KLEE, PAUL
1879 Münchenbuchsee–1940 Muralto/ Ticino

Title: Denkmäler am Hang.
Date: 1917.
Technique: Watercolour and pencil on Laid paper.
Mounting: Laid down on watercolour paper. 13 x 19cm. On backing card (28 x 22,5cm).
Notation: Signed lower right: Klee. Dated and inscribed below the watercolour paper left: 1917. 91.
Frame: Framed.



Provenance:
- - Berggruen & Cie, Paris

- The Hanover Gallery Ltd., London (from 1954)

- Lady Nika Hulton, London

- Galerie Beyeler, Basel

- Private collection, North Rhine-Westphalia


Exhibition:
- The Hanover Gallery, London 1954 (label)

- The Tate Gallery, London 1955

- City Art Gallery, York 1955

- The Arts Club, Chicago 1956

- Kunst- und Museumsverein Wuppertal, 1964

- Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam 1964

- Frankfurter Kunstverein, 1964

- Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich 1964

- Museum am Ostwall, Dortmund 1965

- Kunsthaus Zürich, 1967/68

- Galerie Beyeler, Basel 1973 (label)

- Galerie Karl Flinker, Paris 1974


Literature:
- Paul Klee Foundation/Kunstmuseum Bern (eds.): Paul Klee – Catalogue raisonné, Vol. 2 1913–1918, Bern 2000, cat. rais. no. 1775, ill.

- Exhib. cat. Paul Klee, The Hanover Gallery, London 1954, cat. no. 2

- Exhib. cat. Works by Paul Klee From the Collection of Mrs Edward Hulton, The Tate Gallery, London 1955/City Art Gallery, York 1955/The Arts Club, Chicago 1956, cat. no. 11

- Hulton, Nika: An Approach to Paul Klee, London 1956, p. 36, ill. (here titled: Landscape)

- Exhib. cat. The Collection of Sir Edward and Lady Hulton, London, Kunst- und Museumsverein Wuppertal, 1964/Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam 1964/Frankfurter Kunstverein, 1964, cat. no. 68, ill.

- Exhib. cat. The Sir Edward and Lady Hulton Collection, London, Kunsthaus Zürich, 1967/68, cat. no. 70, ill.

- Exhib. cat. Paul Klee – Kunst ist ein Schöpfungsgleichnis, Galerie Beyeler, Basel 1973, cat. no. 10

- Exhib. cat. Klee. 74 oeuvres de 1908 à 1940, Galerie Karl Flinker, Paris 1974, cat. no. 11



- Early work by the artist, created at the start of his breakthrough to becoming an established artist

- In 1917, he had his first solo exhibition at Herward Walden’s ‘Der Sturm’ gallery

- A watercolour of particular richness in colour and composition, in the artist’s customary small format

- Impressive provenance




Paul Klee During the First World War

When Paul Klee created the present watercolour in 1917, he found himself in a highly particular moment of life. The thirty-eight-year-old family man, trained as a graphic artist and having spent most of his life in Switzerland, had been conscripted for military service in 1916. Klee’s father was German, and his son therefore held the same nationality.

The war had already cost Klee two close artist friends: in 1916, Franz Marc, his fellow member of Der Blaue Reiter, and as early as September 1914, August Macke. Only in April of that same year, Klee had travelled to Tunisia together with Macke and Louis Moilliet. The impressions of those three weeks proved so enduring that Paul Klee definitively embraced colour and became fully convinced of his identity as a painter.

Yet in 1917, Klee was stationed in Gersthofen, Bavaria, serving as cashier-administrator at an aviation training school. It was a comparatively calm and safe post, affording him both time and opportunity to produce watercolours. Meanwhile, far away in Berlin, Klee’s artistic breakthrough was finally taking shape. Herwarth Walden had organized exhibitions of Klee’s watercolours at his gallery Der Sturm in both 1916 and spring 1917. Their success was such that the dealer urgently requested new works.

The small format would remain Klee’s preferred scale throughout his life. His infinite world required no monumental dimensions. In 1917, however, keeping the format small was also a matter of practicality.



Monuments on the Slope

In diary entry no. 1081, written in July 1917, Paul Klee noted:

“July. Thoughts at the open window of the cashier’s office. Everything transitory is only a metaphor. What we see is a proposal, a possibility, a makeshift. […] Light and shadow are the graphic world. Richer in phenomenon than a sunny day is the diffuse brightness of a light veil. A thin layer of mist shortly before the celestial body breaks through. Difficult to paint, because the moment is so fleeting […]”

(Paul Klee, quoted in Felix Klee (ed.), Diaries 1898–1918, Cologne, 1957, p. 321)

At first glance, the sheet appears as a wild interplay of differently sized forms in pastel tones filling the small composition: much yellow and rose-violet, with touches of blue. Grey-brown and green seem to serve as natural hues within the watercolour palette. The coloured elements press together, overlap, and interlock. At points of superimposition, narrow zones of blended colours emerge over the delicate pencil contours that remain visible in places. (Almost) no right angles can be seen; instead, rounded corners dominate.

Only at the upper edge of the image does the eye find firmer orientation: mountain ridges and jagged tree forms meet a narrow band of violet sky. The remaining forms appear not entirely stable, with most leaning slightly to the right. Only the green elements—presumably to be read as trees—stand upright.

Paul Klee’s visual art is never conceivable apart from his second great gift: musicality. The rhythm and dynamism of his colour distribution always function simultaneously as a kind of “melody” of tonal values.

Unlike most of Klee’s works on paper, the present sheet does not bear its title on the mounting card. For many works created between 1913 and 1918, he dispensed with subtitles altogether. Yet the designation Monuments on the Slope (Denkmäler am Hang) originates with the artist himself.

Particularly fascinating and visually rewarding is the combination of the pastel-toned watercolour with the artist-designed backing sheet. This “extension” forms an integral part of the work itself. Paul Klee numbered the composition as a whole. Here, the colour has been chosen in deeper, richer tones. Transparent browns shift painterly alongside red and yellow highlights, while linear elements appear in the lower right corner.

The contrast with this richly coloured “framing” emphasizes the deliberate flatness of the coloured forms. The backing sheet appears to support the watercolour proper; it grounds the delicate swaying of the Monuments on the Slope.

During the period in which the present watercolour was created, Paul Klee repeatedly experimented with extending the pictorial space itself, creating a transition, as it were, between imagination and reality. Sometimes he used monochrome cardboard, at others he enclosed the composition with opposing dark blocks, almost like brackets. On occasion—as in the present work—he artistically intervened in the backing sheet itself (cf. fig. 1).



A Work of the Finest Provenance

The catalogue raisonné records the first known owner of this watercolour as Galerie Berggruen & Cie. Its proprietor, the highly influential twentieth-century art dealer and collector Heinz Berggruen, once described his particularly profound relationship to Klee’s work, stating that Klee had exerted a decisive influence on his development as both collector and dealer (cf. Heinz Berggruen, Main Roads and Side Roads: Memoirs of an Art Dealer, Berlin, 1996, p. 9).

Beginning in 1954, the work passed to the prominent The Hanover Gallery in London, founded by Düsseldorf-born Erica Brausen. From there, the sheet entered the collection of Nica Hulton, becoming part of one of Britain’s most important collections of modern art. From the 1970s onward, it belonged to the holdings of Galerie Beyeler in Basel.

In relation to Paul Klee, one could scarcely imagine a more exquisite “who’s who” of former owners.

Alexandra Bresges-Jung



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