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Lot Essay
In 1925, five years after its founding, the Bauhaus found itself brusquely expelled from its site in Weimar by the Nazi-controlled Thuringian parliament. For all the sinister implications of this action, the subsequent move to Dessau proved auspicious for Klee and his family. The years 1925-1926 saw closer contact with Wassily Kandinsky—with whom Klee stayed while the Dessau buildings were being prepared—as well as the formation of the Klee Gesellschaft, the subscription 'Klee Society' which greatly improved the artist's financial circumstances.
In December 1926, Klee and his fellow 'masters' finally moved into the new residential quarters designed by Walter Gropius, the Bauhaus founder and talisman (fig. 1). The artist's new home was spacious and he was surrounded by his closest colleagues, Lyonel Feininger, Kandinsky, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Oscar Schlemmer among them. The present work dates from the following year, poised between the stimulating, however ominous, relocation and the artist's seminal trip to Egypt. In many ways, Glashäshauser Viertel (District of the Glass Houses) appears to take the Bauhaus aesthetic as its subject, where architecture itself was identified as an avant-garde artistic principle.
Christina Thomson states that "Klee had completely taken possession of architecture as a compositional and metaphorical artistic method. Architectural and urbanistic forms permeate his entire oeuvre, at both structural-theoretical level and with respect to motif" (in The Klee Universe, exh. cat., Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, 2008, p. 231). Referring to architecture as motif, she continues, "Klee causes real architectural forms to collide with invented or symbolic elements, mixing the familiar with the visionary and space with dream. The result is fantastical cities, castles in the air, and dream worlds that fuse into a singularly dynamic architectural cosmos: nothing is rigid and purely geometric; everything pulsates, swells, flows, hovers, or glows" (ibid.).
Furthermore, on a structural level, Klee’s artistic practice is essentially architectural, "Painting…constitutes a pictorial architecture: it follows the architectural principle of the incremental construction of weight-bearing foundation, articulating framework, and finishing materials: 'Does a picture come into being all at once? No, it is built up piece by piece, the same as a house' (Paul Klee, The Thinking Eye, The Notebooks of Paul Klee, New York, 1964, p. 78). Klee builds not only using lines and grids, but also with color. In the 1920s, he increasingly produced works in which the investigation of constructed form by means of color brought with it a more pronounced abstraction of visual form" (ibid., p. 232).
In December 1926, Klee and his fellow 'masters' finally moved into the new residential quarters designed by Walter Gropius, the Bauhaus founder and talisman (fig. 1). The artist's new home was spacious and he was surrounded by his closest colleagues, Lyonel Feininger, Kandinsky, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Oscar Schlemmer among them. The present work dates from the following year, poised between the stimulating, however ominous, relocation and the artist's seminal trip to Egypt. In many ways, Glashäshauser Viertel (District of the Glass Houses) appears to take the Bauhaus aesthetic as its subject, where architecture itself was identified as an avant-garde artistic principle.
Christina Thomson states that "Klee had completely taken possession of architecture as a compositional and metaphorical artistic method. Architectural and urbanistic forms permeate his entire oeuvre, at both structural-theoretical level and with respect to motif" (in The Klee Universe, exh. cat., Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, 2008, p. 231). Referring to architecture as motif, she continues, "Klee causes real architectural forms to collide with invented or symbolic elements, mixing the familiar with the visionary and space with dream. The result is fantastical cities, castles in the air, and dream worlds that fuse into a singularly dynamic architectural cosmos: nothing is rigid and purely geometric; everything pulsates, swells, flows, hovers, or glows" (ibid.).
Furthermore, on a structural level, Klee’s artistic practice is essentially architectural, "Painting…constitutes a pictorial architecture: it follows the architectural principle of the incremental construction of weight-bearing foundation, articulating framework, and finishing materials: 'Does a picture come into being all at once? No, it is built up piece by piece, the same as a house' (Paul Klee, The Thinking Eye, The Notebooks of Paul Klee, New York, 1964, p. 78). Klee builds not only using lines and grids, but also with color. In the 1920s, he increasingly produced works in which the investigation of constructed form by means of color brought with it a more pronounced abstraction of visual form" (ibid., p. 232).