Façade Brown-Green

By 1919 Klee was back in Munich after the war years, and things were suddenly going well for him. A dealer named Hans Goltz signed him to a three-year contract and began showing his work steadily, so a painter who had sold almost nothing was, in his late thirties, becoming known. This small oil turns a building front into a puzzle of interlocking rectangles in brown and green, with a few windows and the hint of a roofline still legible inside the pattern. It reads as a wall and as a flat mosaic at the same time. Klee liked to keep both readings alive, letting the façade stand up and settle into coloured shapes at once.