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Fugue in red is an abstract painting made by the Swiss-born German artist Paul Klee in 1921.

Title and subject
The title refers to the musical form of the fugue, here built from a structural and dynamical use of shapes and colour. Described by Pierre Boulez as "a personal execution" of the fugue form, from a dimentional point of view, this painting is widely considered emblematic because it's a particularly evident manifestation of Klee's composition method and poetic.

Description
This small painting consists in the representation of some organized series of red abstract figures, combined with their variations, carefully distributed over a vaguely black background.

The most accreditable and shared interpretation wants to see spatial and chromatic organization readable through musical parameters: the variation of shapes and colours and their relations with space can be seen as an analogy of manipulation of musical phrases and motifs, subjecs and countersubjects. Their features are progressively modified with a coherent visual rhythm in more than an aspect, reflecting fugue's very strict rules, in particular on structure, counterpoint and dynamics: colour gradually mutate in opacity, saturation and distribution while forms change in dimensions and contour, shifting positions and overlaying on other figures or their repetitions.

The original figures and their modified repetitions are, again, in analogy with musical phrases and their variatons: following the spacial arrangement of the paintig it is observable how the variation is made by the gradual, rhythmical alteration of opacity and saturation of colours, joining together spatial and time dimensions in a common meaning.

The painting doesn't refers to a particular piece of music, neither wants to suggest a "literal" translation from iconographic to musical language, viewing the canvas as a score. It is known that Klee was a particularly conscious J. S. Bach listener and analyzer: the Art of the Fugue sure has its contribution in this work and have been a highly relevant influence. In every work inspired by musical notation, Klee limits himself offering a purely visual transcription of the features shared by objects reletable to organized sounds and images: he takes it (language's) signs and uses them as it could be done with Chinese written language, for their aesthetic quality, not for their real meaning. Also, if Klee took the fugue as a model, he didn't mean to graphically compose it in musical terms, rather than find on the canvas some type of returns, repetitions, variations which are the fugue standard language. Moreover, it is evident how Klee diverge from Wassily Kandinsky on the visual interpretations and correlations between images and music, choosing to use features, rules and principles of music theory, forms and objects to explore new ways of representation.

History
Klee realized this painting in 1921, when he was teaching at the Bauhaus, developing his researches on images' rhythm, spacial construction and composition. This method of visual composition has some antecedents in Fugue by Konstantinas Ciurlionis (1908) as well as in František Kupka, who previously made some paintings following a similar structural and chromatic path connected to music. Fugue in red's visual effect may also recall the dynamic imprint of Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, as well as several futurist paintings. Georges Braque also worked on structural balance, with explicit recallings to Bach and his Art of fugue. The painting is actually kept and conserved in the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern, alongside other pieces of the artist.

See also:

 * Der Blaue Reiter
 * Zentrum Paul Klee