'I cannot be grasped in the here and now, for my dwelling place is as much among the dead as the yet unborn. Slightly closer to the heart of creation than usual, but still not close enough'. – Paul Klee

During the last years of his life, the Swiss artist Paul Klee (1879-1940) developed a unique form of visual language he termed ‘pictorial writing’ with which he created several hundred works. The contemporary view in art history/art criticism circles is that while clearly alluding to and reflective of his interest in ancient alphabets and writing systems, Klee’s ‘writing’ primarily plays with the process of meaning-making but is not readable in any direct linguistic sense. By contrast, beyond his use of such sources as a compendium of signs, this talk explores whether Klee may have deliberately employed the modus operandi of ancient writing systems (e.g. Sumerian, Semitic, Celtic) and mantic-hermeneutic strategies (e.g. Midrashic, Kabbalistic) when creating such works, and whether use of such methods as interpretative tools can render his ‘pictorial writing’ readable. Drawing parallels with the ancient idea of interpretation as divining an ‘infinite text’, it asks whether Klee’s art articulates a more transpersonal-imaginal dimension of language in which the work mirrors us reading the work, while allowing the numinous to shine through. The talk explores and illustrates these issues with reference to a specific painting, Park bei Lu (1938), suggesting it may be read as Klee’s poetic transcription in pictorial writing of the Song of Songs.

Dr Chris Pike is Principal Lecturer in Psychology in the School of Psychology, Politics and Sociology at Canterbury Christ Church University, with teaching and research interests in dream interpretation, critical psychology, ecopsychology, and the interface between psychology and art. He has a long-standing interest in the art of Paul Klee, on which he has published in the journal Word and Image and made a short animated film.