Lot Essay
A photo-certificate from Dr. Josef Helfenstein and Dr. Michael Baumgartner of the Paul Klee Stiftung dated Bern, 6 March 1999 accompanies this gouache.
In the fall of 1911, Klee's friend Louis Moilliet (who would accompany Klee on his famous trip to Tunisia in 1914) introduced the young painter to August Macke and Wassily Kandinsky. Klee became acquainted soon after with Franz Marc and Alexej von Jawlensky, and affiliated himself with the Blaue Reiter group centered around Kandinsky in Munich.
The latest developments in painting coming out of Paris had a profound impact on the Blaue Reiter artists, as they did elsewhere in Germany, and these arrived in three successive waves. The first, around 1906-1908, was the expressionist influence of Gauguin and van Gogh, as transmitted via Matisse and the Fauves. The free and expressive use of color encouraged German artists to move beyond the studied elegance of the Jugendstil and towards a more individual and spontaneous approach to subject and form. The second wave was that of Cubism, during 1910-1912, or more precisely the more color-oriented version of Cubism practiced by the Italian Futurists. The Cubist example inspired a more disciplined and constructive approach to form, and provided a means of analyzing reality from a perceptual standpoint. The final surge of influence was one that synthesized all that had gone before, the Orphism of Robert Delaunay, whose use of pure color within an increasingly abstract Cubist framework arrived at the threshold of non-representational painting.
Park stands witness to each aspect of these powerful influences as they directly affected Klee on the eve of the First World War. The use of flat areas of pure color recalls the work of Gauguin; indeed Park brings to mind the famous landscape painting Le Talisman, which Paul Srusier painted under Gauguin's supervision in Pont Aven in 1888. The flattened, interlocking forms show the influence of later Cubism. Finally, the pure, unmodulated color forms, organic in their origin but bordering on abstraction, show the direction that Klee had taken in response to the Orphist paintings of Delaunay, whose impact on his work would last well into the next decade and beyond.
In the fall of 1911, Klee's friend Louis Moilliet (who would accompany Klee on his famous trip to Tunisia in 1914) introduced the young painter to August Macke and Wassily Kandinsky. Klee became acquainted soon after with Franz Marc and Alexej von Jawlensky, and affiliated himself with the Blaue Reiter group centered around Kandinsky in Munich.
The latest developments in painting coming out of Paris had a profound impact on the Blaue Reiter artists, as they did elsewhere in Germany, and these arrived in three successive waves. The first, around 1906-1908, was the expressionist influence of Gauguin and van Gogh, as transmitted via Matisse and the Fauves. The free and expressive use of color encouraged German artists to move beyond the studied elegance of the Jugendstil and towards a more individual and spontaneous approach to subject and form. The second wave was that of Cubism, during 1910-1912, or more precisely the more color-oriented version of Cubism practiced by the Italian Futurists. The Cubist example inspired a more disciplined and constructive approach to form, and provided a means of analyzing reality from a perceptual standpoint. The final surge of influence was one that synthesized all that had gone before, the Orphism of Robert Delaunay, whose use of pure color within an increasingly abstract Cubist framework arrived at the threshold of non-representational painting.
Park stands witness to each aspect of these powerful influences as they directly affected Klee on the eve of the First World War. The use of flat areas of pure color recalls the work of Gauguin; indeed Park brings to mind the famous landscape painting Le Talisman, which Paul Srusier painted under Gauguin's supervision in Pont Aven in 1888. The flattened, interlocking forms show the influence of later Cubism. Finally, the pure, unmodulated color forms, organic in their origin but bordering on abstraction, show the direction that Klee had taken in response to the Orphist paintings of Delaunay, whose impact on his work would last well into the next decade and beyond.