Klee's art en masse confirms his famous aphorism that drawing is simply "taking a line for a walk". He took this walk in more than 9,000 pictures and in each he barely knew the route he was setting out on. Once the original mark — a patch of colour or a millimetre of line — was on the canvas or paper it could meander any which way within the boundaries of a balanced composition. As the mark-making progressed Klee recognised that "sooner or later, the association of ideas may of itself occur to [the artist]...Nothing need then prevent him from accepting it." This was Surrealism's automatic drawing brought under control. Thus his beautiful, random calligraphy could resolve itself into Sacred Islands, 1926, or Pastorale, 1927.
This last is a perfect example of both his "association" and the intuition that guided his work. A complex series of arches and crosses drawn left to right like an ancient script such as Linear B is given the mood of landscape by the simple addition of a thin strip of blue at the top of the picture. This sky colour immediately gives the two-dimensional patterning a third dimension; the picture gains depth and perspective, the abstract patterns hint at resolving themselves into recognisable forms and the picture gains resonance. With Klee much of his most interesting work goes on at the pictures' edges.
Towards the end of his life Klee suffered from scleroderma, a rare and terminal autoimmune disease that stopped him from continuing with intricate compositions. His later works are coarser and broader and the patterning in them more open. They invite the spectator to read them as rhythms that are slowing but deepening: the last notes of Klee's great performance.
Another musical picture, J.M. Whistler's Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket, 1872-77 (the painting John Ruskin likened to "flinging a pot of paint in the public's face"), is the highlight of the Dulwich Picture Gallery's delightful An American in London: Whistler and the Thames. The exhibition shows that the river ran through his art from the moment of his arrival in London in 1859 onwards. A resident of Chelsea, Whistler only had to look out of his window for his subjects.
The show includes both the delicate etchings of the working river and its labourers up at Wapping and Rotherhithe and the ethereal, misty scenes of his more refined stretch of water. These last, in their simplification and the way the scour the scene of the quotidian, mark the beginnings of the Aesthetic movement and in them he matched the fluidity of the river in the fluidity of his paint. The pictures here show why, even while in Venice, Whistler missed the Thames: "They are lovely, those fogs — and I am their painter!"
