The 1920s marked a critical creative episode in Klee’s artistic career. In addition to a major retrospective held at the Galerie Hans Goltz in Munich in 1920, Klee was also appointed a member of the faculty of the legendary Bauhaus, where he taught from 1921 to 1931 alongside leading figures of the avant-garde including Wassily Kandinsky. During his time at the Bauhaus, Klee developed a deep mastery of his watercolor technique, in which he layered the medium in delicate shades emphasizing nuance between light and dark and a kaleidoscopic approach to color. In Orte, Klee distilled everyday items such as houses and faces into simplified geometric forms, rendered in negative space within bursts of rich jewel tones created in watercolor. The artist earned his first solo exhibition in the United States in 1924 at the Société Anonyme in New York, just two years prior to the execution of Orte in 1926.