Paul Klee

Paul Klee loved the river Aare by Berne above everything. Very early on he would retreat to the river, when he felt he had once again been misunderstood by his adult environment. Numerous sketches and drawings are proof of this intense preoccupation with the Aare landscape.

The Aare landscape is one of the earliest oil paintings of Klee at all. This five segment folding screen was a commission which Paul Klee accomplished during his summer holiday in Berne. At that time Klee was studying with Franz von Stuck at the MunichArt Academy. In the summer of 1900 he had come to Berne for three months to relax in the familiar surroundings. His sister Mathilde and his mother organized some commissions for him so that he could earn a little money. The folding screen was the commission for a lady friend of his mother’s. But his mother could not bear to part with the finished object so she bought it from her son and from then on it had its place in the living room of the Klee family.

Klee used up the whole summer working on the screen, not from enthusiasm, but because he could only reluctantly bring himself to complete the commission, which in his opinion was keeping him from his real artistic work. In a letter to his later wife Lily Stumpf he expressed himself disparagingly about this task, which he called the “indigestible spanish screens”. It displeased him that he had to orientate himself formally to a Jugendstil influenced aesthetic, which corresponded to the popular taste of the time and which he had also come to know at the Academy with Franz von Stuck. That Klee attributed no artistic value to this folding screen is shown by the fact that he neither signed nor later registered it in his Catalogue of Works.

Even if certain formal characteristics of Jugendstil are recognizable, the work still has its own artistic qualities which extend far beyond Jugendstil. The eye travels from different vantage points and varying perspectives under changing light conditions over the river landscape. For a classical Jugendstil screen, one single landscape view would have been spread over all five panels. It is important to note the compositional analogy between the two outer panels and the mirrored images of the 2nd and 4th panels. This manner of presentation no longer corresponds to the Jugendstil decorative pattern arrangement but to a more photographic view. Some years earlier Klee had become intensely occupied with the new medium of photography.

The intense nature experiences on the banks of the Aare were a stimulus for Klee’s lifelong pre-occupation with and analysis of the landscape theme. The dynamic element, which was symbolised by the movement of the water, particularly interested him.