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Lot Essay
Irrende Seele (Wandering Soul) is one of a small group of watercolours painted in the autumn of 1929 in which Klee gives full voice to the innate lyricism that underlay his strong mystical vision. Conjuring a sense of a mysterious natural underworld in which strange amoeba-like creatures drift, float and intermingle, Irrende Seele seems to depict a 'microcosmos' in which spirit has taken on a physical form. A counterpart to Klee's contemporaneous experimentation with the depiction of the outward forms of nature (trees, leaves, and flowers for example) as physical manifestations of the powerful procreative and essentially spiritual forces that drive through them, Irrende Seele is a work that gives imaginative physical form to the inner being.
'I am a cosmic point of reference, not species,' Klee once famously declared. 'I cannot be understood in purely earthly terms. For I can live with the dead as with the unborn. Somewhat nearer to the heart of all Creation than is usual. But still far from being near enough' (Paul Klee, 1916, cited in W. Grohmann, Paul Klee, London, 1951, p. 182.)
Klee's friend and biographer, Will Grohmann wrote of Irrende Seele that it is part of a group of watercolours executed in 1929 in which the artist began to explore space, not as a physical phenomenon but as a 'mysterious' and 'inner' dimension. Citing a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke in relation to this work, Grohmann wrote; 'No matter how far Klee may travel from this earth, he never loses touch with human life and destiny, with spirits, souls, and demons. Perhaps he alludes here to the transience and evanescence of man's life: 'We merely drift past everything like a current of air' Rilke said. The space in these pictures is something like the 'inside space of the universe' of which Rilke spoke; the inner and outer events coincide' (W. Grohmann, op. cit., p. 283).
Moving, mysterious and charming, Irrende Seele is a deceptively powerful work that, like its sleeping, drifting figure, floating in a strange sea of misty and ambiguous fluid forms, articulates a dream-like state of cosmic wonder.
'I am a cosmic point of reference, not species,' Klee once famously declared. 'I cannot be understood in purely earthly terms. For I can live with the dead as with the unborn. Somewhat nearer to the heart of all Creation than is usual. But still far from being near enough' (Paul Klee, 1916, cited in W. Grohmann, Paul Klee, London, 1951, p. 182.)
Klee's friend and biographer, Will Grohmann wrote of Irrende Seele that it is part of a group of watercolours executed in 1929 in which the artist began to explore space, not as a physical phenomenon but as a 'mysterious' and 'inner' dimension. Citing a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke in relation to this work, Grohmann wrote; 'No matter how far Klee may travel from this earth, he never loses touch with human life and destiny, with spirits, souls, and demons. Perhaps he alludes here to the transience and evanescence of man's life: 'We merely drift past everything like a current of air' Rilke said. The space in these pictures is something like the 'inside space of the universe' of which Rilke spoke; the inner and outer events coincide' (W. Grohmann, op. cit., p. 283).
Moving, mysterious and charming, Irrende Seele is a deceptively powerful work that, like its sleeping, drifting figure, floating in a strange sea of misty and ambiguous fluid forms, articulates a dream-like state of cosmic wonder.