Crystal Gradation

This is a tiny sheet, barely 24 by 31 centimetres, and up close it is just rows of little squares and triangles, each a slightly different tone of brown, ochre and grey. Klee has stepped the colours so carefully that the flat grid seems to tilt and catch the light, like the facets of a cut crystal, which is what the German title, Kristall-Stufung, promises: a crystalline gradation. He painted it in 1921, the year he began thinking of colour as something to be measured and ordered rather than only felt. Watercolour let him lay one transparent tone over another and control the steps precisely. Around the image he drew a thin ruled border in pen, framing the small experiment like a specimen.