Paul Klee

Like many parents, Paul Klee was a big fan of his son Felix’s art. Some of the child’s paintings were on sheets of paper that his father had already worked on the other side of. It is unclear whether Felix’s brightly painted watercolour Untitled (Good Luck, The Arrow) is the front or back.

A number of Klee’s double-sided works from between 1907 and 1915 have no clear front or back. Klee did not include these works in his catalogue raisonné and did not mount them on card.

One example is the sheet with a drawing by Klee on one side – Untitled (Five Soldiers Shooting) (circa 1915) – and a watercolour painting by his son Felix on the other.

An account of one particular incident illustrates Klee’s esteem for Felix’s art. His writer friend Alfons Rosenberg was sent on behalf of an embroidery workshop to collect a design from Klee. But instead, he was given a work by Felix! It was not until Rosenberg happened to turn the page over that he noticed Klee’s drawing of soldiers in the trenches, which the artist had sketched during the First World War.

The juxtaposition between the depiction of war on the one side and the optimistic inscription “Good luck” on the other imbues the sheet of paper with a multifaceted, arguably even ironic meaning.