ARA. “Cooling in a Garden of the Torrid Zone”

The odd word at the front of the title, ARA, is the Latin name for the macaws, the big tropical parrots. Klee liked giving his creatures mock-scientific labels, as if his invented world came with its own field guide. Here a garden in what the title calls the torrid zone, the hot belt of the tropics, is drawn in fine pen lines and washed with orange, blue and yellow, and somewhere in it a bird is keeping cool. He made the sheet in 1924, the year he and three friends, Kandinsky, Jawlensky and Feininger, banded together as the Blue Four to show their work in America. The sheet lives in Basel's print room, the Kupferstichkabinett, among the works meant to be pulled out and studied up close rather than hung.