Painted in encaustic—a laborious hot-wax technique—this picture demonstrates how Klee’s approach had been transformed by his decade at the Bauhaus. Abstract design—in the pseudo-architectural forms at right, for example—and material experiment—in the use of encaustic—here replace playful figuration as the artist’s leading concerns. Klee considered this composition one of his most successful; when the dealer and collector Galka Scheyer first wrote to the artist in hopes of purchasing it, his wife responded, “He is... just as much in love with ‘Possibilities at Sea’ as you are... He considers the painting a rare work, and there is no thought of a substitute for it.”
Details
- Artist Name: Paul Klee (Swiss, 1879-1940)
- Title: Possibilities at Sea
- Date: 1932
- Medium: Encaustic and sand on canvas
- Dimensions: 38-1/4 x 37-5/8 in. (97.2 x 95.6 cm)
- Credit Line: Norton Simon Museum, The Blue Four Galka Scheyer Collection
- Accession Number: P.1953.067
- Copyright: © Norton Simon Museum
Object Information
Galka Scheyer;
Pasadena Art Institute, Pasadena, 1953-1954;
Pasadena Art Museum, Pasadena,1954-1975;
Norton Simon Museum, 1975.
Paul Klee: a Retrospective Exhibition
- Pasadena, Pasadena Art Museum, 1967-01-01 to 1968-12-31
Paul Klee: Catalogue Raisonne, Volume 6, 1931-1933, color fig. 5722 p. 170, 210
Glaesemer, Jürgen, Paul Klee: Handzeichnungen II 1921-1936, pp. 225, 226, 228
Paul Klee, p. 30
Wünsche, Isabel, Galka E. Scheyer and the Blue Four: Correspondence 1924 - 1945, Plate XIII p. 340
Armitage, Merle, 5 Essays on Klee, p. 22
Franciscono, Marcel, Paul Klee: His Life and Work, pp. 248-249
Ed. Oliver Kase, Paul Klee: Construction of Mystery, Fig. 9 pp. 70-71
Barnett, Vivian Endicott, The Blue Four Collection at the Norton Simon Museum, no. 342 pp. 330-332
Henry, Sara Lynn, Pantheon, fig. 49 p. 159
Franciscono, Marcel, Arts Magazine, p. 124
Geelhaar, Christian, Paul Klee: Leben und Werk, pp. 72, 73, 74
The Blue Four. Feininger, Jawlensky, Kandinsky, and Klee in the New World, no. 141 pp. 225, 353
Geelhaar, Christian, Paul Klee and the Bauhaus, p. 150
The Blue Four Galka Scheyer Collection, Norton Simon Museum of Art at Pasadena, no. 285
Linda Henderson, Bruce Clark (eds.), From Energy to Information: Representation in Science and Technology, Art and Literature, fig. 9.3 p. 199
Rosenthal, Mark, Paul Klee and the Arrow, fig. 93 pp. 116-119, 296
Additional Artwork by Artist
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