Paul Klee

Galerie Der Sturm, Berlin (acquired directly from the artist in 1917) 

Galerie Wolfgang Ketterer, Munich, 5 June 1972, lot 812 

Galerie Tarica, Paris 

Private Collection, Switzerland (acquired from the above in the early 1970s) 

Sotheby's, London 24 June 1996, lot 44 (consigned by the above) 

Acquired at the above sale by the present owner

Berlin, Galerie Der Sturm, Paul Klee. Gösta Adrian-Nilsson. Gabrielle Münter, 1917, no. 20 

Dresden, Galerie Ernst Arnold, Expressionistische Ausstellung. Der Sturm, Expressionisten, Futuristen, Kubisten, 1919, no. 155 

Stuttgart, Kunstgebäude, Der Sturm und Üecht-Gruppe, II, Herbstschau Neuer Kunst, 1920 

Munich, Haus der Kunst, Elan Vital oder das Auge des Eros, 1994-95, no. 293, p. 557 (titled Miniatur)

Max Bill, "Paul Klee," Das Werk, vol. XXVII, no. 8, August 1940, p. 210, fig. 2, illustrated (titled Miniature, schwarz, gefasst)

Wolfgang Kersten, Paul Klee „Zerstörung, der Konstruktion zuliebe?“, Marburg, 1987, p. 50 

The Paul Klee Foundation, ed., Paul Klee: Catalogue Raisonné, vol. 2, London and New York, 2000, no. 1748, p. 401, illustrated

Miniatüre Oben und Unten Schwarz Gefasst reveals Klee’s extraordinary ability to make the page a self-contained universe. Created in 1917, during one of the most introspective and fertile phases of his career, the work encapsulates the moment when Klee reconciled drawing and color, line and plane, intuition and construction. From his modest military billet in Bavaria, he turned confinement into a form of spiritual architecture. Two black bands, drawn with deliberate steadiness, frame the image above and below, enclosing a field of translucent watercolor veils. Within these boundaries unfolds a delicate balance between freedom and order: transparent planes drift and breathe across the surface, animated by the musical rhythm of Klee’s line. The work’s intimate scale—what he himself called a Miniaturwelt (“miniature world”)—belies its compositional sophistication and the quiet radiance of its poetic abstraction.

The year 1917 marked a moment of transition and renewal. Conscripted into the German army in March 1916, Klee benefited from an unwritten decree that spared many young Munich artists from front-line service (see fig. 1). After two transfers, he was finally assigned to a desk job at the Royal Bavarian Flying Training School in Gersthofen near Augsburg in January 1917. There, in relative safety, he devoted himself once more to art.

Klee turned inward, maintaining distance from the surrounding catastrophe. In his diary he wrote:

“I have long had this war inside me. That is why, interiorly, it means nothing to me. And to work my way out of my ruins, I had to fly. And I flew. I remain in this ruined world only in memory, as one occasionally does in retrospect. Thus, I am ‘abstract with memories.'”

- Paul Klee

Immersed in his work and largely unencumbered by military duty, Klee participated in the war without confronting its brutality directly. While a few drawings encode its trauma through abstract symbolism, most of his 1917 works instead cultivate an inner stillness—order wrested from disorder. “My work progresses faster in these difficult times,” he wrote to his wife, “than it ever would in a quiet, humdrum existence” (Briefe an die Familie, vol. II, Cologne, 1979, p. 876). Rather than depict chaos, Miniatüre Oben und Unten Schwarz Gefasst transforms tension into poise: a composition that harmonizes the boundless fluidity of watercolor with the sober gravity of its black framing.

Out of this inward stillness emerged a new sense of pictorial balance—one that translated introspection into structure and feeling into form, a synthesis that drew on Klee’s dialogue with Cubism and the chromatic theories of Robert and Sonia Delaunay. During a trip to Paris in 1912, Klee saw works by Cézanne, Picasso, Braque, and Matisse, and met Robert Delaunay—an encounter that proved decisive. The Cubists’ analytic dissection of form impressed him, yet he regarded it as a fragile dialectic of destruction and construction. Writing to Alfred Kubin from Paris, he confessed that he had “come to appreciate the latest efforts, but [he] must develop what [was] personal” (Paul Klee, letter to Aldred Kubin, 19 May 1912 in Paul Klee Life and Work, Bern, 2012, p. 78). Klee thus transformed Cubism’s structural rigor into an interior rhythm rather than an imposed geometry.

From Delaunay, Klee absorbed the idea that color itself could become a generative principle. His 1912 German translation of Delaunay’s Sur la lumière for Der Sturm introduced the concept of simultaneous color contrast—what Apollinaire termed Orphism—to German readers. Delaunay wrote that “Nature is imbued with a rhythm that in its multiplicity cannot be constrained… a harmony of colors that divide and in one and the same process reunite to form a whole. This synchronic action is the one, true subject of painting” (Hajo Düchting, Paul Klee: Painting and Music, Munich, 2004, p. 24). For Klee, this idea matured into a guiding principle: within a defined structure, color can unfold as though it were pure sound, liberated from representation.

In the present work these influences coalesce. The title itself encapsulates Klee’s dialectical method: Oben und Unten Schwarz Gefasst (“Framed Black at Top and Bottom”). The two black bands of inked enclosure serve not merely as decorative borders but as rhythmic thresholds that contain and activate the luminous interior field. Within this intimate pictorial cosmos, Klee orchestrates a dialogue between transparency and opacity, gesture and geometry. The translucent pigments hover like atmospheric veils, suggesting both landscape and abstraction—a liminal state typical of his work from 1916–17, when he moved away from naturalism toward what he later termed das Bildnerische Denken (“pictorial thinking”).

Artist, architect and former pupil of Klee at the Bauhaus, Max Bill, described how Klee’s paintings of this period reveal “a tendency to create pictures according to painterly principles”. Klee became a leader of a new type of painting and “now created those free cubist works that, built from surfaces and shapes, became harmonious structures”. Writing about the present work, Bill describes an “idiosyncratic composition in planar watercolor technique: pink, yellow, light green contrast with dull blue and various browns. S-shapes repeat themselves in almost imperceptible ways, breaking up the horizontal structure of the pictorial composition and accentuating it with their endpoints” (Max Bill, “Paul Klee,” Das Werk, vol. XXVII, no. 8, 1940, p. 210). This description captures precisely the visual rhythm of Miniatüre Oben und Unten Schwarz Gefasst, where the alternation of hue and form gives the sheet its quiet musicality.

In these same years, Klee was developing his Schriftbilder—his “script pictures”—in which symbols, musical notation, and the movement of handwriting merge with drawing. This preoccupation with the written mark had deep roots. As early as 1912, influenced by both Expressionist and Cubist experiments, Klee began to assign script forms an independent aesthetic value. Whereas the Expressionists used text illustratively and the Cubists inserted lettering as a compositional device, Klee absorbed both tendencies, transforming script into a living graphic rhythm.

His interest in script deepened after 1916, when his wife Lily gave him a collection of Chinese poems. The calligraphic fluidity of that tradition resonated deeply with Klee’s own pursuit of a pictorial language that could move between meaning and form. In his diaries, Klee attributes significance to the line of writing: “in the context of graphics and painting, the display of calligraphic characteristics is a means and a component of artistic design […] The more capable our handwriting is to write, the more sensitive are the characters.” (Paul Klee, Das bildnerische Denken, 1956, p. 455). The black horizontal bands of Miniatüre Oben und Unten Schwarz Gefasst might thus be read as silent staves, across which linear motifs drift like written notes.

Although the present work contains no literal letters, its taut, rhythmic lines embody the same calligraphic sensibility that animates works such as Initiale (see fig. 4) and Einst dem Grau der Nacht enttaucht (see fig. 5), where script becomes an element of design rather than a bearer of semantic meaning. In this way, Klee extended handwriting into pictorial space—an idea that would later underpin his famous declaration: “A line is a dot that went for a walk” (Das Werk, 1940, p. 105).

Klee’s miniatures of this period are best understood as private meditations—intimate spaces where perception and construction fuse. Their small scale is not modesty but focus. Fellow artist Oskar Schlemmer wrote, “The great in the small—the universe in a single sheet” (Schlemmer quoted in Wolfgang Kersten, Zerstörung, der Konstruktion zuliebe, 1987, p. 61). Similar examples of small watercolours by Klee reveal a similar fusion of delicacy and formal logic (see fig. 6). Each miniature becomes a self-contained cosmos: its minute gestures encompassing an entire worldview.

This synthesis had its origins in Klee’s Tunisreise of 1914, undertaken with August Macke and Louis Moilliet. On this trip in Tunisia, the North African light revealed to him the autonomy of color as a structuring force. Writing at the time of his travels Klee observed, “color possesses me. I don’t have to pursue it. It will possess me always, I know it […] Color and I are one. I am a painter” (Paul Klee, Diaries, London 1964, p. 297). Although the chromatic exuberance of Tunis gave way to restraint during the war years, its spiritual resonance persisted. In the present miniature, the delicate harmonies of water-color evoke an interiorised echo of that Mediterranean revelation—a quiet meditation on structure and transcendence.

By 1917 Klee was also anticipating the formal clarity that would later define the Bauhaus. When he joined the school in 1921, his teaching codified the principles already latent here. The work’s diagrammatic scaffolding foreshadows the visual language of his Pädagogisches Skizzenbuch (1925), where he taught that every pictorial form originates in motion—an expansion and contraction of point and line within space. For Klee, “construction” was never measurement but metamorphosis.

Equally vital was his inheritance from Der Blaue Reiter, the spiritual and artistic circle that had shaped his pre-war identity. Wassily Kandinsky’s conviction that color possesses inner sound and Franz Marc’s search for metaphysical nature both found in Klee a quieter, introspective echo. His watercolors differ from Kandinsky’s radiant compositions in that their mysticism is domestic, achieved not through explosion but through concentration (see fig. 8). They share an affinity with August Macke’s late watercolors, where geometry and light become metaphors for inner order (see fig. 9).

Rooted in the ethos of Der Blaue Reiter—Klee had exhibited with Kandinsky, Marc, and Macke in 1912—his art by 1917 had turned inward, toward an abstraction both conceptual and poetic. Kandinsky’s influence remained palpable, yet Klee’s sensibility was distinct: less cosmic than microcosmic, less transcendental than immanent. Miniatüre Oben und Unten Schwarz Gefasst embodies that paradox: a vast metaphysical order compressed into a handful of pigment and line.

His compositional strategy in the present work also prefigures the structural modernism of later artists. The otherworldly explorations of Joan Miró, the kinetic line of Alexander Calder, and the luminous spatial blocks of Mark Rothko all echo Klee’s balance of spontaneity and structure. As Will Grohmann observed, “Klee is not an imitator of nature but her equal” (Will Grohmann, quoted in Das Werk, 1940, p. 52). The poetic sign-language Klee developed between 1916 and 1920 profoundly influenced Miró’s Surrealist vocabulary of the 1920s (see fig. 10).

The dual frame—on paper and in pigment—speaks finally to Klee’s fascination with the boundary as a site of tension. The black bands confine yet intensify, suggesting not enclosure but the containment of energy. This motif recurs throughout his later work, such as Scheidung Abends (see fig. 11), where rhythmic bars regulate chromatic flow. The seeds of that architectural thinking are already present here: the early miniature as blueprint for a lifelong investigation into how painting can articulate the unseen.

Klee’s mounting of the work—integral to his conception—further emphasizes its autonomy. He often prepared his mounts with inscriptions and numbering that transformed each sheet into an archival object. The black bands, echoed by the mount’s pale ground, create a dialogue between inner and outer boundaries, between pictorial and physical limits. For Klee, even the smallest watercolor could embody the totality of his artistic universe. Paper itself becomes a participant: its absorbent texture catches pigment in filigreed gradations, allowing color to breathe. The support becomes atmosphere; the sheet, a living membrane of perception.

In its restraint and luminosity, Miniatüre Oben und Unten Schwarz Gefasst encapsulates Klee’s enduring credo: “Art does not reproduce the visible; it makes visible.” (Das Werk, 1940, p. 76.) What it makes visible here is not an external scene but an inner architecture—a balance of order and freedom, melancholy and play. It is a miniature that seems to breathe: an image that, while silent, carries the resonance of a single sustained note.