The Swiss born artist Paul Klee was a consummate watercolourist. He worked a lot in Germany, including a post teaching at the Bauhaus, and was a close friend of both Kandinsky and the less well-known artist Franz Marc in whose garden he painted this delicate image while he was staying with his friend who was on leave from the army. The composition here is divided into transparent, overlapping lozenges. Each roughly drawn triangular form would have had to dry before the next was applied. The wall of Marc’s house stands along the right hand edge; dark trees surround the red roof of a smaller, distant building; looming over everything is a violet mountain. Everything in this honeycombed structure is connected, both by shape and colour. The Föhn, by the way, is a warm dry wind that blows down from the Bavarian Alps. Note the year this was made – there’s no hint of the war engulfing Europe, only the gentle, geometrically conceived consolation of a modest garden.
