Paul Klee

Katherine S. Dreier, New York 
Galka E. Scheyer, Braunschweig, New York, San Francisco & Los Angeles (acquired by 1926)
Ida Bienert, Dresden & Munich
Moderne Galerie Otto Stangl, Munich
Berggruen et Cie., Paris 
Saidenberg Gallery, Inc., New York (acquired by 1955)
Selma & Israel Rosen, Baltimore (acquired from the above in December 1955)
Thence by descent to the present owners

New York, Saidenberg Gallery, Paul Klee, 1955, no. 12, illustrated in the catalogue
Baltimore, Baltimore Museum of Art, Modern Art for Baltimore, 1957
Waltham, Brandeis University, Paul Klee, 1960, no. 10
New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Pasadena, Pasadena Art Museum; San Francisco, San Francisco Museum of Art; Columbus, Columbus Gallery of Fine Arts; Cleveland, Cleveland Museum of Art; Kansas City, William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art; Baltimore, Baltimore Museum of Art; St. Louis, Washington University, Gallery of Art & Philadelphia, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Paul Klee 1879-1940, A Retrospective Exhibition, 1967-68, no. 52

Will Grohmann, Privatsammlungen neuer Kunst. Die Sammlung Ida Bienert Dresden, Potsdam, 1933, p. 22
Will Grohmann, Paul Klee, Stuttgart, 1954, pp. 79 & 192
Felix Klee, Paul Klee. Leben und Werk in Dokumenten, ausgewählt aus den nachgelassenen Aufzeichnungen und den unveröffentlichten Briefen, Zurich, 1960, p. 138
Selma & Israel Rosen (eds.), The Selma & Israel Rosen Collection, Baltimore, 1986, illustrated n.p.
The Paul Klee Foundation (ed.), Paul Klee, Catalogue raisonné, Bern, 1999, vol. III, no. 2968, illustrated p. 433

Executed on white laid paper, not laid down and fixed to the artist's mount with glue along the verso of the four edges. The artist's mount is laid down on board. The edges of the sheet are deckled. There are fine surface scratches inherent to the artist's technique visible in the ink of the black tree-like element at the centre of the composition and in the vocals of the singer. The mount is lightly time-stained and there is a faint window stain around the edges of the sheet. There is a small paper loss to the edge of the mount in the upper left corner and another in the upper right corner, not visible when framed. There are small spots of surface abrasion in each of the four corners of the mount and at the centre of each edge relating to an old mounting and also not visible when framed. This work is in very good overall condition.
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Music served as a driving source of inspiration throughout Klee’s career. When he became a professor at the Bauhaus in 1920, he was inspired to devise an approach for teaching young artists. With his extensive musical background—his parents were musicians and he himself a talented violinist—it is only logical that he turned to the language and terms of music as a means to define and encounter the visual arts.

Although Klee’s musical investigations were predominantly formal in nature, there are periodical moments in his oeuvre when these theoretical discussions are punctuated with rather more whimsical—and frequently comic or autobiographical—compositions, such as that of the present work. At the peak of the Weimar era, Klee attended the opera nearly every night, and the fantastical figure of the tenor singer in Der Heldentenor als Konzertsänger is likely inspired by one of the performances he saw there. Will Grohmann explained Klee’s deep attraction to the stage, writing, “It was not the music alone that attracted him; he had a highly developed sympathy for that world of the contradictory, the illogical, the abstract… Klee liked the detached quality of operatic action; its human characters represent elementary facts rather than psychological entities like Good and Evil, the Pure and the Demonic, Ugliness and Beauty. The symbolic content is shared among a number of figures, so that the general is embodied in the individual” (Will Grohmann, op. cit, 1954, p. 245-46).