Botanical Theater

Klee began this picture in 1924, while he was teaching at the Bauhaus in Weimar, and did not finish it until 1934. The decade in between took him with the school to its new building in Dessau, then to the academy in Düsseldorf, and in 1933, after the Nazis removed him from his post, back to Bern, the Swiss city where he had grown up. The picture travelled with him, and its inscriptions still show the gap. At the upper left he wrote his name and 1924, then an equals sign and 1934. Stalk-like plants, leaves and blossoms frame the scene like the wings of a stage, and in the middle floats a single strange growth with a red, drop-shaped core, sending out odd shoots below. Fine, furry hatching covers every form like down. He built it in layers of oil, watercolour and pen on paper, and over the years small cracks have opened in the centre.