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Lot Essay
Painted in 1938, Hände hoch! (Hands Up!) forms part of the immense body of work created by Paul Klee during the final years of his life, as he experienced an important rejuvenation within his art. Klee had been diagnosed with a rare skin disease, scleroderma, in 1935, the effects of which had left him bed-ridden and unable to work for much of the following year. However, by 1937 the artist was able to manage his symptoms sufficiently enough to return to work, and adapted his methods to accommodate his ill-health, sitting at a large drawing table instead of working before an easel, for example, to achieve a modicum of relief during the many hours he spent painting. The result was a tremendous out-pouring of creativity, as Klee completed hundreds upon hundreds of new works–having produced just 25 in 1936, his output jumped to 264 the following year, 489 in 1938 and, incredibly, over 1200 in 1939. In a letter to his son Felix, the artist described the extraordinary breadth and speed of his output: “Productivity is accelerating in range and at a highly accelerated tempo; 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” (quoted in F. Klee, Paul Klee: His Life and Work in Documents, New York, 1962, p. 72).
During this period of his life Klee’s paintings were marked by an idiosyncratic pictorial language of simplified shapes and succinct graphic marks, often set against free-form patches of subdued, pastel colors that appear to float underneath the heavy black lines. In Hände hoch!, the plethora of marks seem to hang together in a mysterious constellation, an intricate configuration of signs and symbols that forms a secret language of ciphers whose meanings remain beyond our reach. Drawing inspiration from a variety of writing systems including the Latin alphabet, Egyptian hieroglyphs and cuneiform script, these marks oscillate between the familiar and the indecipherable, their forms echoing familiar signs and codes while also suggesting the free, semi-automatic creation of the artist. With their rough edges and painterly execution, these marks retain a clear sense of the energy of the artist’s hand, capturing the spontaneity and vigor Klee employed in their creation as he sought to channel his creative impulses into a concrete artistic expression.
During this period of his life Klee’s paintings were marked by an idiosyncratic pictorial language of simplified shapes and succinct graphic marks, often set against free-form patches of subdued, pastel colors that appear to float underneath the heavy black lines. In Hände hoch!, the plethora of marks seem to hang together in a mysterious constellation, an intricate configuration of signs and symbols that forms a secret language of ciphers whose meanings remain beyond our reach. Drawing inspiration from a variety of writing systems including the Latin alphabet, Egyptian hieroglyphs and cuneiform script, these marks oscillate between the familiar and the indecipherable, their forms echoing familiar signs and codes while also suggesting the free, semi-automatic creation of the artist. With their rough edges and painterly execution, these marks retain a clear sense of the energy of the artist’s hand, capturing the spontaneity and vigor Klee employed in their creation as he sought to channel his creative impulses into a concrete artistic expression.