Paul Klee (1879-1940)
Beulen Birne [Bulgy Pear], 1934
gouache on paper
8 ¼ x 8 ½ inches
Courtesy of Moeller Fine Art, New York

So much of the metaphysics that the influential Blue Rider group unabashedly promoted is wrapped up in Klee’s small but substantive still life of a single pear, invested with an illogical and artificial green surrounded in fields of graduated blues, warmed by red and purple, including cut strips of painted paper applied at the top and bottom edges that are right out of the Matisse playbook. Klee and Kandinsky eloquently taught in their writings the god-like role of the artist who creates a pear in his own “de-formed” way, leading away from the commonplace and prosaic correctness of realism to abstraction. In the seminal essay On Modern Art he wrote: “Today we reveal the reality that is behind visible things, thus expressing the belief that the visible world is merely an isolated case in relation to the universe and that there are many more other, latent realities.”

#NCMAblueperiod