Friday, August 5, 2011

My hero / Paul Klee by Philip Hensher

Paul Klee in 1939 Photograph: Walter Henggeler


My hero: Paul Klee by Philip Hensher

'Somewhere in the afterlife, I am going to accompany his violin in the Brahms G major sonata'


Kwes / Why I love Paul Klee

Drawings by Cézanne and Klee among works gifted to Courtauld Gallery



Friday 5 August 2011

Twice a year or so, I get on the train from Geneva to Bern. At the end of it, there is the wonderful Zentrum Paul Klee, which holds thousands of Klees. Not all of them are on display; only two or three hundred at a time. But the Zentrum swaps them round regularly, and there's always something new to see. Restless and funny, Klee was the most musical of visual artists, the wisest and the most decent. Somewhere in the afterlife, I am going to accompany his violin in the Brahms G major sonata.

My favourite photographs of him all have something of the absurd – Klee with a donkey in Tunisia, or emptying sand out of a boot on a beach, or with that unmistakable face peering out from under a Pickelhaube in a German first world war regiment. It's that sense of the absurd, of the power of laughter against evil, authority and oppression, that gives him such strength – his Conqueror who is running in no particular direction under a pennant far too big for him. Or the Twittering Machine, that magical, smudged poem about anarchic voices at dawn. Or the Destroyed Labyrinth, painted at the dark end of the 1930s; something that a tyrant built, and that now children could walk through unhindered.

He was a brave man who stood against fascism from the start and who, through his love of colour, music, the stuff of the world, large and small, never minded trying things out, never worried about going slightly wrong, and created more wonderful, lovable, humane works of art through play than any artist I can think of. Sometimes at the Zentrum, you find yourself in tears in front of a still life, or a complicated game with lines where you have to work out the rules. Sometimes, too, it's laughter, not easily explained. He has the most beautiful grave, and a memorial, a hedge-lined ziggurat with the best view of the Swiss Alps from the top, the Luft-Station. He is my hero and somehow, too, my friend.

Philip Hensher's King of the Badgers is published by Fourth Estate.

THE GUARDIAN






2009
001 My hero / Oscar Wilde by Michael Holroyd
002 My hero / Harley Granville-Barker by Richard Eyre
003 My hero / Edward Goldsmith by Zac Goldsmith
004 My hero / Fridtjof Nansen by Sara Wheeler 
005 My hero / Mother Mercedes Lawler IBVM by Antonia Fraser
007 My hero / Ernest Shepard by Richard Holmes
008 My hero / JG Ballard by Will Self
009 My hero / Alan Ross by William Boyd
010 My hero / Ben the labrador by John Banville
011 My hero / Vicent van Gogh by Margaret Drabble
012 My hero / Franz Marek by Eric Hobsbawm

2010

017 My hero / Jack Yeats by Colm Tóibín
018 My hero / Francisco Goya by Diana Athill
019 My hero / Max Stafford-Clark by Sebastian Barry
020 My hero / Arthur Holmes by Richard Fortey

036 My hero / Robert Lowell by Jonathan Raban
037 My hero / Beryl Bainbridge by Michael Holroyd
038 My hero / Charles Schulz by Jenny Colgan
039 My hero / Oliver Knussen by Adam Foulds
040 My hero / Annie Proulx by Alan Warner

041 My hero / David Lynch by Paul Murray
042 My hero / Edwin Morgan by Robert Crawford
043 My hero / Anne Lister by Emma Donoghue
044 My hero / Jane Helen Harrinson by Mary Beard
045 My hero / Edmund Burke by David Marquand
046 My hero / Shelagh Deleaney by Jeanette Winterson
047 My hero / Christopher Marlowe by Val McDermid
048 My hero / Gwen John by Anne Enright
049 My hero / Michael Mayne by Susan Hill
050 My hero / Stanley Spencer by Howard Jacobson

051 My hero / William Beveridge by Will Hutton
052 My hero / Jean McConville by Amanda Foreman
053 My hero / Alexander Pushkin by Elaine Feinstein
054 My hero / Michael de Montaigne by Liyun Li
055 My hero / Michael Donaghy by Maggie O'Farrell
056 My hero / Richmal Crompton by Louise Crompton
057 My hero / Edward Thomas by David Constantine
058 My hero / Cy Twombly by Edmund de Waal
059 My hero / Sefton by Jilly Cooper

2011
079 My hero / Gene Wolfe by Neil Gaiman
087 My hero / Alberto Moravia by John Burnside
096 My hero / Isaac Babel by AD Miller
097 My hero / Lucian Freud by Esi Edugyan
100 My hero / Thomas Tranströmer by Robin Robertson

102 My hero / David Hockney by Susan Hill
111 My hero / Arnold Lobell by Julia Donaldson (23 December)

2012 (PAGE 9)
115 My hero / Nadime Gordimer by Tessa Hadley (27 January)

(PAGE 8)

2013

(PAGE 5)
194 My hero / René Descartes by James Kelman (13 September)
199 My hero / Albert Camus by Geoff Dyer (1 November)

(PAGE 4)



(PAGE 3)

2015
250 My hero John Bayley by Richard Eyre (22 January)
2016

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