Suburban Idyll

The German title, Gartenstadtidyll, points at a real dream of the age: the garden city, a planned suburb of small houses and green plots that reformers across Europe were building to get working families out of the crowded industrial centres. Klee painted his own idyll of one in 1926 in oil, over a chalky white ground, as a loose weave of little roofs, walls and garden patches, tidy and gently comic at once. He had been watching such estates take shape for years, and that same year the Bauhaus, where he taught, moved into a brand-new home in Dessau with its own modern housing estate nearby. His own version stays small, a panel under half a metre high, its rows of little houses painted in oil over a chalk-white ground.