Wallflower

In April 1945, with the war in Europe weeks from its end, a gallery in Rio de Janeiro opened an Exhibition of Art Condemned by the Third Reich. It was organised by Miécio Askanasy, a bookseller and dealer who had fled the Gestapo and reached Brazil in 1939, and it was meant to rally the public there against Nazism. Number 43 in the catalogue was this watercolour.

Klee had made it in 1922, in Weimar. His German title, Mauerpflanze, names a plant growing on a wall. He drew it in pencil first, then worked in watercolour, laying thin washes one over another, and added lines in pen and brown ink.

Before Rio it had been shown in Munich in 1923, in an exhibition of ten years of new art at the gallery of Hans Goltz, Klee's dealer. After Rio it went to Pennsylvania, to Henry Clifford, curator of paintings at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and his wife, who lent it in 1957 to an exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts. In 1964 the museum bought it from the New York dealers Knoedler.