a grimly reahstic into a resolution that is at once coolly theoretical and au too human. Eidola: Erstwhile prelude to the world of high contemporary Philosopher depicts a contemplative figure, ex- fantasy at the Hayward, an exhibition which has so many new Chinese directions that it amining his fate in a pose similar to Rodin's almost ceases to have direction at all. Thinker. No! offers an elegant refrisal, its ultta Perhaps the most outt room in the Haythin une counterbalancing the weight of the negative. In Stick It Out!, the continuous line ward exhibition is that given over to the work of Sim Yuan and Peng Yu. At the center porttait turns inward on itself, becoming so is their Civilization Pillar (original 2001), a distorted that its energy is torqued into a cubtwelve-foot-high obelisk made of human fat ist head with spirals for eyes. coected as a by-product of hposuction. It In her catalogue essay, Eliane Escoubas parodies ttaditional, dignified Chinese marconcludes that Klee finds in these drawble pillars meticulously curved with clouds ings the "essence of rhythm" and a sense of and dragons; this one is soft, yeow, perishart in the process of becoming. The French able, and seemingly slapdashthe very anphosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty had altithesis ofthat which is being parodied. Many ready drawn this conclusion in 1961, noting
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"psychic improvisations." They depict scenes of murder, public denunciations, violence, and sorcery in an atmosphere of coercion and fear. Klee somewhat mitigates the imagery by drawing on his operatic works, showing secret agents as barbarians in doublets and military ttibunals as witch ttials. In 1935, Klee's health had begun to deteriorate. A series of symptoms including bronchitis, pleurisy, and persistent fatigue baffled the doaors who first diagnosed measles. In 2010, Dr. Hans Suter, a physician and Klee enthusiast, published what is surely the definitive history of this mysterious malady, now generay believed to be sderoderma. Suter quotes Klee's reflection on approaching death: "not as oblivion but as the pursuit of perfection." An uncharacteristically bleak work from 1939 belies this equanimity. While ./4 Gate is classical in its ausion to death as a threshold, Klee uses masses and line in a monochromatic palette to distance himself from the experience that seems imminent. Gnter Figal notes that works such asyl Gate "do not have foreground and background. So they are not mere optical phenomena; rather they encounter the beholder. . . . They are intensely present in what can be called their texture." Among the sttongest works in the show are continuous line drawings such as Eidola:

that Klee freed the line so that "[it] no longer imitates the visible; it 'makes visible'; it is the diagram of a genesis of things." It would seem that Klee had succeeded in makingas he himself defined arta "sime of creation." Leann Davis Alspcmh

"Art of Change: New Directions from China" Hayward Gallery, London. September 7-December 9, 2012 "Everything Was Moving: Photography from tJie '60s and '70s" Barbican Art Gallery, London.
September 13. 2012-January 13, 2013

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