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Lot Essay
'On some solemn night, Klee planted in the most secret of places the germ of his self-contained selfhood. From then on, all the threads that he had meant to spin turned into tender roots. And what he has since been able to draw out of his soul has become rootedness. He is said to have spent a solar year in Tunis. The plant shot up at once. Now it is putting forth flowers: his fiery watercolours. But the self is developing further: when Klee draws, new roots sprout forth: and colourful flowers emerge when he paints, poetry composed in colours' (Theodor Däubler, 'das Kunstblatt', 1918, quoted in In Paul Klee's Enchanted Garden, exh. cat., Berne, 2008, p. 13).
Parks and gardens were a central motif in Klee's art throughout his life, For Klee their patchwork construction or a variegated row of flowerbeds provided a rhythmic visual structure that offered a pictorial link for him between Nature, art and the hidden ordering forces of Nature and the cosmos, which he believed it was the purpose of art to reveal. 'Art relates to creation in the manner of a metaphor,' Klee wrote in his 'Creative Credo' written soon after he joined the Bauhaus in 1920. 'It is always a model, in the same way that the earth is a model of the cosmos' (Paul Klee, 'Creative Credo', 1920, in The Inward Vision: Watercolours, Drawings and Writings by Paul Klee, exh. cat., New York, 1959, pp. 5-10).
Parklandschaft is an exquisite, fluid and richly coloured watercolour made by Klee during this same fertile period in the development of his art when he was attemping to integrate these beliefs into the practice of his art in accordance with the start of his teaching career at the Bauhaus. Depicting two linear rows of strangely different plant forms all rendered with a single flowing line meandering and looping in a seemingly continuous flow of ink from his pen, the painting articulates a mysteriously ordered world of varied organic form and burgeoning growth. Showing the roots below the soil as well as the flowering forms above, the flat colours and fluid outlines of this semi-abstract painting give pictorial expression to Klee's essentially mystic vision of the earth as a mirror of the cosmos and of art as the means by which an understanding of the integrated holistic unity of all things can be conveyed.
Parks and gardens were a central motif in Klee's art throughout his life, For Klee their patchwork construction or a variegated row of flowerbeds provided a rhythmic visual structure that offered a pictorial link for him between Nature, art and the hidden ordering forces of Nature and the cosmos, which he believed it was the purpose of art to reveal. 'Art relates to creation in the manner of a metaphor,' Klee wrote in his 'Creative Credo' written soon after he joined the Bauhaus in 1920. 'It is always a model, in the same way that the earth is a model of the cosmos' (Paul Klee, 'Creative Credo', 1920, in The Inward Vision: Watercolours, Drawings and Writings by Paul Klee, exh. cat., New York, 1959, pp. 5-10).
Parklandschaft is an exquisite, fluid and richly coloured watercolour made by Klee during this same fertile period in the development of his art when he was attemping to integrate these beliefs into the practice of his art in accordance with the start of his teaching career at the Bauhaus. Depicting two linear rows of strangely different plant forms all rendered with a single flowing line meandering and looping in a seemingly continuous flow of ink from his pen, the painting articulates a mysteriously ordered world of varied organic form and burgeoning growth. Showing the roots below the soil as well as the flowering forms above, the flat colours and fluid outlines of this semi-abstract painting give pictorial expression to Klee's essentially mystic vision of the earth as a mirror of the cosmos and of art as the means by which an understanding of the integrated holistic unity of all things can be conveyed.