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Lot Essay
Klee painted the present work in 1932, during the height of his experimentation with Divisionism. During this phase, he constructed his pictures out of mosaics of closely associated colors, stressing abstract investigation of light and polychromy over literal representation. A work of great imagination and fantasy, Landschaft UOL is said to depict the genesis of the world. According to Will Grohmann, Landschaft UOL ranks among "the chief pictures of the [Divisionist] group," along with such works as Ad Parnassum, Polyphony, and Diana (W. Grohmann, op. cit., pp. 284-285).
For Klee, the experimentation with Divisionism was immensely liberating. As Grohmann has written:
As soon as Klee, in the course of his explorations, discovered the structural pattern of Divisionism he found a flood of images which had been waiting for this very discovery; whose matrix was the new light-filled space itself. The pattern dose not restrict his means of expression but expands them; for with Klee, imagination is always in tune with observation. Thus he could paint light in his pictures both in terms of its own internal harmonies--its polyphony, as it were--and with the exactitude of a mathematician balancing the terms of an equation. (W. Grohmann, op. cit., p. 285)
For Klee, the experimentation with Divisionism was immensely liberating. As Grohmann has written:
As soon as Klee, in the course of his explorations, discovered the structural pattern of Divisionism he found a flood of images which had been waiting for this very discovery; whose matrix was the new light-filled space itself. The pattern dose not restrict his means of expression but expands them; for with Klee, imagination is always in tune with observation. Thus he could paint light in his pictures both in terms of its own internal harmonies--its polyphony, as it were--and with the exactitude of a mathematician balancing the terms of an equation. (W. Grohmann, op. cit., p. 285)