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拍品专文
The year 1928 found Paul Klee at the height of his powers as both artist and teacher, and buntbewegtes an der Lage gemessen belongs to a period of exceptional creative and intellectual concentration in the context of his career. He was then a central figure on the faculty of the celebrated Bauhaus Dessau, the revolutionary school of art, architecture and design founded by Walter Gropius which had become the defining cultural institution of the Weimar Republic. Here colleagues and students alike recognised in him a teacher of rare depth, one described by those who knew him as possessing 'profound truth and astounding knowledge' (M. Baumgartner, A. Hoberg and C. Hopfengart, eds., Klee and Kandinsky, Neighbors, Friends, Rivals, exh. cat., Lenbachhaus, Munich, 2015, p. 318). The intellectual rigour and creative ferment of the Bauhaus fed directly into Klee’s practice, giving him the space to interrogate the foundations of his own artistic thinking and to innovate in dynamic new formal directions.
Across a panoramic sheet, its horizontal sweep redolent of both musical score and landscape, Klee orchestrates an exhilarating collision of geometric and organic forms. Planes of rose-pink, cerulean, teal, ochre and purple press against each other in animated tension, while sweeping arcs, ellipses and angular passages of deep cobalt and acid yellow introduce a percussive rhythm to the work’s surface. The palette has a particular luminosity that connects the work to Klee’s visit to Egypt in 1928, a journey that intensified his engagement with saturated, light-filled colour. Threading through this chromatic field is a searching graphic line that defines the composition, here tracing rigid contours, there suggesting frantic movement, all while animating forms which hover tantalisingly between the representational and the abstract. As Christina Thomson has observed of his practice during this period, 'nothing is rigid and purely geometric; everything pulsates, swells, flows, hovers, or glows… Klee blurs the boundary between the built and the grown, the constructive and the organic' (quoted in The Klee Universe, exh. cat., Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, 2008, pp. 231-232). The result is a composition structured less like a conventional landscape than a visual translation of musical principles - tempo, register, harmonic progression - rendered in colour and form.
The title itself confirms that music may be the work's governing motif. buntbewegtes an der Lage gemessen explicitly employs the vocabulary of musical notation: bewegt is a standard German tempo marking which denotes animated or agitated movement, while Lage refers specifically to register or position, the placement of a note within the tonal range of an instrument or voice. Gemessen implies measurement and meter; bunt a colourful chromatic variety. Read in this light, the composition becomes a kind of visual score, with horizontal bands suggesting shifting registers, colour blocks evoking harmonic movement, and staccato rhythms translating musical tempo into spatial form. For Klee, a trained violinist who grew up in a highly musical household, the parallels between musical and pictorial construction were not incidental. At the Bauhaus, he even went so far as to use a diagrammatic rendering of Bach's Sonata no. 6 in G major as a teaching tool, demonstrating how the principles of musical composition could illuminate the structures of visual art. Indeed, Will Grohmann has written, 'In the same way that one reads musical scores and hears them with the inner ear, one can read Klee's pictures and see them with the inner eye – not arbitrarily, but in accordance with the "directions" he gives the eye' (Paul Klee, London, 1951, p. 162). In buntbewegtes an der Lage gemessen, those directions are encoded in the title itself, producing a work in which colourful motion and measured structure, polyphony and discipline, are held in dynamic visual equilibrium.
Across a panoramic sheet, its horizontal sweep redolent of both musical score and landscape, Klee orchestrates an exhilarating collision of geometric and organic forms. Planes of rose-pink, cerulean, teal, ochre and purple press against each other in animated tension, while sweeping arcs, ellipses and angular passages of deep cobalt and acid yellow introduce a percussive rhythm to the work’s surface. The palette has a particular luminosity that connects the work to Klee’s visit to Egypt in 1928, a journey that intensified his engagement with saturated, light-filled colour. Threading through this chromatic field is a searching graphic line that defines the composition, here tracing rigid contours, there suggesting frantic movement, all while animating forms which hover tantalisingly between the representational and the abstract. As Christina Thomson has observed of his practice during this period, 'nothing is rigid and purely geometric; everything pulsates, swells, flows, hovers, or glows… Klee blurs the boundary between the built and the grown, the constructive and the organic' (quoted in The Klee Universe, exh. cat., Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, 2008, pp. 231-232). The result is a composition structured less like a conventional landscape than a visual translation of musical principles - tempo, register, harmonic progression - rendered in colour and form.
The title itself confirms that music may be the work's governing motif. buntbewegtes an der Lage gemessen explicitly employs the vocabulary of musical notation: bewegt is a standard German tempo marking which denotes animated or agitated movement, while Lage refers specifically to register or position, the placement of a note within the tonal range of an instrument or voice. Gemessen implies measurement and meter; bunt a colourful chromatic variety. Read in this light, the composition becomes a kind of visual score, with horizontal bands suggesting shifting registers, colour blocks evoking harmonic movement, and staccato rhythms translating musical tempo into spatial form. For Klee, a trained violinist who grew up in a highly musical household, the parallels between musical and pictorial construction were not incidental. At the Bauhaus, he even went so far as to use a diagrammatic rendering of Bach's Sonata no. 6 in G major as a teaching tool, demonstrating how the principles of musical composition could illuminate the structures of visual art. Indeed, Will Grohmann has written, 'In the same way that one reads musical scores and hears them with the inner ear, one can read Klee's pictures and see them with the inner eye – not arbitrarily, but in accordance with the "directions" he gives the eye' (Paul Klee, London, 1951, p. 162). In buntbewegtes an der Lage gemessen, those directions are encoded in the title itself, producing a work in which colourful motion and measured structure, polyphony and discipline, are held in dynamic visual equilibrium.