Paul Klee, Henry Darger and Puppets, Real and Imagined

JF Ptak Science Books Post 717  Blog Bookstore

 

While he was serving in the German army, Paul Klee’s 1917 journal entry (#1032) contained this pearl, coming being advice from his sergeant to him and the rest of the non-com grunts:  “Let’s not kid ourselves, at our workshop-- you won’t get ahead. There you’ll find advancement.”

Klee (born in the same year as Einstein and died in the second year of the European War, 1940) was a leading and inventive modern painter, who along with Franz Marc and Wassily Kandinsky created the Blaue Reiter movement, and who worked in close proximity to many of the major art movements of the new era.  He was an iconic, creative artist of vast influence.

What struck me today was this image of Klee’s hand-made toys and this seldom-seen image of the puppets he created for his boy, Felix, around 1922.  (Felix was 13, Paul  43.)  Evidently Klee made 50 or so of these puppets, 30 of which have survived.  They are lovely and whimsical and are examples of quick, creative work with found and manipulated objects.  I can certainly visualize Klee getting drawn into the project—his diaries too show that he was interested in his son’s development, taking note of the different small, developmental things that lots of folks can miss when their child is growing up.  The puppets are intimate, made for his son for play, and are composed of bristle and bone and nutshells and electrical outlets and bits of gingham and cloth and wire and buttons.  Stuff from the junk drawn or whatnot box.  Klee did construct more elaborate puppets for his connection with the theatre, and of course was also a sculptor.  But I do like these little puppets, much in the same way as I enjoy the small toys made by Alexander Calder for his kids.

And somewhere in there imagining Klee getting a little lost in constructing these puppets arose the image of Henry Darger, the severely-imaginistic, primarily invisible-in-life  outsider artist who found his fame in post mortem glory.  Darger’s  (1892-1973) work—and life—were discovered only after his death, when his apartment in Chicago became an archaeological dig by his landlords, and his massive and outré output became “discovered”.  The process of discovery seemed not to interest Darger in life, as he had extremely limited contact with people and was basically an Invisible in work, pushing mops and brooms for most of his life to make his rent.  In the meantime, in the lifetime not at work, Darger was very busy in his own created world, typing out a 15,000-page novel/world called  The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion…  (This is just one of his works of fiction—another is a 10,000-page work called  Crazy House: Further Adventures in Chicago, and another is a  work of autobiography (?), where Darger spends 200-odd pages on his early life before slipping away into a 4,800-page diversion on a tornado called “Sweetie Pie”.)

His artwork was primarily concerned with this constructed environment of the Vivian girls, and I must say that it is fascinating to me, but only forensically—I don’t “enjoy” it per se, even though it is phenomenal, and fantastical.  The subject matter—often veering into bestial brutality towards children, with lots of dripping redness--is just too deeply twisted and disturbed for me to enjoy, though I do have an appreciation for the stuff that surrounds it all. 

And so what does this all have to do with Paul Klee and puppetry?

Nothing, except in a fiction that I’ve had in my head about Darger (pictured at right)   for as long as I’ve known about him, and which is also wholly unsupported by fact or reasonable supposition.  Listen:  from the first moments that I knew of him, I pictured Darger returning to his rooms at night after a day of cleaning, mopping, scrubbing, taking abuse for spills not cleaned, and then reliving the entire day at night in miniature.  In my own story, Darger created small figurines and puppets through which he re-enacted his day, complete with sets of the rooms in which he worked.  Perhaps he lost himself in these moments, finding a vindication in miniature stages in his second-story walk-up that he couldn’t in his daily life, allowing his creative, 50,000-page nighttime imagination to open up. 

That’s what I had in my own head when I saw the image of the Klees’ theatre, and puppets.  Certainly my Darger idea is not what Klee had in mind; nor is it anything that was in Darger's mind, either.  Just mine.

Comments

[Jeff]

It's OK, John. I think many of your ideas are exactly that: just yours. That's why I read this blog.

[John PTak]

Thanks, Jeff. I've wondered about Mr. Darger for a while; I can't possibly have any insight into what he was thiking...and especially since he was thinking (and recording) *SO* much.