Hommage à Paul Klee 13/9/65 Nr. 2 (Frieder Nake, 1965)

Hommage à Paul Klee 13/9/65 Nr. 2 is a plotter drawing by the mathematician Frieder Nake, dated by its title to 13 September 1965. Nake wrote the program for a Standard Elektrik Lorenz ER56 computer, and a Zuse Graphomat Z64 drew the result with a pen.^1, 2 It is, in the words of one gallery text, one of the drawings most often cited in books and articles about the earliest phase of computer art.³

The painting behind it

The starting point was Paul Klee's oil painting Hauptweg und Nebenwege (Highway and Byways) from 1929, now in the Museum Ludwig in Cologne.²

Nake did not try to copy the painting. The Digital Art Museum quotes him: the drawing is "in no respect the attempt of a simulation".⁴ According to the V&A, he took from Klee the proportions and the balance of vertical and horizontal lines, fixed a framework of horizontals and verticals, and let random variables choose among a set number of options inside it.²

How it works

The picture is a stack of roughly horizontal bands. The lines between the bands are not straight: they bend at a series of points, the vertices, from the left edge to the right. Between two neighbouring vertices, each band forms a four-sided cell, a quadrilateral. The text on the work published by the Gazelli Art House lists the decisions the program left to chance:³

• the width of each band where it starts, at the left edge;
• how each band edge bends from vertex to vertex, with the rule that no edge may cross another;
• for each quadrilateral, whether it stays empty or is filled with vertical lines or with triangles;
• how many lines or triangles go into it, and where;
• how many circles there are, and the position and radius of each.

The rule against crossing keeps the order of the bands. Everything else may vary. "A lot of pseudo-random decisions were needed to algorithmically realize this structure", the same text says.³

No screen showed the result in advance. Nake saw the picture only when the plotter had drawn it.²

Live sketch

New drawing

Copies and prints

The program could run again, and each run made a new drawing. Nake estimates that the machine drew "about 30 or 40 copies" between 1965 and 1967, each counted as an original work. In 1966 he made a screenprint edition of 40.⁴ The V&A holds one of the screenprints; the ZKM in Karlsruhe holds the work as well.^2, 1 The machines and dates are compared with other early plotter works in Plotter Art.