Paul Klee

A large number of pictures that use the theme of dance and theatre were created during the first years at the Bauhaus in Weimar. Inspired by the festivals there, we find in Klee’s pictorial motifs masquerades and fancy dress. In particular the magic lantern festival for the summer equinox, when students paraded through Weimar with large Chinese lanterns made by themselves, and the kite festival at the start of the new semester in October, when they flew their own fantastic kites, which seem to have inspired Klee artistically.

Rotating flying objects return in the Assyrian Game, where they have arranged themselves into a puzzling firmament of stars. It is a loose grouping of objects on a black grounding. The motifs are cut sharply out of the even black grounding and reveal the colorless, with delicately changing shading light-brown of the cardboard base. The objects appear like chess boards, opened or diagonally placed in the space beside chains of drops, above triangles, squares between turning wheels and crosses of rays. While pointed stars and arrows indicate the chess game for us, the heavenly bodies stand as mathematical symbols for a philosophy which is apparently not European. Object and expression correspond to the mental image of an exotic land without giving any indication of meaning. Klee merely imagines the objects as his idea of Assyria. From the shining effect of the bright colours against the dark night sky, Klee seems to have developed his own method of presentation, a type of „Lantern style“ which he uses several times in the years 1922 and 1923. The combination with black allows the colourful motifs to shine out from within.