Lot Essay
Klee painted Diana in 1931, the year he terminated his contract with the Bauhaus, leaving Dessau and moving to Dusseldorf in April where he secured a teaching position at the academy. Using a divisionist or pointillist technique borrowed from the French Neo-Impressionists, Klee shifted further away from images of the real world to images derived from more poetic sources.
Klee, in his own way, makes use of colored
light as van Gogh and Seurat had done before
him. On a slightly differentiated ground he
places dots of varying color and intensity in
closely set rows and organizes this "field of
dots" by the use of intervals, through
relations between colors and planes, or by
graphic accents and symbols. Klee differs
from the Pointillists in that he does not
"split" his colors to achieve an effect of
greater luminosity nor does he arrange them
according to the law of "simultaneous contrasts,"
but works with rows of dots of the same color.
(W. Grohmann, 1954, op. cit., pp. 283-284)
Here, the mythical figure of queen Diana, the huntress or wood-spirit, materializes out of a network of intertwining lines set against a shimmering blue-green ground. The arrow along the top of the painting and the circular shape that she balances on at the bottom act as ciphers. In discussing this painting Grohmann writes:
The colored light here has the effect of a
"divinatory being," to quote a phrase by the
poet Novalis, and it is both a spiritual and
a physical phenomenon. The distinction
between "within" and "without" is no longer
valid, Diana is a fleeing, flying being, her
left foot touches a wheel; the figure is a
structure composed of fluttering forms, the
tiny head is of little importance. More
important is the arrow which denotes movement,
seeing, and apparently also hunting. The
dominant, nocturnal green is Diana's home,
she moves on it like a planet, for she is,
among other things, a moon goddess.
(W. Grohmann, Paul Klee, New York, 1956,
p. 20)
Previous owners of this painting were Curt Valentin and Karl Nierendorf, both ex-Berliners. They along with J.B. Neumann and Galka Scheyer left Germany because of the war emigrating to the United States where they promoted Klee's work and were instrumental in exposing it to a wider audience.
Klee, in his own way, makes use of colored
light as van Gogh and Seurat had done before
him. On a slightly differentiated ground he
places dots of varying color and intensity in
closely set rows and organizes this "field of
dots" by the use of intervals, through
relations between colors and planes, or by
graphic accents and symbols. Klee differs
from the Pointillists in that he does not
"split" his colors to achieve an effect of
greater luminosity nor does he arrange them
according to the law of "simultaneous contrasts,"
but works with rows of dots of the same color.
(W. Grohmann, 1954, op. cit., pp. 283-284)
Here, the mythical figure of queen Diana, the huntress or wood-spirit, materializes out of a network of intertwining lines set against a shimmering blue-green ground. The arrow along the top of the painting and the circular shape that she balances on at the bottom act as ciphers. In discussing this painting Grohmann writes:
The colored light here has the effect of a
"divinatory being," to quote a phrase by the
poet Novalis, and it is both a spiritual and
a physical phenomenon. The distinction
between "within" and "without" is no longer
valid, Diana is a fleeing, flying being, her
left foot touches a wheel; the figure is a
structure composed of fluttering forms, the
tiny head is of little importance. More
important is the arrow which denotes movement,
seeing, and apparently also hunting. The
dominant, nocturnal green is Diana's home,
she moves on it like a planet, for she is,
among other things, a moon goddess.
(W. Grohmann, Paul Klee, New York, 1956,
p. 20)
Previous owners of this painting were Curt Valentin and Karl Nierendorf, both ex-Berliners. They along with J.B. Neumann and Galka Scheyer left Germany because of the war emigrating to the United States where they promoted Klee's work and were instrumental in exposing it to a wider audience.