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Two small watercolours

Paul Klee

Two small watercolours

1916
Watercolour and pen and ink on two-parted french Ingres, mounted on cardboard
3 1/4 x 7 inches (8,2 x 17,7 cm)


Around 1916, Paul Klee began to mount selected works on paper on cardboard and to add the so-called border strip, a horizontal line below the title. Only by doing this did they become definitive, new works. In our case, the result even receives the highest distinction from the artist: „Sonderklasse“ (exceptional class) - marked by his own hand on the backing cardboard with "S Kl".
The work "Two Small Watercolours" is a wonderfully dense work, irritating like a complex jigsaw puzzle, full of figurative hints that can hardly be resolved. But it also evokes associations with a musical score in which the colours set the tones, in which motifs combine through dynamics and timbre to form a symphonic whole. Thus our impressive watercolour proves once again how large works of timeless charisma can be created in a small format.

Über Paul Klee

Born: 1879 in Münchenbuchsee
Died: 1940 in Muralto/Locarno

Paul Klee was born on 18 December 1879 in Münchenbuchsee near Bern. His father works as a music teacher and his mother is a singer.
Paul Klee attends the Städtische Literarschule in Bern until 1898. After graduating from high school he moves to Munich, where he studies at a private drawing school and at the Academy under Franz Stuck.
After a long study trip to Italy he returns to Bern in 1902. Here he produced graphic works of a socially and culturally critical nature. Klee developed a drawing style characterised by grotesque distortions of form.
In 1906 Klee moved to Munich and in the same year married his fiancée, the Munich pianist Lily Stumpf.
From 1911 onwards Klee compiled a handwritten catalogue of his artistic production. In Munich he meets the initiators of the "Blaue Reiter", Kandinsky and Marc. Klee's involvement with Cubism brought him closer to abstract pictorial design.
In 1914 Klee travels to Tunisia with August Macke and Louis Moilliet.
During the First World War Klee was called up as a reservist - even at the front he continued to draw and achieved his first sales successes with his small-format, poetically playful works.
In 1920 Walter Gropius appointed him as a teacher at the State Bauhaus in Weimar, which moved to Dessau after it closed in 1925.
Klee founds the "Blue Four" with Kandinsky, Lyonel Feininger and Jawlensky.
In 1930 Klee leaves the Bauhaus and becomes a professor at the Düsseldorf Art Academy.
In April 1933 he is suspended by the National Socialist director; in December he emigrates to Bern. In 1935 Klee falls seriously ill with an incurable form of scleroderma.
Until his death he created one of the most significant and important contributions to 20th century art, unparalleled in creative spirit, visionary and creative power - formally and intellectually Klee left his mark on generations of later artists.
He died on 29 June 1940 in the Viktoria spa hotel in Orselina near Locarno.