The Fish Magic
The Fish Magic is one of the most well-known paintings and combines a lovely subject with bold colors. The audience has experienced a range of emotions as a result of Paul Klee's aura-filled artwork.
Creation and Inspiration
Before passing away from scleroderma, Klee completed The Fish Magic in his prime years as an artist. However, the painting has continued to be one of the works that inspired the painter's imagination and brought out a new level of talents to produce a new figure. Fish magic was created in a pane using oil and watercolors. It combines the components from the sea, such as fish, the earth, which are flowers and the galaxy, that is the moon and the planets. The painting appears as though Klee was conveying a complex story using the elements of the sea, sky on canvas and the earth. He expresses his romantic, expressionist and surreal mood through the painting. Any person examining Klee's work for the first time will definitely think it was a work of a nursery watercolor worm. After looking carefully at the elements, one can see how the elements in the painting fuse together to illustrate a message after seeing how Klee was managed to make an artistic impression using simple elements.
Imitations and Other Artistic Impression
There are several imitations of the Fish Magic painting which have been produced after the completion of the initial painting but have not reached the standard of the initial painting by Klee. Klee has made other artistic impressions with his prowess as a modern artist. There is another impressive creation in the 1922 twittering machine painting. Klee has used oil and canvas in most of his paintings and has satisfactorily used the natural elements.
Image of Klee's Fish Magic
Klee has succeeded in creating a magical realm through the intertwining of aquatic, earthly, and celestial elements. The painting is covered by a delicate black surface in the underlying colors, where the artists have revealed scrawling and scratching designs using the black paint. At the center of the painting, there is a square of muslin which is stuck on the canvas. A long diagonal line crosses the top of the clock tower. The diagonal line is poised to send away the subtle in the curtain.
German Romanticism and Elements
The Fish Magic is set squarely suing the background of German romanticism. It is a blend of natural empiricism and fantasy, as well as the use of poetry and pragmatics. The painting was made during the middle period of the artist's period in Bauhaus using a mix of aquatic, celestial, and earthly elements. It is done in a dark environment of indeterminate scale and scope, with the fish and flora floating amongst the clock towers and the human beings.
Artistic Techniques
Klee cleared and sanded the black paint as an illustration of the black paint, which shows mysterious specks and the bright colors of the passages underneath. He has used a rare version of the games which children play using the wax crayons. The artist has also developed a device ingeniously, which is used to show there is more unique ways, which need to be unveiled. The fish magic is a collage with unique with a square of muslin stuck on the top of the surface with bigger rectangular canvas. The long diagonal line touches the top of the clock tower using the side as it appears poised to send away the subtle of the curtain. For the artist, art is always considered a theater, just like any of his paintings, one which gives a promise of the acts to be followed.
The Landscape Series
Fish Magic belongs to a class of landscape in the production series by Klee among them Botanical Theatre. The vast majority of these works leave a spectrum of creativity and have been surmounted by the sky. The Fish Magic draws the curtain on the indeterminate space in which a fish swims while the plants grow in the presence of the people and the planet. The curtain and the clown frame the scene on the upper side and the lower left, which in appearance is not part of reality. Instead, the author has revealed it to the audience, in the crystalline perspective with the face of the clown and a peering edge of the picture which appear to be calling for attention.
Distinctive Elements in Fish Magic
With a couple of exceptions and other inhabitants, Klee's work is easily identifiable, due to its properties. A vigorous blue daisy with three fish is the main property, which can be used to identify the painting for any person who has a clue of what it entails. In the right corner, there is an hourly vase of daisies while the left has a gesticulating figure containing two profile gazes on either of the sides of the picture. A continuation on either of the encounters is a sapling conifer, a tall scape which is attached to the wire trap and an hourglass which holds there a glowing red disk. Above this, there are three more fish. In the celestial body, there are hovers close to the curtain edge, while on the upper left, there is a brightly colored circle in yellow, which floats nestled in a powdery blue crescent.
Overlapping Boundaries
On various occasions, the objects in Klee's painting overlap the boundaries of the patch of the fabric added to the picture, which gives the picture a uniqueness of the design, as seen by the viewer. Hence, the wire trap is suspended within the patch and supports the rod placed on the edge. The fish is ignorant of the boundary which is placed between the two zones, as it swims freely in and out of the central patch as the plants grow from the roots. The curtain-edge is reflected on the upper corner of the image, with the lower left having a patch that bisects the hourglass, as though it is an inverted cone due to the image of the mirror below it. The seam between the two pieces of fabric bisects the head of the gesticulating figure through the normal eyes but once again, it shows the reflected image. The reflecting mirror is gazes from the mid-point of the picture as it presents a clear mistakable transformation of the image.
Interpretive Rhythms and Style
The Fish Magic gives insights into the creative methods and objectives of Klee's method of art and stands as a warning to the painters who were trying to interpret his imagery. The distinctive rhythmic articulation defines Klee's style in art. The dark backgrounds in the picture establish a grave with occasional sinister and mood from the beginning as the glowing form appears to be bringing forth the deepest regions in Klee's subconsciousness. The picture brings elusive dream and the power of a revelation, as the interpretation of the work is grounded on relationships and identity from the pictorial elements instead of using a structural manipulation.
Significance of the Clock
Klee has raised the Fish Magic curtain up with water underneath superficially. It is worth noting that after the equivocal underwater scene preceding as shown in the Hamburg Goldfish catalog. Other similar works during that time include the Aquarium with Silvery Blue Fishes produced in 1924 as well as the Fish Picture produced in 1925. However, the Fish Magic differs from them due to the use of elements which are not found underwater. Above all, the double profile figure, the church steeple, and also the planetary bodies in the picture.
Symbolism and Themes
The last of the furnishes in Paul Klee's Fish Magic is more complicated due to the theme of personal nature, which was one of Klee's preferences and used in most of his artistic works. The paintings, which are nestled at the center with a yellow disc of the clock face and give a compositional focus as a large and regular circle in the several circles in the design. It is impossible to desist from comparing the celestial bodies on the upper left in relation to the group of images, which was one of the favorite recurrent preoccupations and motifs by Klee. The main difference between the cosmic and earthly time is the finite time and in the infinite time.
The Clock and Symbolic Meanings
This is a comparison similar to the sun and the moon and the clock as they are repetitive in the first picture by Klee in the first divisionism picture, namely Sunset, produced in 1930. The interminable rotation of day and night is seen under the human presence. In the contrary, the featureless face has an eye and a tear similar to the arm of a clock. Though this is a poignant conflation of the images missing from the Fish Magic, the meaning has little attributes. Four numerals in the clock are painted in red and shine with a white and yellow face as in general. The unusual digits are 1, 2, 5 and 9, rather than 3, 6, 9, and 12 which are rearranged to record the date of the picture, 1925.
Opinions from Other Artists
The message of the clock will help to illustrate the wire trap where it is placed. Historically this system is seen as a fishing net whose threads make the outline of the belfry. Max Huggler has made a comparison of the general theme of the picture to the Time of the Plants produced in 1927. He, however, notes that the wire basket and the clock are an illustration of the 'die Zeit der Fische' which is the presumable remaining time before the fish is caught. Klee has considered this topic as a drawing, Calling the Fish of 1919 and another one. They are Biting found in the Tate gallery dating from 1920. The interpretation of Huggler is quite reasonable in case one accepts Fish Magic as an underwater scene.
On a corresponding deeper interpretative level, the trap belongs to the reality of the underwater habitat, though the cosmic theme of Klee's picture is the subjection of all life applicable to the duration rule. In the contrary, the free-floating planetary bodies with the rhythmic rhythms of the universe are bound by a steeple and clock which are made to be obeyed by man. In absence of the trap, the clock on a church steeple is a traceable motif in the entire career of Klee. From the start of 1883 and 1884, which was the time the artist's career was four to five years old, the dates of a drawing, the church, the Clock with contrived numbers was made.
Though it is connected to a particular building, the main concern is that the clocks are closely linked with Klee's origin, Swiss as well as the early impressions, which are familiar with the Berne, the clock tower. These were some of the initial impressions which were familiar to the Kramgasse. However, both were more important and prophetic than the young Klee's interest in hiding a cryptic message in the clock face. It is quite indecipherable though the viewer conceptualizes the personal message on the clock with Magic Fish, as it makes the disclosure. The Philadelphia picture in more than forty years, Klee had discovered that a clock might be used to tell something more than the time of the day, which is a medium of art.
The deeply rooted image remained with Klee up to the watercolor picture, Heavenly and Earthly Time. It appears as one of his bitter-sweet sentiments of the picture. The more ambitious Fish Magic appeared two years earlier, with the design focusing more on the clock, steeple, and a church, while either side of these floats in the weak armature of the townscape, which is scarcely less intricate than the paintings on the clock. The entire construction is gently suspended on from a single wire of heaven and is softly balanced on the complementary motions on the earth, with heavenly pulleys. The initial dark, small, solid, and fixed to the clock picture helps to measure the time and record the elapsed hours, with larger and lighter swings which did not initially have any recordings.
Following the living habitats of the Fish Magic, it could be noted that the fish which gave the picture the title is familiar with Klee's motif of art in the 1920s when they are a subject of more than a dozen major works. The characteristic of the fish, unlike several of his other companions in his daily life, got into his art through different levels. In specific works, for instance, the Aquarium with Silvery Blue Fishes or the Fish in Circle are content to themselves. In others, Around the Fish and the Fish Magic appear almost inadvertent and have a symbolic meaning of the artist in the course of developing one picture. Klee was not always aware of the change in his emphasis as illustrated in the two slim pieces of evidence on the genesis of Fish Magic.
Bibliography
Bauschatz, Paul. “Paul Klee’s speaking pictures.” Word & Image 7, no. 2 (1991): 148-164.
Klee, Paul. Creative Confession-Paul Klee. Vol. 5. Tate Enterprises Ltd, 2013.
Klee, Paul. The Diaries of Paul Klee, 1898-1918. Univ of California Press, 1968.
Lanchner, Carolyn, ed. Paul Klee, His Life, and Work. Hatje Cantz Pub, 2001.
Raczka, Bob. No one saw: Ordinary things through the eyes of an artist. Millbrook Press, 2002.
Verdi, Richard. “Paul Klee’s’ Fish Magic’: An Interpretation.” The Burlington Magazine 116, no. 852 (1974): 147-155.
