Temple Gardens

Arches and blocky structures suggest a garden built from pure geometry, rendered in bands of orange, red, blue, and earthen tones that hint at sunlit walls and shaded passages. The composition reads as abstraction rather than a literal view, though the architectural forms remain recognizable as garden structures. Paul Klee made this piece in 1920 using gouache with traces of ink across three sheets of paper, mounted on paper and then on cardboard. It is held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, having entered the collection as part of the Berggruen Klee Collection. Klee, who lived from 1879 to 1940 and held German-Swiss citizenship, worked within the Bauhaus movement. One detail worth noticing is how the layered sheets of paper give the surface a subtle physical depth, reinforcing the sense of built, overlapping space within the stylized garden scene.