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Ensayo del lote
Executed in 1934, Erwartender is a wonderfully eccentric example of Paul Klee’s inexhaustible imagination, in which the apparent whimsy of a childlike portrait conceals multitudes just beneath the work’s surface. With his startled yet votive eyes, unruly shock of hair and tightly-pursed lips, the figure seems caught in a moment of anxious anticipation; his expression hovers in a superposition between knowing assurance and unease. Klee’s generous, and yet oblique application of pastel, watercolor and gouache lends the face a spectral quality, while the figure’s largened head and abbreviated body recall the best of the fantastical cast of characters that populate the artist’s pictorial universe.
In the midst of a particularly consequential moment in his life and oeuvre, Klee created Erwartender shortly after being forcibly dismissed from his professorship at the Düsseldorf Academy in 1933. Returning to Bern with his wife Lily that December, the artist faced a more hermetic but increasingly uncertain existence in Switzerland. Importantly too, as Will Grohmann has remarked, the early years of the Bern period were “a new start” for Klee (W. Grohmann, Paul Klee, New York, 1955, p. 312). He embarked on a refreshed investigation of the human figure qua psyche, creating works rife with both complex existential premonitions and exuberant moments of levity. Alongside Erwartender, 1934 works like Dynamik eines Kopfes (Basil and Elise Goulandris Foundation, Athens) and Zauberspiegelbild (Art Institute of Chicago) exhibit Klee’s whimsical employ of the head and face as a field of endless expressive possibilities, allowing abstracted features to suggest variegated and sometimes conflicting psychological states. Such images kept with the artist’s longstanding fascination with the visual languages of childhood, caricature and the theater, inflected by a keen awareness of the darkening Lebenswelt he occupied. In this period, Klee seems to suggest that the playful and the unsettling are never entirely separate in his world and ours.
Against this background, Erwartender takes on a particular poignancy: a figure waiting, perhaps, for something that may never arrive. Only a year after the work’s execution, art historian and (later) director of the Kunstmuseum Basel, Georg Schmidt would specifically admire the sense of innocent faith imbued by the piece (G. Schmidt, "Paul Klee: Zur Ausstellung in der Kunsthandel, III. (Schluss.)" in National-Zeitung, no. 542, Basel, 22 November 1935, p. 7). In Erwartender, the figure’s fixed gaze and tentative posture create a disarming sense of vulnerability. The innocent faith Schmidt discerned lends a quietly hopeful quality to the figure’s anticipation, suggesting an openness to possibility even amid the uncertainties of Klee’s exile.
Perhaps the work’s most ingenious formal feature, however, is revealed when the sheet is turned over. On the verso, a vibrant composition of looping, intersecting lines and floating geometric forms unfolds over a mauve ground. The contours are nearly incised into the sheet with a blunt implement, possibly the back of his brush. Klee appears to have incorporated aspects of this underlying composition on the recto, heightening the makeshift embossment with pastel, and repurposing the forms as elements of Erwartender’s anatomy. This dialogue between the two sides offers a remarkably intimate glimpse into the artist’s working process: forms could be reconsidered, reinterpreted and endowed with entirely new meanings, while the boundary between abstraction and representation remained delightfully porous. Klee's celebrated conception of taking “an active line on a walk… a walk for a walk’s sake” seems particularly apt (S. Moholy-Nagy, trans., Paul Klee: Pedagogical Sketchbook, New York, 1953, p. 16). The lines seen in Erwartender have quite literally found their way to the other side of the paper. It is telling that from May to August 2026, Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern staged an exhibition dedicated to the significance and inventiveness of the artist’s double-sided compositions.
Following Klee’s death, Erwartender passed through the hands of Lily Klee and subsequently the Klee Gesellschaft, before being handled by two of modern art’s most influential dealers, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler and Curt Valentin. By 1951, it belonged to the celebrated American playwright and screenwriter Clifford Odets, whose own fascination with the complexities of human character makes him an especially sympathetic custodian of Klee’s peculiar protagonist. Odets would quickly lend the work to be exhibited by The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Thereafter, the piece entered the collections of G. David Thompson, and later, Jane and Alfred Friedlander in Cincinnati. Erwartender would remain in the Friedlanders’ private collection for over six decades. Shown in Basel as early as 1935 and in Paris in 1938, Erwartender has enjoyed a remarkable exhibition history. Its two intimately connected compositions encapsulate one of Klee’s greatest gifts: the ability to discover an entirely new world within the simplest of forms.
In the midst of a particularly consequential moment in his life and oeuvre, Klee created Erwartender shortly after being forcibly dismissed from his professorship at the Düsseldorf Academy in 1933. Returning to Bern with his wife Lily that December, the artist faced a more hermetic but increasingly uncertain existence in Switzerland. Importantly too, as Will Grohmann has remarked, the early years of the Bern period were “a new start” for Klee (W. Grohmann, Paul Klee, New York, 1955, p. 312). He embarked on a refreshed investigation of the human figure qua psyche, creating works rife with both complex existential premonitions and exuberant moments of levity. Alongside Erwartender, 1934 works like Dynamik eines Kopfes (Basil and Elise Goulandris Foundation, Athens) and Zauberspiegelbild (Art Institute of Chicago) exhibit Klee’s whimsical employ of the head and face as a field of endless expressive possibilities, allowing abstracted features to suggest variegated and sometimes conflicting psychological states. Such images kept with the artist’s longstanding fascination with the visual languages of childhood, caricature and the theater, inflected by a keen awareness of the darkening Lebenswelt he occupied. In this period, Klee seems to suggest that the playful and the unsettling are never entirely separate in his world and ours.
Against this background, Erwartender takes on a particular poignancy: a figure waiting, perhaps, for something that may never arrive. Only a year after the work’s execution, art historian and (later) director of the Kunstmuseum Basel, Georg Schmidt would specifically admire the sense of innocent faith imbued by the piece (G. Schmidt, "Paul Klee: Zur Ausstellung in der Kunsthandel, III. (Schluss.)" in National-Zeitung, no. 542, Basel, 22 November 1935, p. 7). In Erwartender, the figure’s fixed gaze and tentative posture create a disarming sense of vulnerability. The innocent faith Schmidt discerned lends a quietly hopeful quality to the figure’s anticipation, suggesting an openness to possibility even amid the uncertainties of Klee’s exile.
Perhaps the work’s most ingenious formal feature, however, is revealed when the sheet is turned over. On the verso, a vibrant composition of looping, intersecting lines and floating geometric forms unfolds over a mauve ground. The contours are nearly incised into the sheet with a blunt implement, possibly the back of his brush. Klee appears to have incorporated aspects of this underlying composition on the recto, heightening the makeshift embossment with pastel, and repurposing the forms as elements of Erwartender’s anatomy. This dialogue between the two sides offers a remarkably intimate glimpse into the artist’s working process: forms could be reconsidered, reinterpreted and endowed with entirely new meanings, while the boundary between abstraction and representation remained delightfully porous. Klee's celebrated conception of taking “an active line on a walk… a walk for a walk’s sake” seems particularly apt (S. Moholy-Nagy, trans., Paul Klee: Pedagogical Sketchbook, New York, 1953, p. 16). The lines seen in Erwartender have quite literally found their way to the other side of the paper. It is telling that from May to August 2026, Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern staged an exhibition dedicated to the significance and inventiveness of the artist’s double-sided compositions.
Following Klee’s death, Erwartender passed through the hands of Lily Klee and subsequently the Klee Gesellschaft, before being handled by two of modern art’s most influential dealers, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler and Curt Valentin. By 1951, it belonged to the celebrated American playwright and screenwriter Clifford Odets, whose own fascination with the complexities of human character makes him an especially sympathetic custodian of Klee’s peculiar protagonist. Odets would quickly lend the work to be exhibited by The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Thereafter, the piece entered the collections of G. David Thompson, and later, Jane and Alfred Friedlander in Cincinnati. Erwartender would remain in the Friedlanders’ private collection for over six decades. Shown in Basel as early as 1935 and in Paris in 1938, Erwartender has enjoyed a remarkable exhibition history. Its two intimately connected compositions encapsulate one of Klee’s greatest gifts: the ability to discover an entirely new world within the simplest of forms.