Twittering Machine
Encyclopedia
Twittering Machine is a 1922 watercolor and pen and ink oil transfer on paper by Swiss-German painter Paul Klee
. Like other artworks by Klee, it blends biology and machinery, depicting a loosely sketched group of birds on a wire or branch connected to a hand-crank. Interpretations of the work vary widely: it has been perceived as a nightmarish lure for the viewer or a depiction of the helplessness of the artist, but also as a triumph of nature over mechanical pursuits. It has been seen as a visual representation of the mechanics of sound.
Originally displayed in Germany, the image was declared "degenerate art
" by Adolf Hitler
in 1933 and sold by the Nazi party to an art dealer in 1939, whence it made its way to New York. One of the better known of more than 9,000 works produced by Klee, it is among the more famous images of the New York Museum of Modern Art
(MoMA). It has inspired several musical compositions and, according to a 1987 magazine profile in New York Magazine, has been a popular piece to hang in children's bedrooms.
, a "sine-wave branch") over a blue and purple background which the MoMA equates with the "misty cool blue of night giv[ing] way to the pink flow of dawn". Each of the birds is open-beaked, with a jagged or rounded shape emerging from its mouth, widely interpreted as its protruding tongue. The end of the perch dips into a crank.
describing it as "characterized by the exquisite absurdity of Lewis Carroll's "Twas brillig and the slithy toves" and The Riverside Dictionary of Biography placing it in "a very personal world of free fancy".
Sometimes, the image is perceived as quite dark. MoMA suggests that, while evocative of an "abbreviated pastoral", the painting inspires "an uneasy sensation of looming menace" as the birds themselves "appear closer to deformations of nature". They speculate that the "twittering machine" may in fact be a music box that produces a "fiendish cacophony" as it "lure[s] victims to the pit over which the machine hovers". Kay Larson of New York Magazine (1987), too, found menace in the image, which she describes as "a fierce parable of the artist's life among the philistines": "Like Charles Chaplin caught in the gears of Modern Times, they [the birds] whir helplessly, their heads flopping in exhaustion and pathos. One bird's tongue flies up out of its beak, an exclamation point punctuating its grim fate—to chirp under compulsion."
Without drawing conclusions on emotional impact, Werckmeister, in 1989's The Making of Paul Klee's Career, sees a deliberate blending of birds and machine, suggesting the piece is part of Klee's general interest in "the formal equation between animal and machine, between organism and mechanism" (similar to the ambiguity between bird and airplane in a number of works). According to Wheye and Kennedy (2008), the painting is often interpreted as "a contemptuous satire of laboratory science".
Danto
, who does not see the birds as deformed mechanical creatures but instead as separate living elements, speculates in Encounters & Reflections (1997) that "Klee is making some kind of point about the futility of machines, almost humanizing machines into things from which nothing great is to be hoped or feared, and the futility in this case is underscored by the silly project of bringing forth by mechanical means what nature in any case provides in abundance." Danto believes that perhaps this machine has been abandoned, the birds opportunistically using it as a perch from which they issue the sounds the inert machine is failing to produce. Danto also suggests, conversely, that the painting may mean simply that "it might not be a bad thing if we bent our gifts to the artificial generation of bird songs."
Wheye and Kennedy suggest that the picture may represent a sound spectrograph
, with the heads of the birds perhaps representing musical notes and the size, shape and direction of their tongues suggesting the "volume, intensity, degree of trilling, and degree of shrillness of their voices". This reflects the earlier view of Soby's Contemporary Painters (1948) that:
school in Germany for a year when he completed this ink drawing on watercolor in 1922. The work was displayed for several years in the Alte Nationalgalerie
in Berlin
until Adolf Hitler declared it and many other works by the Swiss-born Klee "degenerate art
" in 1933. The Nazis seized the painting and sold it in 1939 for $120 to an art dealer in Berlin. The New York MoMA purchased the painting that same year.
Although Klee produced more than 9,000 works in his lifetime, Twittering Machine has become one of his better known images. According to Danto, the painting is "one of the best-known treasures at the Museum of Modern Art".
, and one of the pieces in David Diamond
's "The World of Paul Klee", which debuted in 1958, as well as one of the seven in Gunther Schuller
's "Seven Studies on Themes of Paul Klee", composed the following year. According to Time
magazine, the two composers drew very different interpretations from the piece, with Schuller's work consisting of a "snatch of serial music in which the orchestra beeped, squeaked and rasped like a rusty hinge while the muted brasses burped out shreds of sound" while Diamond drew on "more somber tones: muted, dark-hued movements of the strings, with the picture's more jagged lines delineated by scampering woodwinds and brasses."
Larson wrote in New York Magazine (1987) that the image was then "embedded in childhood prehistory", commenting that it "always seemed to be taped to kids' bedroom walls, next to Rousseau's The Sleeping Gypsy
".
Paul Klee
Paul Klee was born in Münchenbuchsee, Switzerland, and is considered both a German and a Swiss painter. His highly individual style was influenced by movements in art that included expressionism, cubism, and surrealism. He was, as well, a student of orientalism...
. Like other artworks by Klee, it blends biology and machinery, depicting a loosely sketched group of birds on a wire or branch connected to a hand-crank. Interpretations of the work vary widely: it has been perceived as a nightmarish lure for the viewer or a depiction of the helplessness of the artist, but also as a triumph of nature over mechanical pursuits. It has been seen as a visual representation of the mechanics of sound.
Originally displayed in Germany, the image was declared "degenerate art
Degenerate art
Degenerate art is the English translation of the German entartete Kunst, a term adopted by the Nazi regime in Germany to describe virtually all modern art. Such art was banned on the grounds that it was un-German or Jewish Bolshevist in nature, and those identified as degenerate artists were...
" by Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party , commonly referred to as the Nazi Party). He was Chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945, and head of state from 1934 to 1945...
in 1933 and sold by the Nazi party to an art dealer in 1939, whence it made its way to New York. One of the better known of more than 9,000 works produced by Klee, it is among the more famous images of the New York Museum of Modern Art
Museum of Modern Art
The Museum of Modern Art is an art museum in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world...
(MoMA). It has inspired several musical compositions and, according to a 1987 magazine profile in New York Magazine, has been a popular piece to hang in children's bedrooms.
Description
The picture depicts a group of birds, largely line drawings; all save the first are shackled on a wire (or, according to The Washington PostThe Washington Post
The Washington Post is Washington, D.C.'s largest newspaper and its oldest still-existing paper, founded in 1877. Located in the capital of the United States, The Post has a particular emphasis on national politics. D.C., Maryland, and Virginia editions are printed for daily circulation...
, a "sine-wave branch") over a blue and purple background which the MoMA equates with the "misty cool blue of night giv[ing] way to the pink flow of dawn". Each of the birds is open-beaked, with a jagged or rounded shape emerging from its mouth, widely interpreted as its protruding tongue. The end of the perch dips into a crank.
Critical analysis
Twittering Machine has invited very different opinions on its meaning, which Gardner's Art Through the Ages (2009) suggests is characteristic of Klee's work: "Perhaps no other artist of the 20th century matched Klee's subtlety as he deftly created a world of ambiguity and understatement that draws each viewer into finding a unique interpretation of the work." The image has frequently been perceived as whimsical, with a 1941 article in The Hartford CourantThe Hartford Courant
The Hartford Courant is the largest daily newspaper in the U.S. state of Connecticut, and is a morning newspaper for most of the state north of New Haven and east of Waterbury...
describing it as "characterized by the exquisite absurdity of Lewis Carroll's "Twas brillig and the slithy toves" and The Riverside Dictionary of Biography placing it in "a very personal world of free fancy".
Sometimes, the image is perceived as quite dark. MoMA suggests that, while evocative of an "abbreviated pastoral", the painting inspires "an uneasy sensation of looming menace" as the birds themselves "appear closer to deformations of nature". They speculate that the "twittering machine" may in fact be a music box that produces a "fiendish cacophony" as it "lure[s] victims to the pit over which the machine hovers". Kay Larson of New York Magazine (1987), too, found menace in the image, which she describes as "a fierce parable of the artist's life among the philistines": "Like Charles Chaplin caught in the gears of Modern Times, they [the birds] whir helplessly, their heads flopping in exhaustion and pathos. One bird's tongue flies up out of its beak, an exclamation point punctuating its grim fate—to chirp under compulsion."
Without drawing conclusions on emotional impact, Werckmeister, in 1989's The Making of Paul Klee's Career, sees a deliberate blending of birds and machine, suggesting the piece is part of Klee's general interest in "the formal equation between animal and machine, between organism and mechanism" (similar to the ambiguity between bird and airplane in a number of works). According to Wheye and Kennedy (2008), the painting is often interpreted as "a contemptuous satire of laboratory science".
Danto
Arthur Danto
Arthur Coleman Danto Arthur Coleman Danto Arthur Coleman Danto (born January 1, 1924 is an American art critic, and professor of philosophy. He is best known as the influential, long-time art critic for The Nation and for his work in philosophical aesthetics and philosophy of history, though he...
, who does not see the birds as deformed mechanical creatures but instead as separate living elements, speculates in Encounters & Reflections (1997) that "Klee is making some kind of point about the futility of machines, almost humanizing machines into things from which nothing great is to be hoped or feared, and the futility in this case is underscored by the silly project of bringing forth by mechanical means what nature in any case provides in abundance." Danto believes that perhaps this machine has been abandoned, the birds opportunistically using it as a perch from which they issue the sounds the inert machine is failing to produce. Danto also suggests, conversely, that the painting may mean simply that "it might not be a bad thing if we bent our gifts to the artificial generation of bird songs."
Wheye and Kennedy suggest that the picture may represent a sound spectrograph
Spectrograph
A spectrograph is an instrument that separates an incoming wave into a frequency spectrum. There are several kinds of machines referred to as spectrographs, depending on the precise nature of the waves...
, with the heads of the birds perhaps representing musical notes and the size, shape and direction of their tongues suggesting the "volume, intensity, degree of trilling, and degree of shrillness of their voices". This reflects the earlier view of Soby's Contemporary Painters (1948) that:
The bird with an exclamation point in its mouth represents the twitter's full volume; the one with an arrow in its beak symbolizes an accompanying shrillness – a horizontal thrust of piercing song. Since a characteristic of chirping birds is that their racket resumes as soon as it seems to be ending, the bird in the center droops with lolling tongue, while another begins to falter in song; both birds will come up again full blast as soon as the machine's crank is turned.
History
The Swiss-born Klee had been teaching at the BauhausBauhaus
', commonly known simply as Bauhaus, was a school in Germany that combined crafts and the fine arts, and was famous for the approach to design that it publicized and taught. It operated from 1919 to 1933. At that time the German term stood for "School of Building".The Bauhaus school was founded by...
school in Germany for a year when he completed this ink drawing on watercolor in 1922. The work was displayed for several years in the Alte Nationalgalerie
Alte Nationalgalerie
The Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin is a gallery showing a collection of Classical, Romantic, Biedermeier, Impressionist and early Modernist artwork, all of which belong to the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. The museum is situated on Museum Island, a UNESCO-designated World Heritage Site.- Founding...
in Berlin
Berlin
Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...
until Adolf Hitler declared it and many other works by the Swiss-born Klee "degenerate art
Degenerate art
Degenerate art is the English translation of the German entartete Kunst, a term adopted by the Nazi regime in Germany to describe virtually all modern art. Such art was banned on the grounds that it was un-German or Jewish Bolshevist in nature, and those identified as degenerate artists were...
" in 1933. The Nazis seized the painting and sold it in 1939 for $120 to an art dealer in Berlin. The New York MoMA purchased the painting that same year.
Although Klee produced more than 9,000 works in his lifetime, Twittering Machine has become one of his better known images. According to Danto, the painting is "one of the best-known treasures at the Museum of Modern Art".
Legacy
The son of a musicologist, Klee himself drew parallels between sound and art, and Twittering Machine has been influential on several composers. It inspired the 1951 orchestral work Die Zwitschermaschine by Giselher KlebeGiselher Klebe
Giselher Wolfgang Klebe was a German composer. He composed more than 140 works, among them 14 operas, 8 symphonies, 15 solo concerts, chamber music, piano works, and sacred music.-Biography:...
, and one of the pieces in David Diamond
David Diamond (composer)
David Leo Diamond was an American composer of classical music.-Life and career:He was born in Rochester, New York and studied at the Cleveland Institute of Music and the Eastman School of Music under Bernard Rogers, also receiving lessons from Roger Sessions in New York City and Nadia Boulanger in...
's "The World of Paul Klee", which debuted in 1958, as well as one of the seven in Gunther Schuller
Gunther Schuller
Gunther Schuller is an American composer, conductor, horn player, author, historian, and jazz musician.- Biography and works :...
's "Seven Studies on Themes of Paul Klee", composed the following year. According to Time
Time (magazine)
Time is an American news magazine. A European edition is published from London. Time Europe covers the Middle East, Africa and, since 2003, Latin America. An Asian edition is based in Hong Kong...
magazine, the two composers drew very different interpretations from the piece, with Schuller's work consisting of a "snatch of serial music in which the orchestra beeped, squeaked and rasped like a rusty hinge while the muted brasses burped out shreds of sound" while Diamond drew on "more somber tones: muted, dark-hued movements of the strings, with the picture's more jagged lines delineated by scampering woodwinds and brasses."
Larson wrote in New York Magazine (1987) that the image was then "embedded in childhood prehistory", commenting that it "always seemed to be taped to kids' bedroom walls, next to Rousseau's The Sleeping Gypsy
The Sleeping Gypsy
The Sleeping Gypsy is an 1897 oil painting by French Naïve artist Henri Rousseau. The fantastical depiction of a lion musing over a sleeping woman on a moonlit night is one of the most recognizable artworks of modern times.Rousseau first exhibited the painting at the 13th Salon des Indépendants,...
".