Hutment

A hutment is a cluster of rough huts, a temporary camp thrown up on open ground. Klee painted this one in oil in 1932, while he was teaching at the academy in Düsseldorf. It was, though he did not yet know it, his last full year of work in Germany. Within a year the Nazis would remove him from his post, and he would leave for Bern in Switzerland, the city where he had grown up. Whatever drew him to the subject, he assembled the little settlement from his usual vocabulary of simple signs and blocks set into a coloured ground. The painting is held today by the Kunstmuseum Basel.