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Paul Klee, Red Balloon, 1922

This ethereal scene, half-abstract, half-representational, was made just one year before Paul Klee ventured into creating purely abstract compositions of colored rectangles. He was enjoying great success as a teacher at the Bauhaus during one of the most fertile periods in his career. With delicate pastel hues and a sensation of forms floating in space, Klee makes only the slightest references to doorways, walls, windows and rooftops in a scene that is simultaneously fantastic and intelligible.

In Red Balloon, Klee, a technical innovator, may have employed a special oil transfer drawing technique he developed in an effort to create the misty, atmospheric texture of his lithographs, in painting. He brushed a thinned oil paint onto one side of a piece of paper, then like making a carbon copy, he drew on the back of the painted sheet with a pen or stylus. The resulting lines have a feathered, smudged quality, as the artist stated, “saving transfer of my fundamental graphic talent into the domain of painting.” Devised during Klee’s Bauhaus years, the oil transfer method was used for watercolors and oil paintings that are among the artist’s most idiosyncratically playful images.

United overall by a consistently soft, dark line that was transferred from a preparatory drawing to the surface of this canvas, and by warm touches of red distributed throughout the composition, Red Balloon shows Klee in the midst of experimentation with his technical and compositional practices. Poised above this charming cityscape, a red balloon is detached from the rest of the composition, extending the overall visual sensation of drifting lightness and freedom of movement.

Red Balloon (Roter Ballon), 1922. Oil (and oil transfer drawing?) on chalk-primed gauze, mounted on board. 12 1/2 X 12 1/4 inches. 48.1172x524.