Überbrückung

Paul Klee was a Swiss-German painter, a Bauhaus teacher, and one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century. Überbrückung translates as "Bridging." It was painted in 1935, the year Klee's scleroderma first appeared, and a year after the Nazis fired him from his teaching post at the Düsseldorf Academy and forced him into exile in Bern. A landscape of overlapping angular planes — terracotta, ochre, brown, deep red, pink, blue, slate gray, and olive green — arranged so that the shapes interlock across the canvas like translucent sheets of colored paper. A blue sky sits at the upper left, a teal sky at the upper right, with brown peaks rising between them. The composition reads as both an abstracted mountain landscape and a flat geometric exercise. The paint is matte and slightly chalky, applied in layered washes that let the underdrawing show through.