Burggarten

Klee made this small castle-garden watercolour in 1919, the year things began to go his way. He was 39 and living in Munich, just out of wartime service, in a city still shaking from a revolution and its violent end that spring. That same year he took a large studio in a Munich palace and signed with the dealer Hans Goltz, who soon gave him the show that made his reputation. The garden here is assembled from tilted, translucent planes of colour, more a scaffolding of a garden than a view of one, with a few plant and architectural signs set into the grid. Watercolour let him work thin and fast, floating one wash over another. He kept it small, a sheet about 21 centimetres tall.