Garden Gate K.

A garden gate reduced to its bones: a scaffold of thin lines and coloured panels that reads at once as a gate, a fence and a little grid. Klee painted it in 1932 in casein and watercolour, not on canvas but on a piece of gauze laid over paper, so the weave shows faintly through the colour. It is tiny, about 31 centimetres square. The 'K' in the title is just Klee's cataloguing shorthand, the kind of dry label he gave a whole run of related works. What he keeps is the essential idea of a gate, the sense of a threshold you look through, built from almost nothing.