Three Houses, 1922. Paul Klee. Watercolor on paper, bordered with watercolor, mounted on cardboard. The Berggruen Klee Collection, 1984.
Not surprisingly, the works Klee painted during his tenure at the Bauhaus, from 1921 to 1931, often relate to the subjects of his courses. His so-called color-gradation pictures from 1921 to 1923 correspond to his preoccupation with color theory at that time. In this watercolor, he chose to work with what he called "false color pairs," that is, such secondary colors as green and orange, orange and violet, and violet and green. When mixed in equal parts, these pairs turn into a bluish gray.