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Lot Essay
Towards the end of World War I, Paul Klee's work quickly matured, and his range of subject matter expanded and deepened philosophically. In 1918, the atmosphere of artistic and political revolution in Munich, Klee's pre-war travels in North Africa, and his assimilation of Delaunay's Orphist influence were all coming to fruition, particularly in his handling of colour and the transformation of his drawing and form. It was at the beginning of this year that Klee created this ‘Unfinished Landscape Framed in Cerulean Blue’.
The glowing, jewel-like resonance of this landscape emerges in the combination of delicately modulated colour and imaginative, energetic and meticulous draughtsmanship. It was Klee who famously said that drawing was just 'taking a line for a walk' and in this work he demonstrates this principle in the simplest way, contrasting the sharp graphic line with a diverse palette. Indeed, in the present painting the artist seems to take line for a dance, for there is something of the pleasure of articulating movement evident in the lyrical expression of the curved interlocking lines. Klee's art is unique in the history of the twentieth century in that he was the only modern artist who allowed his work to roam freely between the organic and the geometric, the constructive and the intuitive, the figurative and the abstract and between the purely linear and the wholly chromatic.
In October 1919 Klee signed a contract with the dealer Hans Goltz, which provided the artist with some financial stability, and Goltz sold this work a few months later. 'I paint, he markets and advertises', Klee wrote to his friend Wilhelm Hausenstein in June 1920 (quoted in O.K. Werckmeister, The Making of Paul Klee's Career, 1914-1920, Chicago, 1989, p. 236).
The glowing, jewel-like resonance of this landscape emerges in the combination of delicately modulated colour and imaginative, energetic and meticulous draughtsmanship. It was Klee who famously said that drawing was just 'taking a line for a walk' and in this work he demonstrates this principle in the simplest way, contrasting the sharp graphic line with a diverse palette. Indeed, in the present painting the artist seems to take line for a dance, for there is something of the pleasure of articulating movement evident in the lyrical expression of the curved interlocking lines. Klee's art is unique in the history of the twentieth century in that he was the only modern artist who allowed his work to roam freely between the organic and the geometric, the constructive and the intuitive, the figurative and the abstract and between the purely linear and the wholly chromatic.
In October 1919 Klee signed a contract with the dealer Hans Goltz, which provided the artist with some financial stability, and Goltz sold this work a few months later. 'I paint, he markets and advertises', Klee wrote to his friend Wilhelm Hausenstein in June 1920 (quoted in O.K. Werckmeister, The Making of Paul Klee's Career, 1914-1920, Chicago, 1989, p. 236).