An artist who truly defined the 20th century, Paul Klee expanded the field of art marking in ways that reverberate into the present day. As an artist, teacher, writer and thinker, Klee led the way for modernism through some of the most epochal moments of history – from World War I to the Weimar Republic, from the golden years of the Bauhaus to the Nazi era and World War II. Working in drawing almost exclusively until 1914, Klee was a master of works on paper, his lively drawings and prints often adopting the experimental, vivified by his signature energetic and thin line. 

“There are two mountains where all is bright and clear: the mountain of the animals and the mountain of the gods. But between them lies the shadowy valley of humankind.”

—Paul Klee

Klee’s extensive artistic legacy includes countless representations of animals, and Elefantengruppe is prototypically whimsical composition of Klee’s that perfectly encapsulates his distinctive graphic style. Klee, who once famously declared that “a drawing is simply a line going for a walk”, embraced an intentionally child-like style of drawing in constructing his fantastical, symbolic worlds. In the present Mine de Plombe drawing, his line ‘goes for a walk’ to form a group of elephants, arranged by their height and positioned within a box-like plane. The two frontmost elephants have each of their four legs labeled by the artist in Arabic and Roman numerals as if in a child’s counting book. Notably, three of the four elephants are adorned with symbols on their foreheads – a bindi-like circle on the tallest, a Star of David on the middle animal, and a Sacred Heart on the one below. Klee, while raised Christian, was not particularly religious in his adult life and maintained a curiosity regarding various spiritualities; he was interested in Jewish mysticism and was known to have read the Hindu epic poem the Mahabharata.

Klee created Elefantengruppe in the midst of World War I; 1917 was the year the United States joined the Allied forces. However, none of the epoch’s suffering and destruction surfaces in the artist’s playful elephant image. This sense of detachment from is characteristic for Klee, who often kept an emotional distance to the harsh realities of the war. Instead, the elephants and their symbolic forehead markings reflect a spirit of coexistence and unity. It was also around this time that the artist, who had been an established member of the avant-garde group Der Blaue Reiter since 1911, became a cult figure of young art in Germany, aligning him with the revolutionary artists soon deemed “degenerate” by the Nazi regime.