Description

Paul Klee’s artistic skills were diverse: he was a painter, printmaker, critic, and theoretician. He taught at the Bauhaus for most of the famed school’s existence; initially head of the bookbinding department, he also supervised the glass-painting workshop. His greatest influence, however, was as a lecturer for the basic design course on the theory of form in art. In lectures, Klee developed his ideas about the "polyphony" of painting, which was based on his interest in simultaneous sensational effects that could be created by various layered formal elements. He believed that this type of creative experimentation could "issue forth a transformed beholder of art" and thus pave the way for total abstraction.

Provenance

The artist [with Galerie Flechtheim, Düsseldorf and Berlin (Galerie Flechtheim, Düsseldorf verso label; Berlin 1929; price and shipping lists, 1930, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York, MoMA Exhs. Series Folder 4.2; Berlin 1931); with Mayor Gallery, London (Edinburgh 1934; London 1934; Douglas Cooper Papers, Getty Research Institute, Series 3: Records of the Mayor Gallery, London, 1933–1938, Box 40, Cooper/Mayor Scrapbook, 1933–35; letters from Paul Klee to Douglas Cooper, Mayor Gallery, Dec. 12, 1934, and Jan. 1935, Douglas Cooper Papers, Getty Research Institute, Series 3: Records of the Mayor Gallery, London, 1933–1938, Box 40, File 17; shipping documentation, Feb. 1, 1935, Kunsthalle Bern Archiv); and with Galerie Simon, Paris (documentation, Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, restricted)]; sold through Galerie Simon, Paris, to Nierendorf Gallery, New York, 1938 until 1941 [Nierendorf Gallery verso label, no. 306; letter from Karl Nierendorf, Nierendorf Gallery, New York, to Stendahl Art Galleries, Los Angeles, April 19, 1941, and attached list “14 Pictures by Klee, let to the Traveling Exhibition of the Museum of Modern Art,” Stendahl Art Galleries, Box 2, Folder 28, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; documentation, Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, restricted]. Harold M. (1900–1987) and Claire Florsheim (1903–1991), Highland Park, IL, by 1941 [Chicago 1941]; Ernest B. and Claire Zeisler (formerly Florsheim), Chicago, 1946; Claire Zeisler Trust; bequeathed to the Art Institute of Chicago, 1991.