Lot Essay
Klee first saw Delaunay's paintings at the 1911 Der Blaue Reiter exhibition in Munich. Klee visited Delaunay's studio in April, 1912, where he saw the new Fenêtres paintings, and that August he praised Delaunay's work in a review of the Moderne Bund exhibition in Zurich. An accomplished musician, Klee responded powerfully to the musical aspects of Delaunay's abstraction, which he likened to counterpoint or polyphony. In 1913 Klee published in the magazine Der Sturm a German translation of an essay Delaunay had sent him, which was still in manuscript, entitled Sur le lumière. In it Delaunay maintained that art must free itself from the object and from all descriptive and literary references. The purpose of painting was to give expression and form to the multi-fold rhythms and harmonies of color, and to imbue light with its own plastic independence.
Although the constructive use of disk-like forms recalls Delaunay, Gëoffneter Berg moves beyond the direct influence of Delaunay (as seen in Das Fenster, lot 181) and it signals a maturation of his vision within a non-objective style which is nevertheless entirely Orphic in its transcendent conception of reality. Klee would return to the theme of the mountain and the triangular or pyramidal form many times in later years. Perhaps inspired by the rock formations in a quarry (a theme which had also preoccupied Cézanne), Klee lays open this potent symbolic motif:
At this time Klee not only explored the visual aspect of the mountain as a triangle, but also delved into the heart of the structure itself. In Opened Mountain (1914) cones rotate around their hubs, turning perpendicularly as well as parallel to the picture plane. The artist has stripped movement to planes of force, comparable to the futurists' "lines of force." Klee called this painting Opened Mountain perhaps because it suggested to him the primal forces responsible for the mountain formation or the actual crystalline formation itself. To Klee art, besides being the interpretation of nature and of human emotion, is the very likeness of creation. (P. Selz, op. cit., p. 296)
Although the constructive use of disk-like forms recalls Delaunay, Gëoffneter Berg moves beyond the direct influence of Delaunay (as seen in Das Fenster, lot 181) and it signals a maturation of his vision within a non-objective style which is nevertheless entirely Orphic in its transcendent conception of reality. Klee would return to the theme of the mountain and the triangular or pyramidal form many times in later years. Perhaps inspired by the rock formations in a quarry (a theme which had also preoccupied Cézanne), Klee lays open this potent symbolic motif:
At this time Klee not only explored the visual aspect of the mountain as a triangle, but also delved into the heart of the structure itself. In Opened Mountain (1914) cones rotate around their hubs, turning perpendicularly as well as parallel to the picture plane. The artist has stripped movement to planes of force, comparable to the futurists' "lines of force." Klee called this painting Opened Mountain perhaps because it suggested to him the primal forces responsible for the mountain formation or the actual crystalline formation itself. To Klee art, besides being the interpretation of nature and of human emotion, is the very likeness of creation. (P. Selz, op. cit., p. 296)