The Kettledrum Organ

Paul Klee's Kettledrum Organ was painted during the artist's last year at the Bauhaus school in Dessau, where he taught as a "master of form." The school's foundation, in 1919 in Weimar, came out of a desire to form closer connections between theory and practice and the "fine" and "applied" arts, inspired in part by the earlier English Arts and Crafts movement. Klee had been invited to the school by architect and Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius and taught there from 1921 to 1931. Classes or workshops at the Bauhaus were taught by two masters-that "of form," a "fine" artist, and that "of handwork," a "craftsman."

During Klee's time at the Bauhaus, he was interested in spatial studies, and made many drawings in which he explored geometric relationships between objects. In this painting, the Cubist-inspired forms are accompanied by two drumsticks finished with black and red balls, a wind-up handle, and a cylinder-like shape. These forms identify the objects depicted as a kettledrum organ, an instrument related to a calliope in which compressed air is passed through whistles. An elfin figure at lower center, wearing a pointed red hat, is a humorous, if ambiguous, presence; it may represent either a jack-in-the-box figure, or the "soul" of the organ's music itself. Klee's father was a music teacher, and the artist was equally proficient in music and art.

This painting was confiscated from the Dessau museum in 1937 by the Nazis as an example of degenerate art, and published as having "Bolshevist" tendencies. It is an important example of early twentieth-century art produced by German, Swiss, and Austrian artists in the AMAM's collection, along with works by Kirchner, Kokoschka, Klimt, Nolde, Schmidt-Rottluff, and others.