Paul Klee (1879-1940)

Mannequin is a bold, figurative depiction from the artist’s rich and productive late period. Executed in "Kleisterfarben," a mixture of colored pigment and glue that the artist favored throughout his last years, the present work composed of several bold strokes enclosing colored shapes, with the placement of two black dots and a short line in the upper semi-circular element which create the face of a mannequin. Klee had once, in 1920, described the creative process of drawing as "a certain fire, coming to life, [it] leaps up, runs through the hand, courses onto the paper, and flies back as a spark where it came from, thus completing the circle; back to the eye and on again" (quoted in C. Hopfengart and M. Baumgartner, Paul Klee, Life and Work, Bern, 2012, p. 314).
With its angular network of lines and burning ochre tones that fuse into pink-red shading within certain key elements, Klee skillfully uses color to conjure a sense of fleshy forms. These curves are joyously balanced in Mannequin, articulating his ability to bring to life his subject through the perfectly economical use of line he adopts in his later works.
The elemental and cyclical sense of creation also runs as a central theme throughout Klee’s late works. Mannequin depicts an imitation of the core elements of life, the human form, as a visual experience that has been built from a secret pictorial language of shapes. The title of the work extends this idea of imitation further, with the notion of the mannequin as object, mimicking the human form and withdrawing all life—nature—from it. When describing the sentiment of the artist Klee stated: "He [the artist] does not attach such intense importance to natural form as do so many realist critics, because, for him, these final forms are not the real stuff of the process of natural creation. For he places more value on the powers which do the forming than on the final forms themselves. [He says of the world] In its present shape it is not the only possible world … The deeper he looks … the more deeply he is impressed by the one essential image of creation itself, as Genesis, rather than by the image of nature, the finished product” (quoted in F. Spartshott, The Theory of the Arts, New Jersey, 1982, p. 81). Indeed, viewed within the context of this statement, Mannequin at once realizes it convincingly.