Paul Klee
Opened, 1933
Watercolor, pen and pencil on primed muslin on plywood, 40,5 x 55 cm
Private collection, Switzerland, Held at the Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern
Paul Klee simply called this work “Opened.” He painted it using a mixed-media technique of watercolour, pen, and paper on a delicate textile support glued to wood. All of the planes have a texture reminiscent of plaster on a wall. Klee depicts a landscape with two mountains and a full moon at the top left. Irregular rectangular planes “grow” out of the mountains, nested together like the pages of an open book, a fanfold, or an expandable folding screen. The colours of these planes and the bright blue frame, their alternation between light and dark, increase the sense of depth: certain colours appear closer than others.
“When I learned to understand the monuments of architecture in Italy, I immediately won a significant insight. Although these structures serve practical purposes, they express the principle of form more purely than other works of art. The easily recognizable arrangement of their form, the exact nature of their organism can be rendered with far greater precision than any head, nude, or compositional study.”