PAUL KLEE (1879-1940)

In 1920, Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus art and design school in Weimar, Germany, invited the Swiss-German artist Paul Klee to join the faculty. For the next decade, Klee taught alongside some of the most important modern European artists of the twentieth century, including Wassily Kandinsky, László Moholy-Nagy and Lyonel Feininger. Klee’s courses ranged from textile weaving, metal working, glass painting, book binding, to figure drawing—though his class on design was particularly in demand. It was during this period that Klee painted the present cityscape, Ansteigender Stadt-Teil, which depicts an “up-and-coming” part of a city. Klee’s own artistic affinities towards shape and line, as well as the Bauhaus pedagogical emphasis on simplicity and functionality, are evident in this work.
Klee, by this point in his career, had achieved international recognition. The year before this work was painted, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Nationalgalerie in Berlin organized major exhibitions in celebration of the artist’s fiftieth birthday. Though Klee still experienced some professional frustration—the following year he would hand in his resignation from the Bauhaus school to become a professor at the Düsseldorf Academy—he remained confident in his artistic vision and skill.
The present work may have been loosely inspired by the Bauhaus-built apartment buildings in Dessau, where the school moved in 1926 and where Klee and his family briefly shared a duplex with Kandinsky and his wife Nina. Yet this noctural scene is abstract enough to render the structures totally anonymous and universal. As Christina Thomson wrote, "Klee causes real architectural forms to collide with invented or symbolic elements, mixing the familiar with the visionary and space with dream. The result is fantastical cities, castles in the air, and dream worlds that fuse into a singularly dynamic architectural cosmos” (The Klee Universe, exh. cat., Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, 2008, p. 231).