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Lot Essay
'Does a pictorial work come into being at one stroke? No, it is constructed bit by bit, just like a house...out of abstract elements a formal cosmos is ultimately created independent of their groupings as concrete objects or abstract things such as numbers or letters, which we discover to be so closely similar to the Creation that a breath is sufficient to turn an expression of religious feelings, or religion, into reality' (Paul Klee Creative Credo, 1920, reproduced The Inward Vision: Watercolours, Drawings and Writings by Paul Klee, New York, 1959, pp. 5-10).
Using solely a simple geometric pattern of coloured rectangles over which Klee has incised in white paint a series of perspectival lines centred on the middle of the painting, Perspektive Figuration is a work that articulates a playful landscape-like tapestry of colour and form sparkling with an innate and surprising sense of life. The magical pictorial realm that Klee describes is one where the coloured rectangles of the background seem to become a carpet of fields, and the white lines crossing them appear simultaneously as building structures, house roofs, trees, stars and even, as the title of the picture suggests, figures.
Painted in 1925 during the height of his formal experimentation at the Bauhaus, Perspektive Figuration is deliberately playful in its restrained and simple use of a sequence of geometric and perspectival pictorial conventions to generate a charming vision of a secret pictorial cosmos. It is reflective of Klee's wider creative vision. This was his semi-mystical view that an entire world of creative potential lay dormant within the materials, practices and techniques of picture making. It was a magical realm that was capable of being revealed or 'made visible', only through the intuitive unconscious and discerning intervention of the artist following his creative calling.
'Chosen are those artists who penetrate to the region of that secret place where primeval power nurtures all evolution.' Klee wrote on this subject in 1924. 'There, where the power-house of all time and space - call it brain or heart of creation - activates every function: who is the artist who would not dwell there? In the womb of nature, at the source of creation, where the secret key to all lies guarded' (Paul Klee, On Modern Art, 1924, pp. 49).
Using solely a simple geometric pattern of coloured rectangles over which Klee has incised in white paint a series of perspectival lines centred on the middle of the painting, Perspektive Figuration is a work that articulates a playful landscape-like tapestry of colour and form sparkling with an innate and surprising sense of life. The magical pictorial realm that Klee describes is one where the coloured rectangles of the background seem to become a carpet of fields, and the white lines crossing them appear simultaneously as building structures, house roofs, trees, stars and even, as the title of the picture suggests, figures.
Painted in 1925 during the height of his formal experimentation at the Bauhaus, Perspektive Figuration is deliberately playful in its restrained and simple use of a sequence of geometric and perspectival pictorial conventions to generate a charming vision of a secret pictorial cosmos. It is reflective of Klee's wider creative vision. This was his semi-mystical view that an entire world of creative potential lay dormant within the materials, practices and techniques of picture making. It was a magical realm that was capable of being revealed or 'made visible', only through the intuitive unconscious and discerning intervention of the artist following his creative calling.
'Chosen are those artists who penetrate to the region of that secret place where primeval power nurtures all evolution.' Klee wrote on this subject in 1924. 'There, where the power-house of all time and space - call it brain or heart of creation - activates every function: who is the artist who would not dwell there? In the womb of nature, at the source of creation, where the secret key to all lies guarded' (Paul Klee, On Modern Art, 1924, pp. 49).