Colour Table “Qu 1”

By 1930 Klee had spent nearly a decade teaching colour to design students at the Bauhaus in Dessau, and he thought about it more rigorously than almost any painter alive. This sheet looks like one of his teaching charts that quietly turned into a picture. It is a grid of small rectangles, each a slightly different tone, arranged so the eye slides from one to the next in tiny steps. He drew it in pastel, then mounted the paper onto cardboard with ordinary wallpaper paste. The title is his own filing code rather than a subject. Qu marks the series and the 1 its place within it, the kind of label he gave hundreds of works so he could track his own experiments.