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Lot Essay
'In Klee's work there's a complete synthesis of all these seminal ideas which went into modern art' -Antoni Tàpies.
Composed of a series of thin, delicate black lines, the ‘She-Devil’ at the heart of Paul Klee’s Weibsteufel, die Welt beherrschend (She-Devil, Dominating the World) appears as a strange hybrid creature, a dangerously enigmatic figure whose identity and intentions remain beyond our comprehension. While her shapely legs, encased in a pair of high heeled, leather boots, and exposed breasts clearly evoke an image of a contemporary, sexual woman, the upper portions of her form are a mixture of mechanical, man-made objects - her ‘face’ appears to be made of an elongated sheet of metal or wood, its surface curling upwards, her ‘eyes’ a pair of spoked-wheels. Cast against a field of rich, pink hues, she illustrates Klee’s remarkable ability to combine the humorous with the monstrous, the organic with the mechanical, to create an enigmatic, otherworldly creature, endlessly intriguing in the multiplicity of potential meanings she proposes.
Created in 1921, this intricately executed work is a beautiful example of the technical complexity of Klee’s method of oil transfer drawing, an innovative technique he had pioneered in 1919 and called 'Ölfarbzeichnungen' (oil-colour drawings). In this process, Klee would cover one side of a sheet of Japan paper with a thin film of black oil paint which, when it had dried sufficiently, could be used like a piece of carbon paper to transfer the artist’s preliminary drawing on to another sheet. Carefully tracing the contours of the drawing with a metal needle, Klee used this method to create a new version of the image, altering the quality and appearance of the line as he applied varying degrees of pressure during the translation process. The result is a softer, more granular line, which appears to gradually fade in and out of view as it traverses the page, while small smudges of oil paint, accidentally pressed through by the artist’s drawing hand as he completed the tracing, lend the composition a greater sense of texture. For Klee, oil transfer drawings offered him an opportunity to introduce colour into his oeuvre without having to paint up to the line, or to colour in his forms. The oil paint would repel the sumptuous watercolour washes that he used to fill his backgrounds, their rich colours and subtly shifting tonalities, adding new atmospheric effects to the composition.
Composed of a series of thin, delicate black lines, the ‘She-Devil’ at the heart of Paul Klee’s Weibsteufel, die Welt beherrschend (She-Devil, Dominating the World) appears as a strange hybrid creature, a dangerously enigmatic figure whose identity and intentions remain beyond our comprehension. While her shapely legs, encased in a pair of high heeled, leather boots, and exposed breasts clearly evoke an image of a contemporary, sexual woman, the upper portions of her form are a mixture of mechanical, man-made objects - her ‘face’ appears to be made of an elongated sheet of metal or wood, its surface curling upwards, her ‘eyes’ a pair of spoked-wheels. Cast against a field of rich, pink hues, she illustrates Klee’s remarkable ability to combine the humorous with the monstrous, the organic with the mechanical, to create an enigmatic, otherworldly creature, endlessly intriguing in the multiplicity of potential meanings she proposes.
Created in 1921, this intricately executed work is a beautiful example of the technical complexity of Klee’s method of oil transfer drawing, an innovative technique he had pioneered in 1919 and called 'Ölfarbzeichnungen' (oil-colour drawings). In this process, Klee would cover one side of a sheet of Japan paper with a thin film of black oil paint which, when it had dried sufficiently, could be used like a piece of carbon paper to transfer the artist’s preliminary drawing on to another sheet. Carefully tracing the contours of the drawing with a metal needle, Klee used this method to create a new version of the image, altering the quality and appearance of the line as he applied varying degrees of pressure during the translation process. The result is a softer, more granular line, which appears to gradually fade in and out of view as it traverses the page, while small smudges of oil paint, accidentally pressed through by the artist’s drawing hand as he completed the tracing, lend the composition a greater sense of texture. For Klee, oil transfer drawings offered him an opportunity to introduce colour into his oeuvre without having to paint up to the line, or to colour in his forms. The oil paint would repel the sumptuous watercolour washes that he used to fill his backgrounds, their rich colours and subtly shifting tonalities, adding new atmospheric effects to the composition.