Paul Klee - la belle jardinière, 1939

Zentrum Paul Klee EN

The picture «la belle jardinière», also known as «a bourgeois ghost», is a staging of surreal amusement. The schematic figure made up of red and blue lines, ironically titled by Paul Klee, the beautiful gardener in crinoline, holds in her raised left hand a bunch of flowers.The bourgeois ghost appears as a magic shining phantom, which avoids every attempt at interpretation. The lines, which give the ghost its form, appear like fluorescent red and blue light tubes, whose coloured light shines on the brownish ground. The brown background is completely structured with lively drawings, amongst them stencil drawings.Klee achieved with the contrast of the full, intensely coloured lines of the «belle jardinière» and the brightly coloured background, a pronounced spatial effect with colour. The colours shine fluorescently over the irregularly white grounded jute material.Klee developed this figure on the basis of his pencil drawing «With flowers», and raised the flower woman with only a few strokes into an uncanny gardener. The simplicity in the use of sculptural means is also in the late works always an expression of the greatest creative concentration. The beautiful gardener appears as a ghost of the bourgeois. Perhaps the title contains a side reference to the art appreciation of the National Socialists, who idealised the artistic concept of the 19th century for ideological reasons and contrasted it with the modern art they defamed as degenerate.