Editorial ZM17

The Zentrum Paul Klee is celebrating its 20th anniversary this summer (https://www.zpk.org/en/20years). Since its inception, it has aimed to establish an interdisciplinary cultural space that does justice to the complex artistic practice and multifaceted personality of Paul Klee. Klee was not only a visual artist but also a musician, an enthusiastic opera and theatergoer, a poet, writer, art theorist, and a committed art educator. This extraordinary artistic and intellectual versatility has provided impetus in various cultural and scientific fields, fostering both an international reception of his work and increasingly interdisciplinary research. Against this backdrop, the online journal Zwitscher-Maschine was launched in the winter of 2015 at the initiative of Osamu Okuda and Walther Fuchs. Its aim was to make the latest findings in Klee research accessible to a wide audience. On the occasion of its tenth anniversary, the Zwitscher-Maschine continues to see itself as an open and dynamic platform for academic exchange. It serves to promote and further develop interdisciplinary contributions to the reception and analysis of Paul Klee’s work. Rudolf Altrichter begins by showing that Klee’s conception of his own artistic creation can be explained by a poetics that has its epistemological basis in Kant’s transcendentalism and in the reflections of Fichte and early German Romanticism. However, according to Altrichter, Klee inverted the motifs of Romantic poetics insofar as he drew a modern gnosis from it. Pianist Yumiko Segawa examines how Pierre Boulez and Paul Klee made “movement” visible, audible, and tangible in space and time. Using Klee’s watercolour Fugue in Red, 1921, 69 and Boulez’s piece Constellation-Miroir from his Third Piano Sonata, 1955–1957, in which the movement of the complementary colours red and green optimally accentuates the effect of the music, the order of movement in the creative process of the two artists is examined from the practice-oriented perspective of a pianist. As the result of many years of fundamental research, in 2024, Christine Hopfengart published the correspondence between Paul, Lily, and Felix Klee and Wassily and Nina Kandinsky, as well as Gabriele Münter. The edition is supplemented with extensive photographs, the history of their artwork gifts, and accompanied by extremely insightful scholarly commentary. The final report on this lengthy project is now finally being presented. The publication not only allows the five protagonists to emerge as complex and lively personalities but is also an outstanding source for a deeper understanding of the art-historical context of modernism. Matthias Fischer has, for the first time, successfully identified the ink drawing Straße einer Stadt, 1911, 60 as a view in the city of Bern. It turns out that that Klee’s artistic strategy for appropriating the world in the “sign of division” is carried out purely through drawing, without physical division and rearrangement of the image. Revising the information in the Catalogue raisonné Paul Klee, Marie Kakinuma not only presents the works Segelschiffhafen [Harbour for Sailing Ships], 1925, 45 and blaugeflügelte Vögel [Blue-Winged Birds], 1925, 115, which were discovered since the publication of the last volume of the Catalogue raisonné, but also updates their provenances and supplements them with explanations. Nadia Djibrilla, a former intern at the archive of the Zentrum Paul Klee, reports on a recent addition to the Bürgi family donation, which provides further insight into the activities of the Klee Society and Rolf Bürgi’s role as administrator of Klee’s estate. Klee’s artistic work also left a lasting mark on the works of poets. One of them was the Japanese poet Shuntarō Tanikawa, who passed away in November 2024. In an obituary, the writer Jürg Halter paid tribute to his long-standing poetic exchange with Tanikawa inspired by Klee’s artworks, especially those featuring angels. We wish you an insightful and stimulating read of the current issue—may resonant spaces open in which thoughts shine, ideas reverberate, and science finds a polyphonic echo. Your editorial team at the Zwitscher-Maschine Marie Kakinuma, Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern Osamu Okuda, Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern Walther Fuchs, Digiboo Verlag, Küsnacht