Winter Day, Shortly before Noon

This painting goes back to Paul Klee’s early days at the Bauhaus. It was executed as an oil transfer drawing, a technique that Klee had developed in 1919 to meet the increasing demand for his pictures. This allowed him to record his image ideas as a drawing, and then, if desired, transfer them from a blackened piece of paper onto a painted ground. This explains the brittle quality of the lines Klee used for recording the lyrical landscape and architectural elements on the color swathes of the ground—like a children’s drawing. The previous year, Klee had created works on the theme of fate, which had occupied many artists after World War I. In Winter Day, Shortly before Noon, a cosmic catastrophe looms. A fiery celestial body appears low over the house: The arrow hand of the tower clock notes the time as shortly before 12 noon, the hour of doom. The motif of the arrow is something Klee used in his pictures until 1924 to indicate the direction of the action. It became an inevitable sign of fate and the symbol of magical power. But later, Klee was to state in his teaching: “[ . . . ] a symbol is not yet per se a pictorial design. This sign of an associative agreement must therefore be overcome: It has to work without the arrow.”