Paul Klee's "One eye sees, the other feels," and Arrogant Verneuil in Paris

A modernist painter inspires an interiors and design shop in Paris, his students at the Bauhaus, me, and beyond!

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I stepped out of France for a couple of weeks to visit my family in the US. Although I had my definitely-French husband with me to remind me that I hadn’t abandoned my across-the-Atlantic life, I missed being in our little red and white Basque house by the sea! There’s usually a common thread in the stories of people who have moved abroad: there will be a day when your site-specific allegiance shifts. You’ll feel even more out of place while visiting your birth country. I felt so strongly while traveling from one country’s southwest corner to another’s southwest corner that France is absolutely home.

A few weeks ago, I was reading

Anne Seally

’s I have been to Paris and back writing in her newsletter,

A Treasury of Moods

, when a grouping of images caught my attention. Admittedly, my eyes first met the Eames LCW chair. The coolness of the three people and the color scheme of the store’s branding followed quickly after.

This had me looking into what the shop is all about and who its creators are. Even their website has the perfect dose of character. It’s immediate, like the woosh you feel when a bus rushes past you at a too-close distance.

Arrogant Verneuil, a new project of the owners of Los Enamorados Ibiza, Pierre Traversier and Rozemarijn de Witte.

It’s a space to inspire. In the seventh Arrondissement, ‘le quartier des antiquaires’, we created a new quirky world full of beautiful things. A collection very much to our own taste. For us to share, for you to wonder.

It’s a universe on human scale. It’s an open house on occasion. It’s a store of thousand and one night. It’s a gallery without white walls and with an old soul. Former gallery, named Epoca of the legendary and interesting Mony Liz Einstein. A space in which we hope you will be inspired.

In the gallery, you can find all that we love and that we collect from all over the world. From vintage and contemporary furniture to funky shoes, from handmade ceramics to beautiful knitwear, from carpets to sculptures etc.

The name is 'a clin d’oeil' (at a glance).

Photographs above and below via Arrogant Verneuil’s Instagram and website.

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Paul Klee's Impactful Words

Floating alone at the bottom of Arrogant Verneuil’s site is a simple sentence attributed to artist Paul Klee:

Klee by way of Arrogant Verneuil.

After seeing these six words, I reached for my nearby copy of Klee’s Pedagogical Sketchbook and packed it in my carry-on to read during my trip across the world. When I say read, I mostly mean admiring and trying to decipher its directional cues, invented art jargon, and lessons for the eyes. It’s mostly drawings and hurried notes. The lessons were intended to guide his own art practice, yes, but also to teach. His students were those at the Bauhaus; they were lucky in more ways than they realized.

Sibyl Moholy-Nagy authored the book’s introduction about Klee posthumously. She was an architecture historian, wife to artist László Moholy-Nagy, and a lady worth crushing on. Sybil described her artist friend in a way that expresses how dear Klee was to her and others in their concentric art circles:

“If ever an artist understood the visual aspirations of his epoch it was Paul Klee; and the civilized world came to recognize his contemporaneousness even before his death in 1940. Exhibitions and publications have constantly increased in number, and it might be assumed that together with Cézanne and Picasso, he will be the most reproduced and annotated painter of this century. But it is known to few that Klee was more than a painter. His ‘communication with nature’ produced much more than the transfiguration of the perceived form. It produced a philosophy that rested on empathy with the created world, accepting that everything is with equal love and humility.”

“Klee’s figures and forms are not only transparent, as if seen through a fluoroscope; they exist in a magnetic field of cross currents: lines, forms, splotches, arrows, color waves. As if it were a symphonic composition, the main motif moves from variation to variation in its relationship to other objects on the canvas.”

“A mind so in flux, so sensitive to intuitive insights, could never write an academic textbook. All he could retain on paper were indications, hints, allusions, like the delicate color dots and line plays on his pictures.”

“Paul Klee chose for himself the task of pointing out new ways of studying the signs of nature. The art student was to be more than a refined camera, trained to record the surface of the object. He must realize that he is ‘child of this earth; yet also child of the Universe, issue of a star among stars.’”

“Exactitude winged by intuition was the goal he held out for his students.”

“Pedagogical Sketchbook is a vital contribution toward a more human, more universal goal in design education—the work of a visionary painter who dedicated himself to the practical task of making people see.”

A view into the book:

My old as heck copy, which was fun to flip through another time while on an international flight last week. Going from one place to another in one single line!

After reading, I’m seeing his lines, dots, and accented patterns of color differently! Aren’t you, too?

Paul Klee’s Two Accented Layers, 1932, c/o The Menil Collection, Houston.

Related Notes:

• The true feeling of being exactly where you’re supposed to be: that’s my life here in the Basque Country. I was SO happy to return this weekend. As soon as I saw the sea from the sky, and the familiar lush, rolling hills, I felt my shoulders relax. The tiny airport welcomed us with sunshine, and so did the adorably proportioned Basque horses just outside the airport fencing.

  Exactly a year ago, I shared details of one of my husband and I’s many visits to this region of France while prepping for our wedding. I was looking at the post today and actually gasped out loud when I saw a photograph I took of a street whose quaintness overwhelmed me.

  

  Last May, we were driving through a small seaside town and I had no idea where we actually were. We were headed to pick up Jb’s engraved wedding ring. Six months later, we lived EXACTLY here. Literally, the apartment we moved into last November is tucked behind the trees on the left (we have since moved again to a different house in the neighborhood because of a mold infestation and carbon monoxide problems—I’m never joking when I say that life is an adventure).

  At that point, we had had many exploratory conversations about living in the Basque Country, but we had absolutely no idea that we would relocate to this random town or live on that exact street. I can’t believe I didn’t pair our street to this photograph from last spring until right at this moment! Sometimes, we can’t believe our eyes.

• Peter Schjeldahl (RIP) of the New Yorker—one of my favorite art writers—wrote Between the Lines about a MoMA exhibition of line drawings in the 20th century. He started, “Cubism threw art into a blender and hit the chop button. Subsequent avant-gardes proceeded, by stages, to today’s setting: purée.” This writing’s intro has a similar quality to Klee’s writing. There’s a sense of energized action! For Paul, dots are going for walks and turning themselves into lines; for Peter, art shapes are chopped in a blender.

• The collections of major museums across the globe always seem to be Klee-heavy including MoMA, Tate London, and the Guggenheim in New York.

Now on view at MoMA: Klee’s Fire in the Evening, 1929.

• I’m still freaking out about the photograph/street coincidence. I guess my eyes were doing like Paul Klee’s. They were seeing and feeling—and maybe predicting the future!

**

Kelsey Rose

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*cover image: Arrogant Verneuil collaged with Klee’s Two Accented Layers, 1932, c/o The Menil Collection.