Untitled, ca. 1938

About the Work

"A hovering, silent, magical apparition in the crowd" is how Klee was described by a friend during the last years of the artist's life. He had been dismissed from his post as professor in Düsseldorf in 1933 after being denounced as a "cultural Bolshevik". He left Germany and returned to Bern, where, marked by illness, he created his mysterious late works. Klee confronts the viewer with black lines on reduced patches of colour as if they were secret graphic characters from a vanished culture. There is nothing to help us interpret them - no picture title to make it easier to decipher what we see.