Theatre pictures were a major feature of Klee's Bauhaus years in Weimar and Dessau and Bühnenlandschaft is the most important picture on this theme which serves to combine two of Klee's great passions - music and the theatre. The artist's son, Felix Klee, related that, "My father went to every performance given in the theatres of Weimar and Dessau. It was his main source of amusement." In addition, Klee constructed a puppet-theatre at home which gave him and Felix great pleasure and hours of imaginative occupation (Felix was later to choose the theatre as his profession). Klee also played the violin and often gave evening recitals to his friends. These interests resulted in a lifetime fascination with the mechanics of theatre and opera which was the inspiration for Bühnenlandschaft and numerous other pictures on this theme.

Will Grohmann wrote of this picture, "Bühnenlandschaft is not a landscape on the stage but a contributing factor, like the cast, the voices, and the instruments; in this picture, figures that allude to the play are just as few as in the bizarre Women's Pavilion or Home of the Opera-Bouffe. But whereas in the latter the graphic score is composed of S-shapes and windows, arches and stairs, in Wowen's Pavilion and Bühnenlandschaft the whole construction consists of colored, phosphorescent, transparent pieces of scenery, of curtains and fronds. Home of the Opera-Bouffe remains two- dimensional, while in Bühnenlandschaft the buildings, properties, and drapes swell out as in an enchanted forest and fix the musical action in a rococco frame. In all three cases Klee may well have thought of Mozart, in whose mind art and reality were related as they were in Klee. Home of the Opera-Bouffe suggests Cosi fan tutti; the other two, Don Giovanni for which he would have liked to design the sets." (Paul Klee, London, 1954, pp. 246-7).

Bühnenlandschaft fits into the constructive theories of the Bauhaus years as Klee sought for a pictorial synthesis to give form to his vivid artistic imagination. "At that time (1920s) Klee formed the Damme, paying strict attention to the internal constructive elements, while intuitively organising them into Harmoniserte Kampf. From this point it is only a short step to the creation of the pictorial vocabulary of the arches, staircases and branching, climbing or hanging forms of Bühnenlandschaft. This scheme mediates between the various colored surfaces composed of light and dark tones of brown with green and red highlights between the turbulent linear construction. The title Bühnenlandschaft characterises the composition as an imitation landscape-style creation, constructed out of props. The landscape, so to speak, appears here as scenery. One is missing the star, which for Klee forms part of the cosmos. The motif of the artistically-created landscape was already occupying him, from this moment he felt released from his earlier obligation to depict nature." (J. Glaesemer, op. cit., p. 325, trans. Christie's).

Bühnenlandschaft, with its aura of magic, communicates Klee's joyful fascination with the world of theatre and music. Furthermore, it is more sophisticated than many of the celebrated fugal pictures of the period. As Grohmann observes, "none of these [theatre] pictures are governed by any definite structural laws bound up with the concept of theatre; they adapt themselves rather to nearly all the permutations of Klee's pictorial form. That is where they differ from the magic squares and the fugal pictures; the factor they have in common with them is that they too, belong to a world that has a logic of its own." (Grohmann, op. cit., p. 245).

A photograph by Jürg Spiller shows the artist's studio at Kistlerweg 6, Berne, in 1946 with Bühnenlandschaft visible at the centre of the wall.

This work is recorded in the artist's own oeuvre catalogue as follows:
1922, 178
Bühnenlandschaft
grösseres Olbild, gerahmt
Pappendeckel

Sold with a photo-certificate from Josef Helfenstein and Stefan Frey of the Paul Klee Stiftung, Berne