Paul Klee

Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Paris

Israel Ber Neumann, Berlin & New York (until 1938)

Karl Nierendorf, Cologne, Berlin & New York (acquired by 1938)

Stanley Arnold, New York

Clifford Odets, Beverly Hills

Harold Diamond, New York

G. David Thompson, Pittsburgh (sold: Parke-Bernet Galleries, Inc., New York, The G. David Thompson Collection of Twentieth Century Paintings and Sculptures, March 23 - 24, 1966, lot 59)

Private Collection (acquired at the above sale)

La Boetie, New York

Acquired from the above

New York, Curt Valentin Gallery, Paul Klee, 1953, no. 28

New York, Saidenberg Gallery, Paul Klee. An Exhibition of Paintings and Drawings Commemorating the 75^th Anniversary of his Birth, 1954, no. 33

New York, The Pierpoint Morgan Library, New York Collects: Drawings and Watercolors 1900-1950, 1999, cat. no. 78, illustrated in color in the catalogue 

Paul Klee Stiftung, ed., Paul Klee, Catalogue Raisonné 1934-1938, Bern, 2000, vol. VII, no. 6549, illustrated p. 42

Panisch-Süsser Morgen, executed in 1932, possesses a lyrical quality unique to the works of Paul Klee and is characteristic of the bold technical innovations he developed in his later years. The artist’s experimental approach to painting sought to represent a synthesis of sound and color - thereby becoming ‘polyphonic’. In works such as Panisch-Süsser Morgen and Polyphonie, Klee achieved this by reviving the Neo-Impressionist practice of pointillism utilizing both the highly controlled dots of color as preferred by Seurat and larger mosaic-like affect invented by Signac in the 1900s. Discussing the emergence of the pointillist pictures in the early 1930s, Christine Hopfengart suggests: “Unlike Seurat, Klee’s concern with his pointillist experiments was not to reproduce the visible spectrum of color in the manner of an ‘improved camera’, but to artistically exploit the investigations of simultaneous and complementary contrasts that he had intensively pursued in the context of his teaching at the Bauhaus” (C. Hopfengart, Paul Klee. Life and Work, Bern, 2012, p. 236).

In Panisch-Süsser Morgen, Klee’s technique attained an illusory quality rarely found in other works from the period, as suggested by Dorothea Dietrich: “The brushstrokes twirl around as if pulled by a magnet and circumscribe a vaguely oval form that ends in two more defined circles in the upper right. The figure’s large head, wide-open eyes, and big mouth emerge only on a second viewing and almost immediately disappear again into the bold pattern. It is as if the viewer’s gaze had startled the creature into existence, ‘the pandean’ and ‘sweet’ of the title allude to the creature’s arousal but also implicate the viewer, who is surprised and delighted by the unexpected encounter” (New York Collects: Drawings and Watercolors 1900-1950, Op. cit., p. 186).