Intoxication (Im Rausch) by Paul Klee is a poignant, complex work created in 1939, utilizing the artist’s characteristic method of combining pigmented paste on tracing paper mounted to a board support. This technique allowed for a distinctive visual texture, where the thickness of the paste contrasts with the delicacy and translucency of the tracing paper, blurring the traditional distinction between drawing and painting. Though classified primarily as a drawing, this piece reflects the experimental, materials-driven spirit Klee maintained even in the final years of his career.
The year 1939 marked a period of intense, almost feverish creative activity for Klee, who had been forced into exile in Bern, Switzerland, following his designation as a "degenerate artist" by the Nazi regime in Germany. Despite his physical removal from the German cultural sphere he helped define, the anxieties and psychological pressures of the era are often subtly reflected in his late output. Klee, a crucial figure in European modernism and the Bauhaus movement, often used titles like Intoxication to explore abstract interior psychological states rather than literal depictions.
This piece showcases the highly refined, distinctive late style Klee developed, characterized by simplified, often hieroglyphic or pictorial signs embedded within a structural framework. These abstracted forms suggest a narrative of elevated or disoriented consciousness implied by the title Im Rausch. The subtle application of color highlights the rhythmic linear elements, turning the surface into a sensitive map of emotional or musical notation.
As a significant example of Klee’s response to the tumultuous close of the 1930s, the work is held in the renowned collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. While this specific artwork remains protected, the extensive body of work created by the great German master earlier in his career now resides within the public domain, making high-quality art prints widely available for collectors and students of 20th-century abstraction.
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