(Münchenbuchsee near Bern 1879–1940 Muralto) “Villen”, signed Klee, titled, dated and numbered on the cardboard support 1912–68, watercolour, pen and ink on Japan paper, laid down on card by the artist, 14.2 x 25.8 cm, framed, (PS)

Photo certificate:
Dr. Michael Baumgartner, Dr. Christine Hopfengart, Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, 28.10.2011

Literature:
Paul Klee, Werkverzeichnis, vol. 1, 1883–1912, Bern 1958, p. 436, no. 779 (o. ill.) Paul-Klee Stiftung, Kunstmuseum Bern (eds)

Paul Klee met the Blue Rider artists in Munich in 1911 and reviewed their first exhibition at the Galerie Thannhauser. As a result of his close friendship with these painters, Klee took part in the second and last Blue Rider exhibition, showing 17 of his works in the art gallery Goltz. From this point onwards he was part of the German Avantgarde. From 1911 he recorded the sales of his paintings in his own special catalogue raisonné. He sold Villas, to Goltz in February 1920 (p. CR 779).
Paul Klee is a staunch advocate of “primitive” art. As he says, it is the most helpless children who offer us the most instructive art. For Klee these represent the very beginnings of art, for they are drawn from spontaneous and intuitive stimulus and not from observation (Die Alpen, 6, 1912, p. 302). In Villas, Paul Klee concentrated purely on shape, which he outlined and defined, first in lines and then later with coloured surfaces. The colours here are not applied deliberately, instead Klee appears “to be letting his fantasy run free on a piano of colours, with its dishes of watercolours in rows” (Paul Klee, Diary, March 1910). The colours vary in their brightness, and in this work the artist experimented with tonality, laying one shade over another. This watercolour illustrates particularly clearly the artist as one who is still searching, first noting in his diary in 1914 that “the colour has me, (….) the colour and I are one. I am a painter.” (Paul Klee Diary, 16 April 1914)