Ancient Sound

By 1925 Klee had been building pictures out of coloured squares for a couple of years, and this is one of the finest. Small squares of red, gold, green and brown sit in a loose grid and seem to glow, because he laid them over a dark, almost black ground that makes each colour smoulder. The title he gave it, Ancient Sound, points to how he wanted it read. Klee was a trained violinist who played Bach and Mozart most of his life, and he thought about colour the way a musician thinks about a chord, several notes struck together into a single weight. There is no scene and no horizon here, only the balance of the squares against the dark. He painted it on cardboard, a little over a foot square.