Paul Klee

Swiss-German painter (1879-1940). In Merleau-Ponty's Course Notes, Klee is the primary exemplar of fundamental-thought-in-art — the implicit ontological inquiry that painting conducts. Merleau-Ponty's commentary on Klee "seems to have pushed the reflection on painting in our time farther" than any other (Lefort foreword) and feeds directly into the essay "Eye and Mind" (1961).

Key Points

  • Klee's principle: "the line does not imitate the visible, it 'makes visible'" (line 913) — art opens a dimension of being rather than reproducing visible contours
  • Painting is "philosophy entirely in action" — it grasps genesis and natura naturans rather than copying appearances (line 290)
  • "Coherent deformation" — "genius is the inconsistencies within the system" — systematic deviation that creates a new dimensionality of visibility (line 274)
  • The painting seizes depth not as a third spatial dimension but as the "latency of the inaccessible within the accessible" — overlapping (empiétement) rather than perspectival projection

Details

Klee and Ontology

Merleau-Ponty does not treat Klee as illustrating philosophical theses. Rather, Klee's practice discovers ontological truths that philosophy must then learn to articulate: that the visible has an invisible lining, that expression operates through écart (deviation from a norm), that the seer is caught up in what is seen — "one no longer knows who sees and who is seen" (line 911).

This is why Merleau-Ponty calls Klee's painting "a kind of philosophy: grasping its genesis, philosophy entirely in action." The painting does not represent Being; it participates in Being's own self-disclosure through the flesh of the world.

Connections

  • is the primary exemplar of fundamental-thought-in-art
  • is invoked throughout merleau-ponty-2022-possibility-of-philosophy — Course 1 (nonphilosophy section) and Course 2 (Fundamental Thought in Art)
  • contrasts with Heidegger's condemnation of modern art — Heidegger saw nothing in modern art "that points out a way"; Merleau-Ponty sees it as the primary disclosure of a new ontology
  • is the originator of *Sichtbarmachen* ("art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible") — his 1920 Creative Credo formula that MP adopts for painting, literature, and philosophy
  • is analyzed philosophically by mauro-carbone in carbone-2015-flesh-of-images ch. 3 — "Making Visible: Merleau-Ponty and Paul Klee" (pp. 31–40). Connects Klee's 1924 On Modern Art "Genesis" motif to MP's "phenomenology of genesis"; Klee's gegenständliche Jawort to MP's voyance; Klee's German translation of Delaunay's 1912 "Light" article to MP's "new idea of light"

Sources

  • merleau-ponty-2022-possibility-of-philosophy — Course 1, Part I (lines 274-301); Course 2, Part I (lines 893-1014)
  • merleau-ponty-1961-eye-and-mind — Klee's "I cannot be caught in immanence" as ontological formula of painting (§4); Klee's line "makes visible" (§4)
  • carbone-2015-flesh-of-images — ch. 3 entirely. Klee's Creative Credo (1920), On Modern Art (1924), and the MP course notes on Klee are the primary texts; Carbone's reading connects Klee's principle to Rimbaud, Proust, and philosophy-as-faire voir.