Paul Klee
It is our third Sunday with Zentrum Paul Klee this month :) We hear from your emails and twitter mentions that you really like this month feature - we are really glad :)
The picture La belle jardinère, also known as A bourgeois ghost, is a staging of a surreal amusement. The schematic figure made up of red and blue lines, ironically titled by Paul Klee The beautiful gardener in crinoline, holds in her raised left hand a bunch of flowers. The bourgeois ghost appears as a magic shining phantom, which avoids every attempt at interpretation. The lines, which give the ghost its form, appear like fluorescent red and blue light tubes, whose coloured light shines on the brownish ground. The brown background is completely structured with lively drawings, amongst them stencil drawings.
Klee achieved with the contrast of the full, intensely coloured lines of The belle jardinière and the brightly coloured background, a pronounced spatial effect with colour. The colours shine fluorescently over the irregularly white grounded jute material. Klee developed this figure on the basis of his pencil drawing with flowers, and painted the flower woman with only a few strokes into an uncanny gardener. The simplicity in which he uses sculptural means in his late works is an expression of the greatest creative concentration. The beautiful gardener appears as a ghost of the bourgeois. Perhaps the title contains a side reference to the art appreciation of the National Socialists, who idealized the artistic concept of the 19th century for ideological reasons and contrasted it with the modern art they deemed as degenerate.