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Ghost Chamber with the Tall Door (New Version)

Paul Klee German, born Switzerland
1925
Not on view
In the early 1920s, Klee painted a series of ghost chambers with eerie lines of perspective that reduce everything to skeletal transparency. As Klee rarely used perspective, he applied it in these works—always interiors—solely to show its delusive effects, a theory he relayed to his students in his Bauhaus lectures on the subject in November 1921. He demonstrates that perspective can be playful in this watercolor of an orange room cluttered with black wire utensils and with a tall violet door from which seemingly radiate the black perspectival lines.

Artwork Details

Object Information
  • Title: Ghost Chamber with the Tall Door (New Version)
  • Artist: Paul Klee (German (born Switzerland), Münchenbuchsee 1879–1940 Muralto-Locarno)
  • Date: 1925
  • Medium: Sprayed and brushed watercolor, and transferred printing ink on paper bordered with gouache and ink, mounted on cardboard
  • Dimensions: 24 × 16 5/8 in. (61 × 42.2 cm)
  • Classification: Drawings
  • Credit Line: The Berggruen Klee Collection, 1987
  • Object Number: 1987.455.16
  • Rights and Reproduction: © 2025 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
  • Curatorial Department: Modern and Contemporary Art

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