Lot Essay
Klee joined the Weimar Bauhaus in January 1921, and the interdisciplinary program of the school, with its strong emphasis on architecture and design, had a significant impact on Klee's work during the twenties. He investigated the spatial possibilities of the picture plane in new ways, while retaining the influences of Cubist structure and the color theories of Robert Delaunay's Orphist movement. He took an idiosyncratic approach to the rules of classical perspective and utilized architectural forms in numerous works during this period, while at the same time retaining his customary manner of constructing pictures, in which imagery is drawn on a vaguely empty space, or integrated within a complex structure of color planes.
The present work is the second in a series of "structural" compositions which evolve from abstract renderings of an imaginary architecture to denoted representations of "curtains," "gardens," and "castles." Even in the later more literal works, the dense and maze-like assembly of lines prohibits perspective and necessitates a symbolic reading of space. The composition is rendered in brightly colored lines set against a rich black ground, producing a strongly rhythmic character. Ann Temkin writes, "The pictures take on the ability of music to produce meaning from its own structural elements, to construct pattern and sign by means of repetition and interval, accent and rest" ("Klee and the Avant-Garde, 1912-1940," Paul Klee, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1987, p. 27). At the same time, the painting has the whimsical quality of a child's drawing or fantasy landscape, heightened by the absence of perspective. Commenting on architectural imagery in Klee's oeuvre, Werner Schmalenbach concludes, "With architecture one usually associates the static, stable, and constructional. Klee's architecture is alive, not static; unstable, not stable; and intuitive, not constructional. What holds good for construction and geometry in his work also applies to perspective: it is but one possibility among many" (Paul Klee, Munich, 1986, p. 54).
In the wake of World War II, New York dealer Karl Nierendorf cut down the artist's mount from the present work to remove its German titling in order to placate postwar anti-German sentiment. The artist's dating, numbering and titling are still partially visible, however.
The present work is the second in a series of "structural" compositions which evolve from abstract renderings of an imaginary architecture to denoted representations of "curtains," "gardens," and "castles." Even in the later more literal works, the dense and maze-like assembly of lines prohibits perspective and necessitates a symbolic reading of space. The composition is rendered in brightly colored lines set against a rich black ground, producing a strongly rhythmic character. Ann Temkin writes, "The pictures take on the ability of music to produce meaning from its own structural elements, to construct pattern and sign by means of repetition and interval, accent and rest" ("Klee and the Avant-Garde, 1912-1940," Paul Klee, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1987, p. 27). At the same time, the painting has the whimsical quality of a child's drawing or fantasy landscape, heightened by the absence of perspective. Commenting on architectural imagery in Klee's oeuvre, Werner Schmalenbach concludes, "With architecture one usually associates the static, stable, and constructional. Klee's architecture is alive, not static; unstable, not stable; and intuitive, not constructional. What holds good for construction and geometry in his work also applies to perspective: it is but one possibility among many" (Paul Klee, Munich, 1986, p. 54).
In the wake of World War II, New York dealer Karl Nierendorf cut down the artist's mount from the present work to remove its German titling in order to placate postwar anti-German sentiment. The artist's dating, numbering and titling are still partially visible, however.