As architecture follows certain patterns, structures and rules, mostly in geometrical forms, the structure of a painting should do the same. At first glance the motif breaks down into many coloured planes. A particular pattern slowly appears, stripes seem to run through the painting horizontally and vertically. The primary colours red, yellow and blue accentuate the composition, to which the title alludes.

Klee painted the first version in 1914, after the beginning of the First World War and the sudden death of August Macke. Until its completion in 1921 Klee reworked the picture repeatedly.

The water colour was done at the beginning of 1918, at a time when Klee, as he noted in his diary, was reading a great many poems to escape from the depressing everyday existence of his wartime service. The origin of this poem is unknown. Probably it can even be attributed to Paul Klee.

The E is interpreted partly as an abbreviation for the Bavarian town of Ebenhausen, but in Klee’s work such a pictorial element need not necessarily assume a particular meaning. By incorporating individual letters Klee complements his pictorial trove of motifs: arrows, crescent moons, individual wheels and hieroglyphics. In this way Klee was trying to prevent a single unambiguous interpretation of his work, and instead challenging the viewer with an openness and diversity of meanings.

Let yourself get closer to our works of Paul Klee in an informative and entertaining way. The content of the podcasts offer listeners the classic work descriptions and background information on selected exhibits of Paul Klee.

The oil painting »Bildarchitectur rot gelb blau«, 1923, [Pictorial architecture red, yellow, blue] is one of the »square pictures« that Paul Klee worked on during his time at the Bauhaus in Weimar, and which he systematised in his Dessau Bauhaus period (1927-1930). More than ten years earlier, Klee had composed his first watercolours out of coloured geometric shapes, and he had later transferred the principle into poetic variations. The »square pictures« of the Bauhaus period are among the few completely non-representational compositions in Klee?s oeuvre, and they bear witness to his systematic work on the theory of colour.

In the summer of 1905, Klee started using a new medium: blackened sheets of glass, which he worked on with a needle. Using the resistance of this unusual medium, he discovered a new form of artistic expression - the scratched drawing. In his diary, he described his discovery thus: »The medium is no longer the black line, it is the white. The light energy on a midnight background fits very well with the expression "let there be light". And so I glide gently over into the new world of tonalities.«

Lady Demon was created in 1935 during a period of artistic helplessness and the search for new means of expression. Klee was caught in a creative crisis due to his exile in Berne, the unhealthy political developments in Germany and above all, also due to the constantly deteriorating state of his health. This work is a typical example of the transition phase to his late style which commenced after 1936. In falling back onto earlier subjects and forms which Klee by enlarging the scale and with the help of a new title filled with new content, he was on the way to a new more concentrated pictorial language.

In »der Graue und die Küste«, 1938, [The grey man and the coast], a line beginning at the top edge swings back and forth, dividing the painting into horizontal segments. The »grey man« appears to observe this course, which the title describes as a coast. We too look down on a landscape of fjords far below us, reading the blue surface as sea, the bow-shaped lines as boats, the horizontal bar with three dots in the middle of the painting as a ship.

During his time as a teacher at the Bauhaus, Paul Klee made an intense study of motion in the static, gravity-bound world and in that of the dynamic. The possibilities of movement open to birds and fish interested him particularly, as did their elements - air and water. Klee called water an »in-between realm«, in which the law of gravity does not apply and freedom of movement becomes possible. Kleeís collected works include more than sixty on the subject of fish, and about the same number of titles that contain the concept of water.