Taking as its subject matter the compact architectural forms of a small village, Paul Klee’s Dorfartig, Häuser, 2 Rinder 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 Paul Klee: The Berggruen Klee Collection in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 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., The Diaries of Paul Klee, 1898-1918, London, 1964, p. 313). In Dorfartig, Häuser, 2 Rinder, 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.