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Lot Essay
‘For Klee, making an art of landscape was not…an exclusive category…He did not seek to challenge nature but to learn from its methods; he did not approach the external landscape as matter for interpretation but as a matrix of experience - landscape meant a certain scale, certain modes of colour, an atmosphere, a tracing of memories, a sense of community, a metaphor for even wider spaces.’ (W. Grohmann, Paul Klee: Drawings, London, 1960, p. 40).
Dating from 1937, the present sheet belongs to a pivotal moment in Klee’s late œuvre, following a period of severe physical limitation. Having been diagnosed in 1935 with scleroderma, the artist’s production was drastically curtailed, reaching a low point in 1936. However, by early 1937, the year in which Voralpine Landschaft was executed, a partial recovery enabled a renewed and intensive engagement with drawing and painting.
Previously known only from a black and white photograph, this vibrant work depicts an Alpine landscape articulated through Klee’s characteristic sinuous line. The restrained, yet luminous palette of complementary pastel tones, together with the simplified, almost calligraphic forms, transforms the motif into a poetic evocation rather than a descriptive view. The scene may recall the artist’s stays in Swiss mountain clinics during this period; however, the image resists specific topography, instead operating within the broader conceptual framework of landscape as an experiential and imaginative construct.
Notwithstanding the political tensions of the moment with Klee’s work having been publicly denounced in the Entartete Kunst exhibition and removed from German museum collections, the present composition reveals no direct engagement with these events. Rather, it affirms Klee's sustained inward focus, in which line, colour, and form coalesce into a language of resilience and renewed vitality. The ink drawing on the verso, depicting an animal form, further underscores the simultaneity of experimentation across media that characterises Klee’s late practice.
The animal study present on the verso of the work may be likened to a charcoal drawing titled Esel, aus der Hand fressend (‘Donkey, Eating out of the Hand’), of the same date, in the collection of the Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern (Inv. Z 1231). The Bern drawing is dated and numbered by the artist 1937.7 and therefore appears to have been executed shortly before the present sheet, which is recorded as 1937.11 in Klee’s manuscript Œuvre-Katalog.
Voralpine Landschaft also displays a significant early provenance, having formed part of a group of works handled in New York by the émigré dealers J. B. Neumann and Karl Nierendorf, key figures in the early reception of Klee in the United States. Its acquisition by Dr Eric Ponder, a distinguished American haematologist who assembled a small but choice collection of works by Klee, further situates the present work within the formative history of Klee’s enduring global reputation and admiration.
Dating from 1937, the present sheet belongs to a pivotal moment in Klee’s late œuvre, following a period of severe physical limitation. Having been diagnosed in 1935 with scleroderma, the artist’s production was drastically curtailed, reaching a low point in 1936. However, by early 1937, the year in which Voralpine Landschaft was executed, a partial recovery enabled a renewed and intensive engagement with drawing and painting.
Previously known only from a black and white photograph, this vibrant work depicts an Alpine landscape articulated through Klee’s characteristic sinuous line. The restrained, yet luminous palette of complementary pastel tones, together with the simplified, almost calligraphic forms, transforms the motif into a poetic evocation rather than a descriptive view. The scene may recall the artist’s stays in Swiss mountain clinics during this period; however, the image resists specific topography, instead operating within the broader conceptual framework of landscape as an experiential and imaginative construct.
Notwithstanding the political tensions of the moment with Klee’s work having been publicly denounced in the Entartete Kunst exhibition and removed from German museum collections, the present composition reveals no direct engagement with these events. Rather, it affirms Klee's sustained inward focus, in which line, colour, and form coalesce into a language of resilience and renewed vitality. The ink drawing on the verso, depicting an animal form, further underscores the simultaneity of experimentation across media that characterises Klee’s late practice.
The animal study present on the verso of the work may be likened to a charcoal drawing titled Esel, aus der Hand fressend (‘Donkey, Eating out of the Hand’), of the same date, in the collection of the Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern (Inv. Z 1231). The Bern drawing is dated and numbered by the artist 1937.7 and therefore appears to have been executed shortly before the present sheet, which is recorded as 1937.11 in Klee’s manuscript Œuvre-Katalog.
Voralpine Landschaft also displays a significant early provenance, having formed part of a group of works handled in New York by the émigré dealers J. B. Neumann and Karl Nierendorf, key figures in the early reception of Klee in the United States. Its acquisition by Dr Eric Ponder, a distinguished American haematologist who assembled a small but choice collection of works by Klee, further situates the present work within the formative history of Klee’s enduring global reputation and admiration.