Paul Klee – Pflanzen-Analytisches (Vegetable-Analytic), 1932 | Giclée Print

A strip of canvas barely nineteen centimetres wide, read from the bottom up like a plant growing. On a pink ground Klee stacks small signs drawn in black: a five-sided leaf and a leaning white stalk at the foot, a white drop hanging from a dark red stem in a grey-green band, a white bowl with a crown-shaped bloom on a red square, and at the top a pale, round seed or moon. He painted it in 1932, while he taught at the Düsseldorf academy, in watercolour on a gesso ground laid on canvas.

Klee entered it in his own catalogue as 1932, 229 (V 9). The order of the signs is easy to lose: in 1976 an essay on Klee printed it upside down, and the museum's literature list still notes the slip.

What this is. A giclée reproduction printed with pigment inks from the museum's own photograph of the painting. It is not a painting and is not sold as one.

Scale
Original: 19 × 53.5–54 cm — watercolour on gesso ground on canvas, mounted on cardboard

• 40 × 50 cm / 15.7 × 19.7 in — reduced, 0.80× original. Image 16.31 × 43.60 cm.
• 50 × 70 cm / 19.7 × 27.6 in — original size, 1:1. Image 20.39 × 54.51 cm.

Why this size. The canvas is 53.5 cm high on the right and 54 cm on the left. The museum's photograph holds 308 dpi at that size, above the 300 dpi floor we print to, so the large sheet shows the picture at original size, with a wide white border on either side of the narrow strip. The image measures include the frayed threads at the edges, which run a little beyond the catalogued canvas; we print them as they are. The small sheet is set by its height and shows the picture at four fifths.

Not available in the United States. Klee died in 1940, so the painting is in the public domain in Switzerland, the European Union and the United Kingdom. In the United States a work first published after 1930 can stay protected for 95 years from publication, and we cannot rule that out for this one. We therefore do not ship this print to US addresses.

The print
Giclée on 200 gsm FSC-certified fine art paper, twelve pigment inks. White border, optical centre, with a small Museartis wordmark in the lower left margin. The colour of the museum's file is kept, not corrected. Unframed. Shipped rolled in a tube.

Provenance
Paul Klee (German, born in Switzerland, 1879–1940), Pflanzen-Analytisches (Vegetable-Analytic), 1932, watercolour on gesso ground on canvas on cardboard. Acquired directly from the artist in 1932 by a private collector.

Where this comes from
The museum file, the measurements, and what we are allowed to sell: the record for this sheet.