A crank to make birds sing

A handle appears on the right, a few birds perch above an empty space, and a line connects the whole. Twittering Machine resembles no apparatus whose workings a visitor could immediately learn. Yet its connections can be followed, almost like those of a real mechanism. Paul Klee retains enough technical signs to awaken that curiosity. He associates them with creatures that seem neither peacefully settled nor wholly transformed into objects. The title promises song; the drawing makes us hesitate over its price.

Dated 1922, the work held at the Museum of Modern Art combines several processes: oil transfer, watercolour and ink, on paper mounted on cardboard. This precision matters in an image that initially seems to have developed freely. MoMA explains that Klee transfers a drawing using a sheet coated with oil paint. The resulting line retains irregularities and traces arising from the contact between supports. A line can thus seem spontaneous while having already completed a material journey before reaching us.

The imagined mechanism creates a tension between things we usually separate. The bird suggests flight, the branch suggests rest, and the crank implies an outside intervention. Here, the forms do not fit peacefully together. The visitor can imagine a turn setting something in motion, but has no instruction manual. What matters is the dependence made visible: the small figures remain connected to a construction extending beyond their bodies. The image lets us glimpse a control without showing the person who would take it in hand.

The heads introduce another movement. Beaks, eyes and extensions differ above the shared line. The birds therefore form a group without becoming identical specimens. Their angular outlines direct the eye from one to another, and we can look for where each creature begins and the apparatus ends. This difficulty enriches the drawing. Klee does not need to add a spectacular scene of violence to make the relationship between life and the device uncomfortable; he merely needs to keep their boundaries from settling completely.

Colour does more than fill the silhouettes. The blue and pink areas offer an atmospheric space that the black line describes in a different way. The background can seem open and deep, while the transfer marks recall the surface of the paper. Looking at these two dimensions in turn changes the scene’s character. It moves closer to a dream, then becomes a drawn assemblage again. This oscillation prevents us from placing the birds in a natural landscape where every distance would be easily measurable and every gesture familiar.

MoMA offers a critical reading of the union between nature and industry. It provides an insight without turning every sign into a code whose translation we need only learn. The crank may suggest control; the whole may unsettle us through its precariousness; the title also retains a mordant humour. These possibilities support one another. They do not require us to invent a biographical episode in which Klee saw a similar apparatus working. The painting’s strength lies precisely in a situation created by drawing, capable of making a question concrete.

The work’s journey gave it a real political history. Acquired by Berlin’s Nationalgalerie in 1923, it was removed from German collections under the Nazi regime in 1937, then entered MoMA in 1939. The provenance record allows us to distinguish this documented journey from the fictional device depicted. It would be tempting to read the entire persecution backwards into the 1922 sheet. A more attentive chronology preserves the invention’s original context and shows how another, very real power later acted upon the object itself.

In the end, the little handle remains available for a gesture nobody performs. This waiting is perhaps the best way to look at the work. We can follow the lines, see the birds and understand the means employed without running the scene through to its conclusion. Klee places us beside a possible movement, in a space where song and subjugation become difficult to disentangle. The drawing retains its humour, but the question remains serious: what becomes of a voice when a mechanism claims to make it available?