A Page from the Book of Towns

The title tells you how to read it: this is a page from a book of towns, as if Klee kept an illustrated catalogue of cities that were never built. The little settlement is drawn in thin nervous lines over soft bands of colour, houses and towers stacked and tilted in a way no surveyor would allow. Klee had a whole theory of how a line moves and how a plane fills with colour, and here he uses that grammar to invent a place from nothing. None of it matches anywhere real, which is the point of calling it one leaf from a much larger imaginary book.