Paul Klee
The House in the South, 1927
Chalk and watercolour on paper on cardboard, 24 x 30 cm
Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, Loan from a private collection
This work recently arrived at the Zentrum Paul Klee as a loan from a private collection. Around 1927, Klee was teaching at the Bauhaus in Dessau, where he was not very happy with his position. Design theory, the subject he taught, was becoming less important than architecture and product design. The main building and masters’ houses designed by Walter Gropius, the founder and director of the Bauhaus, reflect this new orientation. Klee’s “The House in the South” seems to take the opposite stance. During this period, his subjects were inspired by vacations in the south of France, and not by the Bauhaus. Klee paints the fields of colour loosely – not at the strict 90-degree angles of Bauhaus architecture. A house consisting of two planes appears unexpectedly and yet it fits right in. He has painted two windows on one of the planes, so that we immediately recognize it as a house with a gabled roof.