Dorfartig, Häuser, 2 Rinder (Village-like, Houses, 2 Cattle)

Name: PAUL KLEE (1879-1940)
Brand: Dorfartig, Häuser, 2 Rinder (Village-like, Houses, 2 Cattle)
Price: 150000.00 GBP
Availability: SoldOut

Price Realised GBP 187,500

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PAUL KLEE (1879-1940)

Dorfartig, Häuser, 2 Rinder (Village-like, Houses, 2 Cattle)

Price Realised GBP 187,500

Details Lot Essay Related Articles More from

PAUL KLEE (1879-1940)
Dorfartig, Häuser, 2 Rinder (Village-like, Houses, 2 Cattle)
signed 'Klee' (lower left) and inscribed 'Dorf.' (lower centre); dated and inscribed '1917 13 D' (on the artist's mount)
watercolour on paper laid down on the artist's mount
image: 6⁷⁄₈ x 4¹⁄₂ in. (17.5 x 11.4 cm.)
artist's mount: 11³⁄₈ x 9 in. (28.9 x 22.8 cm.)
Executed in 1917

Private collection, Bern, until 1959.
with Galerie Rosengart, Lucerne, 1952-1962.
Wilhelm Stichweh, Hanover, by whom acquired in 1962, probably from the above.
Acquired from the above by the present owner.

O.K. Werckmeister, Versuche über Paul Klee, Frankfurt, 1981, note no. 185, p. 95.
O.K. Werckmeister, The Making of Paul Klee's Career 1914-1920, Chicago & London, 1989, note no. 42, p. 285.
W. Kersten & O. Okuda, Paul Klee: Im Zeichen der Teilung, Dusseldorf & Stuttgart, 1995, p. 332 (illustrated).
J. Anger, Modernism and the Gendering of Paul Klee, PhD dissertation, Brown University, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1997, notes no. 198 & 229, pp. 89 & 102.
The Paul Klee Foundation, ed., Paul Klee: Catalogue raisonné, vol. 2, 1913-1918, Bern, 1999, no. 1696, p. 373 (illustrated).

Stuttgart, Württembergischer Kunstverein, May 1917.
Munich, Galerie Neue Kunst Hans Goltz, Weihnachtsausstellung, December 1917, no. 107.
Dresden, Galerie Emil Richter, May 1918.

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Lot Essay

Taking as its subject matter the compact architectural forms of a small village, Paul Klee’s was created while the artist was stationed as a clerk at a military flying school in Gersthofen, during the First World War. There, as his son Felix recalled, Klee had wisely made himself indispensable to the airfield’s paymaster and, as a consequence, was allowed to ‘paint whenever he found a moment, storing his works in his desk drawer’ (Felix Klee, quoted in , New York, 1988, p. 33). At this time, the artist was simultaneously exploring the constructive principles of Cubism and the theories of Robert Delaunay, fusing them with his own sensitive appreciation of colour, forged during a revelatory journey to Tunisia before the war. The result was a new, simple but articulate, visual language which sought to represent Nature in abstract terms, without completely departing from the world of objective reality.

As he sought to explain in his diaries, this approach was determined by the circumstances of the time: ‘One deserts the here and now to transfer one’s activity into a realm of the yonder where total affirmation is possible. Abstraction... The more horrible this world (as today for instance), the more abstract our art, whereas a happy world brings forth an art of the here and now’ (P. Klee, Diary Entry 951, 1915, in F. Klee, ed., , , London, 1964, p. 313). In the dwellings and outbuildings that make up the small village dissolve into a shimmering mosaic of pure colour, as windows and walls, rooves and doorways are distilled down to their basic geometric shapes and then re-assembled in an intricate pattern of intersecting and overlapping colourful planes. In the middle of the composition, the two cattle of the title meander through the scene, a whimsical counterpoint to the concrete forms of the man-made structures that surround them, their presence perhaps a nod to the influence of Klee’s close friend, Franz Marc, who had perished in the Battle of Verdun in 1916.