Bolto and Klee

These two closely related works, one by Bolto, one by Paul Klee, date from 1914, during the two men's chance meeting and subsequent work session in Tunisia. Klee's famous remark in reference to the Tunisia trip ("Color and I are one; I am a painter") is said to have angered the young Bolto (he will not confirm this now). August Macke, who was travelling with Klee in Tunisia at the time, called the collaboration one-sided, but refused to explain. In conversation with Metzinger in 1948 Bolto commented that it hadn't so much been color in general with which Klee had become one, but Bolto's color in particular.


Bolto: Composition With Red X, January 1914 (2007)


Paul Klee: With the Red X (1914)





Accounts of Klee's desperate appeal to Bolto for a collaborative studio session in 1927 seem scarcely credible, considering their sources. Nevertheless, the grid composition of Klee's watercolor 'Sand auf Flora' of that year is unquestionably presaged in Bolto's much busier (and, of course, darker) 'Composition 2' of the previous autumn.


Bolto's 'Composition 2,' probably from November 1926


Klee's 'Sand auf Flora' of 1927



Much has been written elsewhere of Bolto's brief and unfortunate final encounter with Paul Klee, which occurred at some point during the early months of 1940; but there is no question that the meeting was fruitful for both artists, at least with respect to their exploration of meaningful form. Both Bolto and Klee were then independently revisiting Kandinsky's earlier ambitions (ca. 1911 - 1913) to express in visual terms Schoenberg's 12-note method of composition. Working together one afternoon that fateful spring, they approached their shared task earnestly, although Bolto's alternately ironic and nostalgic perspective predominates in the resulting productions. It is instructive to compare Bolto's early composition (No. 1 of 1938) with Klee's own take on the theme (which he called 'Music Unter Tag'), and with Bolto's integration of the two men's ideas in the 'No. 2' of 1940.


Bolto's 'No. 1' 1938 - 1940 (? -- thought to have been referred to by Klee as 'Musik Unter Tag No. 1')



Paul Klee's 'Musik Unter Tag' of 1940


Bolto's 'No. 2' of 1940 (this is the painting about which Grohmann alleged that Klee, on the point of death in June of that year, angrily remarked, 'Musik, vieleicht -- aber unter Nacht!')