Lot 311 Dα

The present sheet was created in the context of a great number of delicate reed-pen drawings in which Paul Klee occupied himself with the essence of the line. From a formal perspective, these works provide highly revealing evidence of his sustained interest in the multidimensionality of space.
From 1920 to 1930 Klee taught at the Bauhaus in Weimar and Dessau. Pioneering texts were published there in 1926 and 1927: these include Wassily Kandinsky's “Punkt und Linie zur Fläche” as well as Kazimir Malevich's “Die gegenstandslose Welt”. Klee's spatial investigations were aimed at a systematic consideration of space as a geometrical idea constructed and delimited through movement. While the intertwined triangles seem to indicate the sailing ships' movement, the ship at the right edge of the image appears "seemingly anchored fast" through the horizontal line and the downward-pointing arrow. Based on the fragile state of this anchorage, the poetically paraphrasing title can be understood as a suggestive commentary on the complex relationship between line and plane, which is characterised by constant variation in Klee's oeuvre. This delicate drawing is an outstanding example of his hybrid oeuvre situated between artistic practice and theory.