Blue Night

Blue Night is built the way you would build a mosaic. Klee filled the surface with small squares and rectangles of colour, mostly blues and violets, so that a night seems to assemble itself out of coloured tiles. It belongs to a group of such square-mosaic pictures he made in the 1930s, where colour is set out cell by cell rather than brushed into shapes. The making is unusual even for him. He worked in pastel, not paint, laying the chalk over a ground of paste on jute backed with cotton, the coarse cloth giving every square a slightly grainy edge. He made it in 1937, and Kunstmuseum Basel bought it four years later, in 1941.