ScyllaCrateis2.0011

Paul Klee, 1879-1940. “Scylla.” Abstract drawing. 1938. Klee Foundation, Bern.

San Lazzaro illustrates the biography of Paul Klee’s “last days” with the pen-and-ink “Scylla” (1938) drawn by the artist at the hospital where he endured he final stages of life. ((below), page 211) Though San Lazzaro does not discuss the pair of drawings he places on facing pages, one seems allowed safely to surmise that San Lazzaro sees this illustration as evidence of Klee’s increasing despondency that overcame him in the onset of the illness that would eventually take is life at 61.
     To my eye Klee’s “Scylla” (1938) depicts a foreboding seascape that features a current-laden waterway in the foreground and a pair of cliffs that flank a narrow passage could lead into the open sea beyond. The cliff-face on the left represents the greater threat to the observing seafarer and also has more detail, perhaps suggesting that it is more menacing — not least because its full frontality seems to present sheer impassability. The current leading the eye into the depiction seems to flow only into the face of this beetling obstacle and its unwelcome presence; escape to the open sea seems possibile, but only through the fractional opening in the prospect ahead. Perhaps the cliff-face’s detail resembles an Alsatian dog at rest but anticipating our arrival — two clipped ears pricked up, a long snout, its haunches off to the right. Klee’s conception of the mythological Scylla seems to link the geological obstruction of Scylla to that canine aspect of the sea-bitch who menaces seafarers since before Odysseus first recorded his frightful passage.
     My assumption inferred from San Lazzaro’s pairing of these two seascapes (though he offers no pointed commentary) is that the psychological message of these artworks reflects the “rude allusions to mental abnormality” and schizophrenic “purgatory” that afflicted Klee who “was to die a few weeks later at Locarno-Muralto”. (San Lazzaro, 210). Klee’s late works articulate a “subconscious [telling him] that he had to hurry, that time was pressing and death — as we can see from many of his pictures — was a constant and inexorable threat.” (ibid., 211)
     Whatever the psychological background of Klee’s “Scylla”, the drawing seems surely to illustrate a non-anthropoid but sentient obstacle, a metamorphosed Scylla at the point in her life after she had been reduced from post-human monstrosity combined with geological menace.