Paul Klee (1879-1940)

Executed towards the end of Klee's years as a teacher, artist and theorist at the Bauhaus in Weimar and Dessau, where he worked from 1920 to 1931, Baubegin̄ im Garten, or “Beginning of Construction in the Garden,” is a manifestation of the artist's belief in the power of color and compositional arrangement to transport one's senses to a higher realm of being, and is an example of the beauty and lyricism that Klee extracted from the most simple geometrical lines and forms.
Nature in all its forms had long fascinated Klee and in many ways formed the foundation of his artistic practice. Anke Daemgen has observed that, “The fascination with processes of change and metamorphosis, growth and movement that characterized all of Klee’s work reached a climax in his artistic exploration of plants, gardens and landscapes. The number of works with botanical themes is exceeded only by representations of the human figure. In particular, gardens fashioned by human hands offered him examples of ordered nature that correspond to his search for ordered, rhythmically structured forms” (D. Scholz and C. Thomson, The Klee Universe, exh. cat., Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, 2008, p. 207).
In the present work, brightly colored geometric lines are laid over a decipherable garden landscape, uniting abstraction with naturalism. Referring to his landscape subjects from the late 1920s and early 1930s, Will Grohmann has written, “As a rule a stricter form is in evidence—a cubic space structure or a graphic-stylistic variation or a rhythmical sectioning. Even when, during a journey, Klee fills a whole notebook with drawings, they become forms that are 'busy throwing off ballast, in a certain way reactive things...' He transmutes natural phenomena into a schematic pattern” (Paul Klee, Stuttgart, 1954, pp. 252-253).