Esperienza e figurazione. Paul Klee ed Ernst Mach

From Paul Klee’s Diaries we know that he was very impressed by the reading of Ernst Mach’s Analysis of Sensations and that, through the mediation of research about visual perception made by the psychologist Friedrich Schumann, he used the Machian conception of «phenomena» to clarify the relationship between the visible and the invisible which goes through all his artistic and theoretical production. According to Mach, perception is constituted on the basis of «elements» meant as variables of a mathematical function, whose meaning depends on the circumstances tracing the boundaries of the various fields of experience. Precisely from Mach, to whom we owe the notion of «form» found in the Gestaltpsychologie, Klee got out the concept of «figuration » (Gestaltung) to express, during his lectures at the Bauhaus, the sensible genesis of visual images avoiding any opposition between conscience and reality, in order to highlight the indissoluble relationship between art and life that is established in his «pictorial thought». The suggestions deriving from the Machian philosophy of experience, however, stop in the last phase of Klee’s artistic production, when the need to go in search of the deepest and essential meaning of a reality now torn by the dramatic historical events of the thirties gets the upper hand over it.