Ad marginem

The Latin title means 'to the margin', and that is exactly where Klee put everything alive. Plants sprout inward from all four sides, a bird prowls along the top edge, small creatures multiply in the corners, and among them drift four loose letters, r, u, l and v. The centre most painters reserve for their subject stays almost empty here, held only by a red sphere that hangs like a low sun. Klee had travelled through Egypt in the winter of 1928, and the fierce light and the tangle of growing things stayed with him. By pushing his focal points out to the edges he quietly undoes the old one-point perspective, where a single vanishing point pulls the eye to the middle. He dated the small watercolour 1930, then kept it by him and reworked it a few years later.