Landschaft gegen den Hades (Landscape near Hades)
Artist
Paul Klee
(Swiss, 1879-1940)
Date1937
MediumPastel on canvas mounted on jute burlap
DimensionsOverall: 18 5/8 x 27 7/8 in., (47.3 x 70.8 cm,)
ClassificationsDRAWINGS
Credit LineMuseum Purchase
Terms
Object number53.174
On View
Not on viewCollections
CopyrightPresumed copyright: the artist or the artist's representative/heir(s) / Licensed by ARS, New York, NY.
Label TextHades is the land of the dead in ancient Greek and Roman mythology. Paul Klee turned to this subject towards the end of his life, when he was ill and living in exile from Nazi Germany.
In Landscape near Hades Klee drew marks floating across a ground of colored, irregular geometric shapes. The marks exist somewhere between a personal hieroglyphic writing and simple imagery of souls being ferried on the River Styx through the underworld.
Klee’s interpretation of ancient myths in this composition is pre-Olympian: a focus on chaos, the powers of nature, and the underworld realm (the Olympians, products of a later cultural stage in Greece, were largely spared from suffering). By 1937, the Olympian tradition had been thoroughly appropriated by the Nazis in their organization of an order that would serve their ideology of racial superiority. Mythology in Klee's late work functions in direct opposition to the Olympian aesthetics sponsored by the Third Reich.
Mary E. Murray, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art
In 1937 Klee was confronting illness, exile from Germany, and the Nazis' official condemnation of his work, as showcased in the "Degenerate Art" exhibition that had opened in Munich in July. His painting manifested a significant change in form and content, initiating the period of his late work that featured freely drawn marks floating across grounds of colored, irregular geometric shapes. Klee's painting had long comprised many forms of pictorial writing, but in the late work hieroglyphic marks fluctuate between the ideographic and figurative.
Death is the theme of Landscape near Hades. With the title, the ship floating in the field to the right of the center of the composition announces the ultimate journey via the River Styx to Hades, the land of the dead in Greek and Roman mythology. It also must be noted that the title Landscape near Hades suggests the pre-Olympian myths of ancient Greece that describe chaos, the powers of nature, and the underworld realm. By contrast, Olympian gods, products of a later cultural stage in Greece, live a safe distance from suffering and pain. By 1937, the Olympian tradition had been thoroughly appropriated by the Nazis in their organization of an aesthetic order that would serve their ideology of racial superiority. Klee's engagement with classical myth is certainly nothing new, but in his late work myth functions in direct opposition to the Olympian aesthetics sponsored by the Third Reich.
In addition to tragic myth, the painting also takes its place in a lifelong series of Klee' s pictures that deal with the theme of maritime navigation. Nautical references abound in both his written and visual work, providing metaphorical frameworks for him indicating not only death, but also adventure, discovery and, above all, orientation, that sense of directionality and placement so important throughout the development of his pictorial theory.
Kathryn Kramer
2005
