erstes Haus einer Siedelung

When Klee painted this in 1926 he had just moved to Dessau, where the Bauhaus, the art and design school he taught at, had built itself a brand-new home. He and his wife lived in one half of a crisp white house designed by the architect Walter Gropius, with the painter Kandinsky and his wife in the other. New settlements of flat-roofed modern houses were going up across Germany in exactly those years, meant to be clean, cheap and rational. Klee gave this watercolour a deadpan title, the first house of a settlement, then drew something closer to a child's building block than an architect's plan: a single small structure sitting alone on its coloured ground before the rest of the street has arrived.