Kleine Mondlandschaft

Around 1920 or 1921, Paul Klee took a photograph of his studio in the eighteenth-century palais Suresnes in Munich, recording the space where his creativity flowed and his imaginative compositions came into being. The room is filled with the various objects, tools and accoutrements essential for the artist at work, from a jar packed with paint brushes beside a box of pigments, to a tall easel on which a pair of set-squares hang, a half-completed composition resting on its edge as if waiting for Klee to take his seat and return to the idea. Along one wall, a series of the artist’s most recent pictures are framed and hung together in a condensed display, their number and variety illustrating the feverish energy with which Klee was experimenting with painting in oil at this time. Among the works visible in the photograph is the whimsical and poetic composition Kleine Mondlandschaft, a dreamy, moonlit landscape in which Klee explores the contrast between man-made and natural forms, allowing verdant plant life to take centre stage within the scene.

This was a period in which Klee achieved his first real measure of fame and professional success. In October 1919, he had signed a three-year contract with the well-established avant-garde dealer Hans Goltz, an agreement that granted the artist a new degree of financial stability. An important retrospective of more than 350 of Klee’s paintings, drawings, and etchings opened at Goltz’s gallery the following spring, offering a comprehensive overview of the artist’s dynamic and varied oeuvre thus far, singling Klee out as one of the most important artistic voices in post-War Germany. Soon after, three monographs dedicated to the artist were published, and Klee’s own statement of his expressive aims appeared in the anthology Creative Credo. Finally, in autumn of 1920, he received an invitation from Walter Gropius to join the exciting community of artists, architects, craftsmen, and designers teaching at the newly founded Bauhaus in Weimar, ushering in a dynamic new chapter of his career. As a consequence, the paintings of 1920 appear to demonstrate a new degree of confidence, as Klee began to intensively develop a rich array of ideas and pictorial concepts of increasing complexity in his work.

Executed in a mixture of oil paint, pen and ink on board, Kleine Mondlandschaft depicts a quiet, rural scene at night. The sky is dominated by the glowing orb of the moon, illuminating the simple domestic dwelling in the distance, its conical shaped red roof and draped white curtains creating an almost toy-like impression. Surrounding the building is a profusion of plant life, from towering trees and rolling planes of grass, to bright flowers blooming in the foreground. Throughout his life, Klee displayed a particular affinity for nature and its many forms – he proved extremely sensitive to the timbre of various landscapes, often documenting his response to different terrains in his diary, and assembling a diverse collection of botanical materials which served as visual aids in his studies. He believed that by reaching into nature the artist was able to absorb impressions of the world, which could then be channelled into a subjective artistic vision that expressed the inherent truths of the universe. In the present work, the play of richly variegated, deep green tones highlight the energy and sense of growth within the landscape, while the sinuous, colourful forms of the flowers appear to echo the powerful presence of the moon above. By juxtaposing this wealth of natural forms against the geometric structure of the building, Klee examines the relationship between nature and spaces shaped and constructed by humans in the modern world.