Twittering Machine

Klee made this in 1922, a year into his teaching post at the Bauhaus in Weimar, the school then trying to marry art to the machine age. His answer to that idea is a little sardonic. A row of spindly birds sits on a wire, and the wire runs to a hand crank, as if their song were something you could grind out by turning a handle. He built it in delicate watercolour and ink, transferring the drawing onto paper rather than painting it boldly. The German state owned it by the 1930s, and in 1937 the Nazis pulled it into their Degenerate Art show as an example of everything they despised. Two years later they sold it abroad, and it eventually reached MoMA in New York.