European Art

Provenance:

Berner collection, until 1952

Galerie Rosengart, Lucerne, 1952-1970

Martin Katz, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 1970

Rabbi and Mrs. Jay R. Brickman

Thence by descent to the current owner

Exhibited:

Stuttgart, Germany, Württemberg Art Association Stuttgart, Paul Klee, Late Work. Works on Paper. 1937-1939, October 25, 1990 - January 13, 1991 (also traveled to Emden Art Museum, February 10 - April 21, 1991), pp. 237; 529, no. 107, illus.

Literature:

The Paul Klee Foundation (ed.), Paul Klee. Catalogue raisonné, Volume 7, 1934-1938, Bern, 2003, p. 482, no. 7587, illus.

Lot note:

During the final years of his life, Paul Klee created a voluminous body of work, including Spreng-Holz (Explosive Wood), executed in 1938. Prior to this, in 1935, the artist was diagnosed with scleroderma, a rare skin disease that left him incapacitated. By 1937, Klee recovered enough to work while sitting at a large drawing table instead of painting in front of an easel. He completed a vast number of artworks, finishing 489 in 1938 alone, and over 1200 the following year. In a letter to his son Felix, the artist described his extraordinary creative output: “Productivity is accelerating in range and at a highly accelerated tempo; I can no longer entirely keep up with these children of mine. They run away with me. There is a certain adaptation taking place, in that drawings predominate. Twelve hundred items in 1939 is really something of a record performance” (Klee, quoted in F. Klee, Paul Klee: His Life and Work in Documents, New York, 1962, p. 72).

 Artworks created during this extremely productive period display Klee’s singular pictorial language of simplified, abstract shapes and marks. As a child, he had been a musical prodigy, but gave up the violin to study art in Munich in 1898. While there, Klee became influenced by the Jugendstil’s ideas of higher spiritual realities beyond the visible world, which resulted in the development of his own complex artistic theories. In his 1920 essay, “Creative Confession,” the artist compared the creation of a work of art to a journey through space and thereby time, concluding, “The pictorial work sprang from movement, it is itself fixed movement and it is grasped by movement (eye muscles)” (Klee, “Schöpferische Konfession,” Tribüne der Kunst und Zeit, Berlin, 1920, pp. 34-35).

 In Spreng-Holz, movement is generated through the undulating brown, black, and purple amorphous shapes. The artist has left the paper untouched by pigment to outline these shapes and placed a field of lavender that flows between the interstices. The lighter, pastel pigment makes the darker, free-form patches of color appear to float against the white of the paper. Through the use of multiple areas of colors, Klee has created structural rhythms that lead the eye continuously around the composition. With their irregular edges and painterly application, these forms also express the artist’s energetic, semi-automatic creativeness. The result captures Klee’s irrepressible spontaneity and vigor as he channeled his immense creativity near the end of his life.