ABSTRACT
The painting is the scene of the performance of vocal illusion. It appears that the cries, which are not the everyday voices of the 'crier', originate in the stomach - the voices of fanciful animals but also the fanciful animal imitations of the ventriloquist. German romantic literature has recognized a certain lurking danger in moors where sounds are plentiful but unseen. Klee's painting indicates this darkness as its colorful gridded backdrop is partially blackened over. Jasper Johns' 1983 Ventriloquist is an encaustic diptych from his 'bathtub paintings' where the faucets and pipes of bathtubs are depicted in the lower right-hand corner of each canvas, situating the viewer approximately at intub level. Like Klee's painting, Johns' contains reference to a water creature. The ventriloquist idea of speaking in other voices may be best represented in Ventriloquist by the depiction of the Untitled 1961 Barnett Newman lithograph in the upper right hand corner of the painting.
