Cliffs by the sea

In 1931 Klee left the Bauhaus in Dessau for a professorship at the art academy in Düsseldorf, without ever fully moving. For the next two years he travelled between the two cities about every fortnight, kept a studio in each, and worked differently in each. In Düsseldorf it was dots. Klee spoke of his so-called pointillizing, a nod to Georges Seurat, though the method was his own. He first sealed the canvas with a thick white ground, then set coloured dots over it, going over some of them again and again until they stand up from the surface in relief. You can see it here. The points of colour gather into a moving pattern that hints at rock, sea and sky without settling into any of them. Klee had a name for this kind of surface, a sowing of dots, and he wrote the title, Cliffs by the Sea, on the stretcher himself.