Rare Vintage 1955 Klee "Invention (With the Dovecote)" Offset Lithograph

A beautiful vintage offset lithograph of Invention (With the Dovecote) (1917) by Paul Klee. This lithograph is printed on one side only and hand tipped-in on a sheet of heavy paper.     

Information regarding the original painting can be found by lifting the plate. 

Image: 6.4" x 9.25" tipped in on heavy paper.

Paul Klee (1879-1940) was a Swiss-born German artist. His highly individual style was influenced by movements in art that included expressionism, cubism, and surrealism.

This Invention (as the term is used in music) stands halfway between the romantic water colors of 1917-19 and Klee's explorations of pure form during the same period. As he does so often, Klee here proceeds along two paths simultaneously, now emphasizing the playful and dream-like aspects, now stressing the purely formal order of the work. He lets it grow and watches as his pictorial adventures produce new realities and insights. There are several layers of consciousness involved in this procedure, resulting in a multiplicity of representational and conceptual dimensions. Since his formal structures always enter into a relationship with the known things of nature, we need not be surprised that these stripes, squares, triangles, circles, and tear-drop shapes suggest some farm buildings and a dovecote; but this happens only at the end, when the forms and colors have evoked a memory of these things in Klee's mind.

COLORED SHEET, WATER COLOR; 8¾ × 6¼"

Karl Gutbrod, Stuttgart, Germany

ThIs Invention (as the term is used in music) stands halfway between the romantic water colors of 1917-19 and Klee's explorations of pure form during the same period. As he does so often, Klee here proceeds along two paths simultaneously, now emphasizing the playful and dream-like aspects, now stressing the purely formal order of the work. He lets it grow and watches as his pictorial adventures produce new realities and insights. There are several layers of consciousness involved in this procedure, resulting in a multiplicity of representational and conceptual dimensions. Since his formal structures always enter into a relationship with the known things of nature, we need not be surprised that these stripes, squares, triangles, circles, and tear-drop shapes suggest some farm buildings and a dovecote; but this happens only at the end, when the forms and colors have evoked a memory of these things in Klee's mind.