Carnival in the Snow (1923): Art, History and Details

Carnival in the Snow (1923) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Paul Klee (German, 1879–1940).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

In this watercolor, acrobats and circus jugglers emerge from a complex pattern of shapes and colors. Two jugglers share a face and torso. A member of Der Blaue Reiter group in Munich, Paul Klee believed that the elements of color and shape alone could carry connotations of emotions, moods, and subjective feelings. His method was to begin painting without a subject, only settling upon something that could be recognized after layering colored form upon colored form.

Object facts

• Title: Carnival in the Snow
• Date: 1923
• Creator attribution: Paul Klee (German, 1879–1940)
• Culture: Germany, 20th century
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: watercolor
• Dimensions: Sheet: 24 x 23.5 cm (9 7/16 x 9 1/4 in.); Secondary Support: 34.5 x 29.3 cm (13 9/16 x 11 9/16 in.)
• Collection: DR - German
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 1969.46

Collection credit

Contemporary Collection of The Cleveland Museum of Art

Further reading listed by the museum

• The Cleveland Museum of Art. Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art/1969. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1969.
• Cleveland Museum of Art. Art of the Twentieth Century in the Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland, OH: Dept. of Art History & Education, CMA, 1969.
• Kupka, Frank, Paul Klee, Larry Poons, Richard Hunt, and Edward B. Henning. “A Group of Twentieth-Century Works of Art Recently Acquired.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 57, no. 4 (April 1970): 107–126.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.