Paul Klee, Häuser an der Kiesgrube (Houses near the Gravel Pit), 1913 Buy Art Prints Now
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Tom Gurney BSc (Hons) is an art history expert with over 20 years experience
Published on June 19, 2020 / Updated on September 27, 2026
Email: tomgurney1@gmail.com / Phone: +44 7429 011000

Houses near the Gravel Pit: a small landscape before Tunisia

Paul Klee made Häuser an der Kiesgrube (Houses near the Gravel Pit) in 1913. The work is indexed as 1913,43 in a multilingual Klee work crosswalk, and a university study identifies it as a watercolour on paper. The inherited page calls its foreground paint on canvas; the available object-specific research instead points to a small work on paper. The underlying museum catalogue record and Klee’s original entry still need direct inspection before publishing a precise support construction, dimensions or current holding institution as settled facts.[1][2]

The upper half gives the houses: pale walls, irregular dark roofs and small window marks that repeat without becoming a measured architectural survey. Below them, loosely joined greens, creams, pinks and yellow-browns spread across the picture. A horizontal band between building and foreground is easier to follow than any one path into the pit. The scene remains recognisable, yet Klee asks line and colour to do different jobs: black marks hold the houses just long enough for the broad lower colour fields to loosen their setting.[2]

A view divided into two kinds of mark

The roofs are drawn with interrupted, angular strokes. Dark dots and dashes act as windows, while the walls are light enough to merge with the paper’s pale passages. Some marks meet and form a building; others stop short, leaving the viewer to complete it. This economy of drawing explains why the picture can look deliberately simple without being careless. It is built from selected cues rather than a complete account of every façade.[2]

The lower area is harder to name. Its overlapping washes, broken touches and partly open patches convey uneven ground more strongly than identifiable blades of grass or stones. The title locates the houses at a gravel pit, but a reduced reproduction cannot tell us which coloured patch is gravel, which is vegetation or whether a particular sloping shape records an exact excavation edge. Calling the foreground “wind blowing in long grass,” as the older page did, invents an event that neither the image nor the sources establish.[1][2]

The watercolour’s small scale matters. One Greek-language university thesis gives 16.7 × 15.6 cm and lists Kunstmuseum Bern; Manfred Clemenz’s later German monograph is quoted elsewhere with 15.6 × 15.2 cm, paper mounted on cardboard and Zentrum Paul Klee. Those are not safely interchangeable measurements or institutional names. The current owner record has not been obtained, so the article does not select either set as definitive. Both sources do agree that this is a compact watercolour, not an oil or acrylic landscape on canvas.[2][3]

Colour before the famous 1914 journey

Klee’s 1913 work should not be treated merely as a failed preliminary to the Tunisian watercolours of 1914. The Zentrum Paul Klee describes 1913 as a year in which Klee experimented with coloured interpretations of reality, in contact with Kandinsky’s expressive landscapes. A separate museum account notes that Klee had begun working with coloured watercolours around 1910, using transparent layers alongside and over one another. Houses near the Gravel Pit belongs to that developing practice, when the coloured ground and the drawn subject could each remain visible.[4][5]

The same institution cautions against reading Klee’s celebrated 1914 diary declaration—“I am a painter”—as if no convincing colour work existed earlier. Its account of the pre-Tunisia watercolours observes that buildings and landscapes were already beginning to dissolve into colour fields. In this picture the upper architecture is still present, while the lower zone moves toward a more independent pattern of coloured patches. The transition is visible within the image rather than only in a before-and-after story about a single trip.[5][6]

A Greek-language thesis makes a more specific comparison. Looking back to Klee’s 1907 quarry image, it describes the 1913 houses in rows of blue and lilac, dull green tones and weak black contours. Its analysis places this picture beside the 1914 Tunisian watercolours as a point on Klee’s changing use of colour and abstraction. That account is useful for the contrast between the lightly structured houses and the coloured surroundings; it should not turn this particular gravel pit into a Tunisian site or identify individual motifs in the later works with this one.[2]

Landscape, architecture and reduction

The German title keeps two subjects together: houses and the gravel pit beside them. It does not identify a town or say that the view records a specific disaster. The houses stand across the top like a shallow row; the foreground spreads toward the viewer, with a patchwork of earth colours and green. There is no dependable basis for the old page’s prediction that the buildings might become wartime ruins. That reading projects the outbreak of war in 1914 back onto an image made in 1913 without an object-specific document from Klee.[1][2]

It is equally misleading to connect the houses to Klee’s Bauhaus teaching. He did not begin that teaching until 1921, years after this watercolour. The features here—short contours, small repeated window marks, detached colour areas—can be examined directly as early experiments without making the picture a retrospective product of a school he had not yet joined.[4][5]

Clemenz interprets the apparent childlike quality of Häuser an der Kiesgrube as deliberate reduction: a limited set of visual means can generate an autonomous image. That is a scholarly argument, not proof that Klee set out to imitate a child’s drawing. It accords with the visible economy of roofs, windows and ground, while leaving open how much was observed at the site and how much was recomposed on paper. The full monograph passage was located in a non-publisher digital copy; its precise wording and measurements should be checked against an authorised edition before they are treated as a final catalogue account.[3]

The picture’s interest lies in a small negotiation. Roofs and windows still let us recognise buildings. Watercolour washes prevent the foreground from settling into a conventional landscape map. Klee had found a way to keep a named place in view while letting patches and lines follow their own visual rhythm. Its value does not depend on a prophecy of the coming war or a later Bauhaus theory; the 1913 work can be read on its own terms.[1][2][4]

References

  1. PaulKlee.fr multilingual 1913 work index, entry 1913,43 (German, English and French title crosswalk): identifies Häuser an der Kiesgrube and its annual number. This is a secondary index, not the printed catalogue raisonné or Klee’s handwritten entry, View source.
  2. Erō Farmaka, master’s thesis, Cyprus University of Technology (Greek), illustrated works list and discussion around pp. 41–42: identifies a 1913 watercolour, offers a visual comparison of early quarry pictures and gives one set of dimensions and Bern location, View source.
  3. Manfred Clemenz, Der Mythos Paul Klee (German, 2016), p. 75: scholarly interpretation of deliberate reduction. The publisher page verifies the book; the object-specific passage was found in a separate digital transcription, not checked against the publisher’s printed page. Its dimensions and holding designation conflict with the Greek thesis and remain open, View source.
  4. Zentrum Paul Klee, Klee & Kandinsky exhibition press material (French, 2015), pp. 3–4: institutional account of Klee’s 1913 watercolour experiments and colour relations with Kandinsky; period context, not an object record for this work, View source.
  5. Zentrum Paul Klee, Paul Klee. Ich bin Maler (German): institutional account of his early watercolour technique and later Bauhaus chronology, View source.
  6. Zentrum Paul Klee, “Klee im Krieg” (German text on an Italian-language route): institutional caution that Klee’s pre-1914 watercolours already show accomplished colour and movement toward abstraction, View source.