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Lot Essay
'Very quietly, just one individual amidst the thousandfold, loud dying of these days, the quietest, the most individual of all present-day artists has passed away. For a long time those close to him had been anxious about this precious life. For even in the last year a harvest ripened in the cycle of harvests from this incomparably fruitful life, a harvest that seemed to add something quite new to all those brought in before. Anyone who had to watch how the sap began to dry up in the roots from which the body lives might see in the apparently more powerful tone of these late works something like the triumph of the creative will over the physical' (Georg Schmidt, speech at Klee's funeral service in the chapel of the Bürgesrpital, Berne, 2 July 1940).
One of Klee's very last important works Berg-Wild (Wild Mountain Animal) is an extremely rare double-sided work that uniquely reflects the two main currents in the artist's late work. Executed in March 1940 only three months before Klee's death, both of these fully worked but very different paintings are transcendental portraits of a mysterious magical realm that have been made with the medium Kleisterfarben - a mixure of coloured pigment and glue - that the artist favoured in his last years. On the verso, Berg-Wild is a semi-abstract depiction of a harmoniously integrated natural world - a child-like portrait of reaction from a cosmic point of view. By contrast, the more straightforward Untitled recto, is a haunting portrait of a glum-looking spectral figure seemingly isolated in a strange netherworld. These two very different works reflect both the tragic and optimistic veins that populate Klee's late work.
In 1935 Klee had been diagnosed with the rare, fatal and incurable disease scleroderma. Unable to work throughout much of 1936, the last three years of Klee's life witnessed an extraordinary development during which Klee produced a prodigious number of pictures and, (arguably), the finest work of his career. Knowing that he was dying, it has often been suggested that Klee created a requiem for himself through his art of the last two years. Figures of death and angels feature prominently: 'Of course it is no accident that I am moving into the tragic vein', Klee commented at this time. 'Any of my works indicate this and say: the time has come...' (Klee cited in ed. E.G. Güse, Paul Klee: Dialogue with Nature, Munich, 1991, p. 154). And yet, Klee was not overly afraid of death. As he asserted, 'death is not an evil: for does one know which is more important, life now, or the life that is to come?' And, as if to illustrate this, alongside his paintings infused with a sense of tragedy of closing, are many optimistic late works representing spring, the regeneration of life or a new dawn that evidently reflect Klee's belief in the continuation of life after death and in his own spiritual regeneration. For Klee, evidently, the end was always indivisible from the beginning.
The two paintings on either side of this work clearly reflect this duality in Klee's late work and speak of the transcendental realm in which he found himslf during these last years. Klee's art had always dealt with the transcendent; 'I seek a place for myself only with God,' Klee had written as early as 1916. 'I am a cosmic point of reference, not species.... I cannot be understood in purely earthly terms. For I can live with the dead as with the unborn. Somewhat nearer to the heart of all Creation than is usual. But still far from being near enough' (Grohman, Paul Klee, 1954, p. 182). Klee's illness accentuated his deep sense of the transcendental role of the artist and his work increasingly began to reflect the artificiality of reality. It also started to become populated by strange spectral figures seemingly neither of this world nor of the next, but, like many of the signs and ciphers of his earlier work, sort of intermediaries between the two. Berg-Wild is an abstract patterning of form and colour that represents an idyllic innocent world of nature as if it were a Creation scene from the book of Genesis. Mountains and animals have become one. Living in perfect harmony they form a unity in the form of a kind of ideogram that suggests they are part of a larger whole. The forms of one are merged and incorporated into those of another as if they were being viewed through the fragmentation of a stained glass window. This 'stained-glass' technique is common to many of Klee's late works and can be seen to reflect the artist's increasingly distanced view of reality as an abstract veil of illusion.
One of Klee's very last important works Berg-Wild (Wild Mountain Animal) is an extremely rare double-sided work that uniquely reflects the two main currents in the artist's late work. Executed in March 1940 only three months before Klee's death, both of these fully worked but very different paintings are transcendental portraits of a mysterious magical realm that have been made with the medium Kleisterfarben - a mixure of coloured pigment and glue - that the artist favoured in his last years. On the verso, Berg-Wild is a semi-abstract depiction of a harmoniously integrated natural world - a child-like portrait of reaction from a cosmic point of view. By contrast, the more straightforward Untitled recto, is a haunting portrait of a glum-looking spectral figure seemingly isolated in a strange netherworld. These two very different works reflect both the tragic and optimistic veins that populate Klee's late work.
In 1935 Klee had been diagnosed with the rare, fatal and incurable disease scleroderma. Unable to work throughout much of 1936, the last three years of Klee's life witnessed an extraordinary development during which Klee produced a prodigious number of pictures and, (arguably), the finest work of his career. Knowing that he was dying, it has often been suggested that Klee created a requiem for himself through his art of the last two years. Figures of death and angels feature prominently: 'Of course it is no accident that I am moving into the tragic vein', Klee commented at this time. 'Any of my works indicate this and say: the time has come...' (Klee cited in ed. E.G. Güse, Paul Klee: Dialogue with Nature, Munich, 1991, p. 154). And yet, Klee was not overly afraid of death. As he asserted, 'death is not an evil: for does one know which is more important, life now, or the life that is to come?' And, as if to illustrate this, alongside his paintings infused with a sense of tragedy of closing, are many optimistic late works representing spring, the regeneration of life or a new dawn that evidently reflect Klee's belief in the continuation of life after death and in his own spiritual regeneration. For Klee, evidently, the end was always indivisible from the beginning.
The two paintings on either side of this work clearly reflect this duality in Klee's late work and speak of the transcendental realm in which he found himslf during these last years. Klee's art had always dealt with the transcendent; 'I seek a place for myself only with God,' Klee had written as early as 1916. 'I am a cosmic point of reference, not species.... I cannot be understood in purely earthly terms. For I can live with the dead as with the unborn. Somewhat nearer to the heart of all Creation than is usual. But still far from being near enough' (Grohman, Paul Klee, 1954, p. 182). Klee's illness accentuated his deep sense of the transcendental role of the artist and his work increasingly began to reflect the artificiality of reality. It also started to become populated by strange spectral figures seemingly neither of this world nor of the next, but, like many of the signs and ciphers of his earlier work, sort of intermediaries between the two. Berg-Wild is an abstract patterning of form and colour that represents an idyllic innocent world of nature as if it were a Creation scene from the book of Genesis. Mountains and animals have become one. Living in perfect harmony they form a unity in the form of a kind of ideogram that suggests they are part of a larger whole. The forms of one are merged and incorporated into those of another as if they were being viewed through the fragmentation of a stained glass window. This 'stained-glass' technique is common to many of Klee's late works and can be seen to reflect the artist's increasingly distanced view of reality as an abstract veil of illusion.