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Lot Essay
Gräberstadt (City of Tombs) is a complex and integrated semi-abstract watercolor from 1914 that reflects Klee's absorption of important avant-garde influences and marks the full maturation in his art that took place that year. The artist had first seen Pablo Picasso’s Cubist paintings in Munich in 1910 at an exhibition of the Neue Künstlervereinigung. “What impressed Klee about them was the boldness with which painting managed to forge beyond the mere outward appearance of the visible to an analysis of inner structure. Disregarding all valid principles of aesthetics, the world of objects was broken down into prism-like component parts and then recombined and interwoven in accordance with purely compositional requirements” (C. Hopfengart and M. Baumgartner, Paul Klee: Life and Work, Bern, 2012, p. 78).
Klee deepened his understanding of Cubism during a visit to Paris in April 1912, where he saw works by Picasso and Georges Braque. He also visited the studio of Robert Delaunay, who’s theories on the harmony of spectral colors would have a lasting influence on Klee’s art. “Works from the first months of 1914…illustrate that even before his legendary trip to Tunisia Klee had arrived at an abstract color-field painting inspired by Delaunay” (ibid., p. 80). The present highly finished watercolor, with its Cubistic abstraction of the architectural forms of a medieval town and its surrounding landscape, illustrates how Klee fused the constructive principles of Cubism with the color theory of Delaunay, to create a new, simple but articulate language representing the world in abstract terms but without completely departing from the world of objective reality. A series of architectural features and organic forms are dissolved into a shimmering mosaic of color, as windows and walls, domes and doorways, celestial bodies and a mountain, are distilled down to their basic geometric shapes and then re-assembled in an intricate pattern of interlocking and overlapping colorful planes.
Executed just before the outbreak of the Great War, Gräberstadt is a work that, despite the dramatic progress in Klee's art during this period, was painted against an atmosphere of increasing gloom. The painting's crystalline break-up of form into a series of playful squares of color were, for Klee, elements that mirrored his desire to escape from the trauma of the times. As he confided to his diary in 1914, “One deserts the realm of the here and now to transfer one's activity into a realm of the yonder where total affirmation is possible. Abstraction. The cool Romanticism of this style without pathos is unheard of. The more horrible this world (as today, for instance), the more abstract our art, whereas a happy world brings forth an art of the here and now. Today is a transition from yesterday. In the great pit of forms lie broken fragments to some of which we still cling. They provide abstraction with its material” (F. Klee, ed., The Diaries of Paul Klee, Berkeley, 1964, p. 313).
The first owner of Gräberstadt was Willem Wolff Beffie (1880-1950), a Dutch art collector who acquired it directly from the artist. Born in Amsterdam, Beffie made his fortune in the diamond business in the early 20th century. Between 1912 and 1918 he acquired an extensive collection consisting of approximately 500 works by international avant-garde artists such as Franz Marc, Marc Chagall, Wassily Kandinsky, Alexej von Jawlensky, Marianne von Werefkin and Dutch artists Piet Mondrian, Kees van Dongen, Leo Gestel and Jan Sluijters. Beffie preferred to buy directly from artists when visiting their studios, often being introduced by Franz Marc. During his lifetime he sold works from his collection which are now in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.
Klee deepened his understanding of Cubism during a visit to Paris in April 1912, where he saw works by Picasso and Georges Braque. He also visited the studio of Robert Delaunay, who’s theories on the harmony of spectral colors would have a lasting influence on Klee’s art. “Works from the first months of 1914…illustrate that even before his legendary trip to Tunisia Klee had arrived at an abstract color-field painting inspired by Delaunay” (ibid., p. 80). The present highly finished watercolor, with its Cubistic abstraction of the architectural forms of a medieval town and its surrounding landscape, illustrates how Klee fused the constructive principles of Cubism with the color theory of Delaunay, to create a new, simple but articulate language representing the world in abstract terms but without completely departing from the world of objective reality. A series of architectural features and organic forms are dissolved into a shimmering mosaic of color, as windows and walls, domes and doorways, celestial bodies and a mountain, are distilled down to their basic geometric shapes and then re-assembled in an intricate pattern of interlocking and overlapping colorful planes.
Executed just before the outbreak of the Great War, Gräberstadt is a work that, despite the dramatic progress in Klee's art during this period, was painted against an atmosphere of increasing gloom. The painting's crystalline break-up of form into a series of playful squares of color were, for Klee, elements that mirrored his desire to escape from the trauma of the times. As he confided to his diary in 1914, “One deserts the realm of the here and now to transfer one's activity into a realm of the yonder where total affirmation is possible. Abstraction. The cool Romanticism of this style without pathos is unheard of. The more horrible this world (as today, for instance), the more abstract our art, whereas a happy world brings forth an art of the here and now. Today is a transition from yesterday. In the great pit of forms lie broken fragments to some of which we still cling. They provide abstraction with its material” (F. Klee, ed., The Diaries of Paul Klee, Berkeley, 1964, p. 313).
The first owner of Gräberstadt was Willem Wolff Beffie (1880-1950), a Dutch art collector who acquired it directly from the artist. Born in Amsterdam, Beffie made his fortune in the diamond business in the early 20th century. Between 1912 and 1918 he acquired an extensive collection consisting of approximately 500 works by international avant-garde artists such as Franz Marc, Marc Chagall, Wassily Kandinsky, Alexej von Jawlensky, Marianne von Werefkin and Dutch artists Piet Mondrian, Kees van Dongen, Leo Gestel and Jan Sluijters. Beffie preferred to buy directly from artists when visiting their studios, often being introduced by Franz Marc. During his lifetime he sold works from his collection which are now in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.