Contemplating

By 1938 Klee was living back in Bern, in exile from Germany and seriously ill. He had scleroderma, a disease that slowly hardens the skin and the tissues beneath it, and it was making the fine, delicate work of his Bauhaus years physically hard to sustain. His late pictures answered the illness by growing simpler and bolder, built from thick dark strokes that read almost like a private script. This pastel belongs to that final stretch. He called it Contemplating, a quiet, inward word from a man with little time left, who in these same years was producing more work than in almost any other period of his life. It is now in the Kunstmuseum Basel.