Rare Vintage 1955 Klee "Place of Discovery" Offset Lithograph

A beautiful vintage offset lithograph of Place of Discovery (1927) 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: 7" x 9.75" 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.

Place of Discovery — IN DESSAU KLEE WENT through a long period of graphic "inventions" of the most varied kinds, which he also used in his water colors and panel pictures. That was the period of the parallel figurations (A Garden for Orpheus, 1926), of free, melodic, and intersecting lines. In 1927 Klee wrote that he had once again plunged into drawing with "barbarous savagery." But this graphic obsession admittedly resulted, by way of contrast, in an intensification of color. Klee refers to color as "the most irrational element in painting," and here too he goes beyond the controllable and predictable.

So long as everything is in order, he says, no tension can arise; art begins only "with arbitrary acts of overemphasis." He subjects color to his will, determines its relations to the other elements of the picture, to the objects and forms. Color quality is subordinated to the desired effect; opaque colors suggest closeness, transparent colors, distance.

Place of Discovery is one of several pictures treating the theme of archaeological excavations; Klee liked excavation sites and visited many of them in Italy and Sicily. After 1924 he went to the South every summer. By means of deeply shaded contours and lightly modeled planes, the essential elements are brought out in the picture (as they are brought out of the ground by archaeologists), and pushed forward. We see something like a quarry, ladders, a bridge, and the objects excavated near a barracks. The triangular moldings underline the archaic character of the scene; they are embedded in the same red as the unearthed objects. Opposed to the red is the blue of the river under the arches of the bridge, and the blue of the sky at the upper left. Everything else is warm, stony gray, as though covered by the dust from the excavations. The objects are deliberately made to evoke the disorder usual at archaeological sites.