The diagnosis of art: Scleroderma in Paul Klee – and Rembrandt's scholar?
Authors: Jeffrey K Aronson, Manoj Ramachandran
Journal: Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine (2010)

Paul Klee (1879–1940) was born in Munchenbuchsee, near Bern in Switzerland. From 1898 he studied art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich with Heinrich Knirr and Franz von Stuck and graduated with a degree in fine art in 1901. In Munich he became associated with the art group known as Der Blaue Reiter, which included Wassily Kandinsky, Gabriele Munter, Alfred Kubin, August Macke and Franz Marc, and contributed 17 pictures to their second exhibition in 1912. A 1919 exhibition gave him worldwide fame, and he taught painting at the Bauhaus, first in Weimar from 1921 and then in Dessau, when it moved there in 1925. He went to teach in the Dusseldorf Academy in 1931, but in 1933 was forced out by the Nazis, who described him as ‘a Galician Jew’ and ‘a cultural Bolshevik’ and demanded that he prove his Aryan ancestry. ‘Even if I were a Jew,’ Klee wrote, ‘ it would not alter my own worth nor that of my work one iota. My own point of view is that a Jew and a foreigner is of no less intrinsic value than a German and a native.’1 He painted his fraught self-portrait, Von der Liste gestrichen (Struck off the list), and returned to Bern.

In 1937 Klee was bracketed with Marc Chagall, Otto Dix, Max Ernst, George Grosz, Wassily Kandinsky, Oscar Kokoschka, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Piet Mondrian in a reactionary Munich exhibition of ‘entartete Kunst’ (degenerate art), a term that encompassed Bauhaus and cubism, Dada and expressionism, Fauvism, impressionism and surrealism. Others whose work was not included in the exhibition, but who were also regarded as degenerate, included Pablo Picasso, Fernand Leger and Joan Miro, whose paintings the Nazis burned. Klee's response to being compared to the mentally ill was the insurrectionary painting Revolution des Viaductes (1937).

In 1935 Klee started to suffer from scleroderma, with fatigue, a skin rash, difficulty in swallowing, shortness of breath on exertion and pain in the joints of his hands.2 His productivity suffered, and his fingers became so affected by the disease that he could hardly paint at all. A photograph of 1939 shows some of the features of the disease (Figure 1). His style became on the whole simpler, less colourful, and dominated by thick black lines. Paintings from this last period depict the agonies that he suffered during this time. Tod und Feuer (Figure 2) is an excellent example. The painting is dominated by a face that foretells his imminent death, in German tod. The mouth has the shape of a letter T, the right eye is an O, and the left eye and nose together make a D. The red flames emerging from the head symbolize the burning features of the disease and the grey area beneath symbolizes the perhaps welcome prospect of release.



Figure 1

Paul Klee in 1939





Figure 2

Paul Klee's Tod und Feuer (1940) (Oil and tempera on jute, 46.7 x 44.6 cm; Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, Switzerland)



Tod und Feuer also features as the name of a track on an album by the Swiss Jazz Orchestra (2007), whose other tracks are also named from paintings by Klee – Rosenwind, Ubermut, Buste eines Kindes, Ad Parnassum, Der Seiltanzer, Paukenspieler and Individualisierte Hohenmessung der Lagen, the painting that is featured on the cover.

Klee's epitaph is poignant: ‘Diesseitig bin ich gar nicht fassbar. Denn ich wohne grad so gut bei den Toten, wie bei den Ungeborenen. Etwas naher dem Herzen der Schopfung als ublich. Und noch lange nicht nahe genug.’ ‘I cannot be trapped in the here and now. For I consort as much with the dead as with the unborn. Somewhat closer to the heart of creation than usual. But not nearly close enough.’ He wrote these words for the catalogue of an exhibition at the Galerie Goltz, Munich in 1920. They presage the torment of his final years.

Scleroderma was first described by Carlo Curzio of Naples in 1753.3 Bishop Francisco Domonte, depicted in Bartolome Esteban Murillo's painting of Archangel Raphael, which dates from 1680, has been suggested to have had scleroderma or even systemic sclerosis,4 although the features are hard to discern. But now look closely at Rembrandt's Portrait of a Scholar from 1631 ( Figure 3). His nose is pinched, his mouth tight, his face pale with a malar flush; his hands are puffy and the joints on his right thumb are distinctly swollen. Did he too have scleroderma?



Figure 3

Rembrandt's Portrait of a Scholar (1631). (Oil on canvas, 104 x 92 cm; The Hermitage, St Petersburg, Russia)