Dry-Cool Garden

Klee liked to garden with paint. Again and again through the 1920s he laid out gardens that never existed anywhere, setting them as grids and terraces of watercolour, part plan seen from above, part dream. This one, from 1921, he named for a temperature and a feeling rather than a place, the dry, cool air of a garden early in the year. The cells are arranged like beds and paths, cool and orderly, a garden you read the way you read a map. Klee gave it that mood as much through its title as through its colour, and he did it all on a sheet only about the size of a page of writing paper.