Rose Garden

In 1920 Klee was still living in Munich, and late that year Walter Gropius invited him to teach at the new Bauhaus in Weimar. This picture belongs to the last months before he went. It is built in layers, almost like a page of music. Narrow red rectangles, each edged with a fine black line, are stacked into horizontal bands, little pavilions with pointed roofs stand among them, and roses on straight stems lift their round, spiralling heads out of the rows like notes on a stave. In his later teaching notes Klee wrote of a bar structure as the rhythm that articulates a landscape. The Lenbachhaus counts this as the most important of the pictures in which he fused grown and built forms around 1920. Like many of his early works, he trimmed the sheet after it was finished, until it showed exactly the section he wanted.