January 1st, for the first time I again drew from nature: a foot. The Association of German Artists has a comfortable place, only somewhat narrow. A handsome and well-knit male model was posing. I have progressed after all while not working from nature. Life-drawing is almost a pleasant distraction. It became my best foot, not life-size, far from it. Haller worked on a large scale; his attention was drawn to the fact that his way of shaping forms was Baroque, and he was urged to overcome this tendency by observing the good and bad examples of it in Rome.
Sunday, January 5th, we went up for the first time to the Palatine, the crown of the seven hills. A brilliant day. Vegetation grows and blooms there the year round, as if this hill had a privileged climate. Pines with thick crowns grow there, and fairylike palm trees, and grotesque cactuses looking like strange immigrants. I understand the emperors who swaggered up here. The view of the Forum must be one of the most splendid in the world. Nowadays this ruinous mass could have a shattering effect on us, if fabulous light didn’t atone for it, as happened yesterday. Domus Livia has beautiful murals, a foretaste of Pompeii. The vessels for oil and wine are still in the kitchen. The wine-jugs are pointed at the bottom, so they can be buried in the earth easily. The expanse of the palace of Augustus! Or just the race track! Around this gigantic ruin the laughing splendour of modern Rome lies like a huge wreath. St. Peter’s, in the distance, whose dome would be a triumph over decay, if the eternal sky didn’t spread its vault above it. All things have their time; this marvel will suffer a catastrophe too. And it’s useless that the individual’s fame survives. Caught up in these thoughts, I begin to feel downcast. Wouldn’t it be wise to enjoy your little bit of life naively, somewhat as the seemingly impervious modern Roman does who strolls this ground with a tune on his lips. I don’t hate him from envy, but today there is some envy in my feelings. (Better to sleep, best not to have been born.) These are, not my best, but amongst my most lucid moments. And now I ought to have “You”, to forget it all.
The Tolstoy and Murger books arrived. Bohème. A sun that warms only superficially. No ray of sunlight reaches down to the depths of the human condition, where I am fond of sojourning. A kind of reading indulged in on the side, like a cigarette, like a daydream at sunset. But then, I do have time for leisurely reading. Aristophanes’ Acharneans, a most enjoyable play. Plautus’ Bramarbas doesn’t stand up next to it, a much poorer sort. I would also like to read Zola’s Rome here. A third person joined us: Schmoll von Eisenwert. Haller already knows him, I had only heard about him from Trappt. I am pleased that he also is an engraver. I hope to benefit from his technical experience. He draws on aluminium plates with pen or with lithographic pencil.
14.1.1902. Yesterday I saw la belle Otero in the Variété Salone Marguerita. First, a half-dozen singers, five of whom were not at all unpleasant. Then Otero; at first she sang in a rather poor voice, posing in exquisite attitudes. When she started playing the castanets she seemed unsurpassable. A short, breathless pause, and a Spanish dance began. Now at last the real Otero! She stands there, her eyes searching and challenging, every inch a woman, frightening as in the enjoyment of tragedy. After the first part of the dance she rests. And then mysteriously, as it were autonomously, a leg appears clothed in a whole new world of colours. An unsurpassably perfect leg. It has not yet abandoned its relaxed pose, when, alas, the dance begins again, even more intensely. The pleasure becomes so strange that one is no longer conscious of it as such. Apart from what is after all of an orgiastic character, the artist can learn much here. Of course there would need to be still another dancer if one is not only to feel the law of movement, but also to understand it. The point at issue is perhaps only the complication of linear relations that subsist between bodies at rest. This topic for the time being constitutes my real field of research.
Italian City, 1928. Ink and watercolour on paper on cardboard, top and bottom borders with gouache, coloured pencils and pencil, 33 × 23.4 cm. Long term loan from a private collection, Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern.
Picture of a Fish, 1925. Oil transfer drawing, pen and watercolour on plaster priming on gauze, on blue, primed cardboard; original painted frame strips, 64 × 43 cm. The Rosengart Collection, Lucerne.
Schmoll is a fine comrade. His drawings of landscapes are undertaken with the greatest love and executed with the utmost delicacy. He is a landscape painter through and through, even in character. A poet who stands in an intimate relation with nature… Haller can’t understand him. I try to feel my way into this sensibility of his, since something can be picked up from him here and there, in regard to the expressiveness of materials, for example. Nöther I only visit out of politeness, at first without my violin. First, take the time to give the place a sniffing-over. But why did God put this sweet, stupid Maria in front of us? Girls, so goes the talk, are hard to come by here. And yet they are more appetising than those in Munich. If only for their clean underwear!
Thursday, January 23rd. I drew a few queerly-shaped tree trunks in the park of the Villa Borghese. The linear principles here are similar to those of the human body, only more tightly related. What I have thus learned I at once put to use in my compositions. Every evening, regular life-drawing course from six to eight at the artists’ association. My earlier studies of the nude are more effective, my current ones are unattractive analyses of forms. Ancient Italy remains the chief thing for me even now, the main basis. There is a certain melancholy in the fact that no present lives up to this past. It is probably ironic that ruins should be admired more than what has been well preserved.
I work with tempera, using pure water, to avoid all technical difficulties. In this way everything goes slowly and well, one thing after the other. Two or three days for a head, a day for each arm and each leg, a day for the feet, the same for the waist, and every appendage a day each. Haller proceeds quite differently, because he is striving for a kind of organic colour effect. In my case the colour only decorates the plastic impression. Soon I shall make the attempt to transpose nature directly into my present creative means. Work goes more freely on an empty belly, but it easily leads to forsaking the sterner kind of morality. To put it bluntly, exactness suffers from it. In particular, I never want to reproach myself with drawing incorrectly because of ignorance.
We spent the 6th of March with Cléo de Mérode, probably the most beautiful woman alive. Her head, everyone knows. But her neck must actually be seen. Thin, rather long, smooth as bronze, not too mobile, but with delicate tendons, the two tendons close to the breastbone. This breastbone and the clavicles (inferences about the bare thorax). Her body is tightly covered, so that it harmonises well with the bare parts. The fact that the hips are hidden is more deplorable in that her virtuoso’s art of movement must reveal the effects of a peculiar logic, for instance when she shifts her weight from one leg to the other. In compensation, her leg is almost bare, as is the foot, which is very shrewdly draped. The arm is classic, only more refined, more variously alive; and then there is the play of the articulations. The proportions and mechanism of the hand reflect, in small, the beauty and wisdom of the organism as a whole. This has to be looked at with precision: here the main lines are not enough, and no substitute of a pathetic sort is available (she seems asexual). The substance of the dance is in the soft-lined evolutions of the body. No soul, no temperament, only absolute beauty. She is the same in the Spanish dance as in the gavotte of Louis XVI. Next to the gavotte, the Greek dance (Tanagra) suited her best. An Asiatic dance was not convincing. After every dance she completely changed costume. The consequence of all this is that she is more difficult to do justice to than Otero; she presupposes an understanding such as the Parisians seem to have. Here it is certainly lacking. The reception was friendly, but a little pig who followed her act was a more spectacular success.
Chorale and Landscape, 1921. Gouache and pencil on oil on paper on cardboard, 35 × 31 cm. Long term loan from a private collection, Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern.
Three Flowers, 1920. Oil on primed cardboard, 19.5 × 15 cm. Donation of Livia Klee, Zentrum Paul Klee,
