| Villa R | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Artist | Paul Klee |
| Year | 1919 |
| Medium | oil on wooden panel |
| Dimensions | 26.5 cm× 22.4 cm(10.4 in× 8.8 in) |
| Location | Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel |
Villa R is an oil-on-carton painting from 1919 by the Swiss-born German artist Paul Klee. [1]
| Villa R | |
|---|---|
| | |
| Artist | Paul Klee |
| Year | 1919 |
| Medium | oil on wooden panel |
| Dimensions | 26.5 cm× 22.4 cm(10.4 in× 8.8 in) |
| Location | Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel |
Villa R is an oil-on-carton painting from 1919 by the Swiss-born German artist Paul Klee. [1]
The work depicts a white villa standing beside a red road winding into the mountains beyond. [2] A full moon is shining yellow overhead. [2] In the foreground is a large capital letter R which appears to be a part of the landscape. The red road forms a diagonal across the painting and a row of green shapes, including the green letter R, form a second intersecting diagonal. The villa is positioned at the intersection.
The significance of the letter R is not revealed in the painting's title, but is believed to stand for Rosa. Klee had seen the Villa Rosa in the early 1900s on his travels through Italy, accompanied by Goethe's travel diary Italian Journey. [3]
In 1939 the painting was confiscated from an art gallery in Frankfurt-am-Main by the Nazis as "degenerate art" and sent with other confiscated works in the Degenerate Art auction by the Fischer gallery in the Grand Hotel National in Lucerne, Switzerland. There it was sold to its current owners, the Kunstmuseum Basel. [4]
Paul Klee was a Swiss-born German artist. His highly individual style was influenced by movements in art that included expressionism, cubism, and surrealism. Klee was a natural draftsman who experimented with and eventually deeply explored color theory, writing about it extensively; his lectures Writings on Form and Design Theory, published in English as the Paul Klee Notebooks, are held to be as important for modern art as Leonardo da Vinci's A Treatise on Painting was for the Renaissance. He and his colleague, Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, both taught at the Bauhaus school of art, design and architecture in Germany. His works reflect his dry humor and his sometimes childlike perspective, his personal moods and beliefs, and his musicality.
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Media related to Villa R by Paul Klee at Wikimedia Commons