Fish Magic

Paul Klee taught at the Bauhaus and produced nearly ten thousand works, most of them small, many of them on paper. Size was never the point. He said a drawing was simply a line going for a walk, which sounds cute until you look at how much structure sits under the apparent play. A trip to Tunisia in 1914 settled his relationship with colour. He wrote afterwards that colour possessed him and that he and it were one. From then on the work builds from coloured squares, grids and washes with symbols floating across them. His teaching notes on form and design run to thousands of pages and are still read seriously. The Nazis declared him degenerate, he lost his post and returned to Switzerland, where scleroderma stiffened his hands. The late works are larger, heavier and drawn with thick black marks that look nothing like the early lightness.