Svetlana Demidova’s Report at the Seminar «Magic, Astrology, and Science in Russian Modernism»

On November 14, during the regular research seminar «Magic, Astrology, and Science in Russian Modernism» Svetlana Demidova has presented a report titled «“Exacte Versuche im Bereich der Kunst”: The Theory of Art and Science in Klee’s texts».

In her presentation, the speaker assembled some preliminary remarks about the topos of observation of the sky and natural phenomena in the texts of Paul Klee. The main materials for the study were the diaries of 1898-1918, the essays of 1920-1928, and the corpus of study notes of the Bildnerische Gestaltungslehre. In Der Blaue Reiter circle, as Lynn Gamwell has shown, there was an active discussion about creating a new style of art that would embody the achievements of modern science. Despite his early skeptical remarks about science, between 1905 and 1907 Klee enlisted the aid of optical instruments, experimentation with perspective, and later, in his theoretical explorations of the 1920s, used the imagery of the natural sciences to describe the new type of gaze cultivated by the modern artist. In his memoirs of Franz Marcus, Klee presents himself as a detached observer, establishing «a priori formulas» and emitting a white cold light, in which the influence of recent discoveries in astronomy and physics can be discerned. Lastly, a significant part of the seminar was dedicated to the discussion of visual materials, especially a watercolor of 1918, The Comet of Paris. Participants of the seminar engaged in a lively discussion on the possible ways of interpreting the image.