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Lot Essay
The bold, thick, graphic lines that define architectural contours and signify plant forms in Garten im Orient, while imparting structure to the flat patterning of sectioned colors that serves as their pictorial ground, are the key elements in a method that Paul Klee introduced during 1937 and became the salient characteristics of his Alterstil—an innovative late style.
This development emerged from a career-long dedication to drawing; the consummate, fine pen line of the Klee’s early and middle period draughtsmanship turned heavy, solid, and emphatic, imbuing his compositions with a sense of grandeur and monumentality that he had not previously sought in his work. The intimate fantasy and whimsy of Klee’s numerous garden-scapes during the late ‘teens and 1920s, brimming with lovingly rendered detail in their small formats, opened up into landscape vistas of memory and visionary impulse, revealing the lineaments of archetypes summoned forth from the depths of the inner self and writ large as potent, revelatory signs.
This metamorphosis of means was Klee’s brave response to a painful, existential ordeal. In 1935 he began to experience symptoms of a debilitating disease subsequently diagnosed as scleroderma, which resulted in his death in June 1940. During 1936 he created only a few pictures in his Bern studio. In 1937, however, his production astonishingly rebounded—he completed a total of 264 catalogued works in various media, his largest tally since he returned to his native Switzerland at the end of 1933 to flee Hitler’s rise to power in Germany.
An even larger sum, 489 pictures, followed in 1938. “Productivity is increasing in range and at a highly accelerated tempo,” Klee wrote to his son Felix on 29 December 1939. “I can no longer entirely keep up with these children of mine. They run away with me. There is a certain adaptation taking place, in that drawings predominate. Twelve hundred items in 1939 is really something of a record performance” (F. Klee, Paul Klee: His Life and Work in Documents, New York, 1962, p. 72).
“In Ascona I did pastel drawings to my heart’s delight,” Klee wrote his wife Lily on 27 November 1937 (ibid., p, 73). The Orient in Klee’s title refers not to the Far East, but evokes the “orientalist” fantasy of North African and Levantine subjects that Delacroix and other European painters, including Matisse, had treated since the 1830s. Klee had undertaken in 1914 a momentous journey to Tunisia, where he experienced an epiphany that transformed his art. “Color possesses me,” he wrote in his diary on 16 April. “Color and I are one. I am a painter.”
In Tunis Klee visited “superb gardens…a path with cactuses just like the ‘hohle Gasse’ [in Immensee, back home]” (F. Klee, ed., The Diaries of Paul Klee, Berkeley, 1964, pp. 293 and 297). The horseshoe arches likely allude to the grand Mosque of Uqba in Kairouan. Trips to Sicily, Corsica, and Egypt during the late 1920s rekindled Klee’s interest in Mediterranean cultures, for years afterwards yielding—in glowing chroma—pictures that are timelessly mythic in their scope and import.
This development emerged from a career-long dedication to drawing; the consummate, fine pen line of the Klee’s early and middle period draughtsmanship turned heavy, solid, and emphatic, imbuing his compositions with a sense of grandeur and monumentality that he had not previously sought in his work. The intimate fantasy and whimsy of Klee’s numerous garden-scapes during the late ‘teens and 1920s, brimming with lovingly rendered detail in their small formats, opened up into landscape vistas of memory and visionary impulse, revealing the lineaments of archetypes summoned forth from the depths of the inner self and writ large as potent, revelatory signs.
This metamorphosis of means was Klee’s brave response to a painful, existential ordeal. In 1935 he began to experience symptoms of a debilitating disease subsequently diagnosed as scleroderma, which resulted in his death in June 1940. During 1936 he created only a few pictures in his Bern studio. In 1937, however, his production astonishingly rebounded—he completed a total of 264 catalogued works in various media, his largest tally since he returned to his native Switzerland at the end of 1933 to flee Hitler’s rise to power in Germany.
An even larger sum, 489 pictures, followed in 1938. “Productivity is increasing in range and at a highly accelerated tempo,” Klee wrote to his son Felix on 29 December 1939. “I can no longer entirely keep up with these children of mine. They run away with me. There is a certain adaptation taking place, in that drawings predominate. Twelve hundred items in 1939 is really something of a record performance” (F. Klee, Paul Klee: His Life and Work in Documents, New York, 1962, p. 72).
“In Ascona I did pastel drawings to my heart’s delight,” Klee wrote his wife Lily on 27 November 1937 (ibid., p, 73). The Orient in Klee’s title refers not to the Far East, but evokes the “orientalist” fantasy of North African and Levantine subjects that Delacroix and other European painters, including Matisse, had treated since the 1830s. Klee had undertaken in 1914 a momentous journey to Tunisia, where he experienced an epiphany that transformed his art. “Color possesses me,” he wrote in his diary on 16 April. “Color and I are one. I am a painter.”
In Tunis Klee visited “superb gardens…a path with cactuses just like the ‘hohle Gasse’ [in Immensee, back home]” (F. Klee, ed., The Diaries of Paul Klee, Berkeley, 1964, pp. 293 and 297). The horseshoe arches likely allude to the grand Mosque of Uqba in Kairouan. Trips to Sicily, Corsica, and Egypt during the late 1920s rekindled Klee’s interest in Mediterranean cultures, for years afterwards yielding—in glowing chroma—pictures that are timelessly mythic in their scope and import.