Im Reich der Luft

In 1917 Klee was a soldier. He'd been called up two years into the war and posted behind the lines at German flying schools, where part of his job was painting identification numbers onto aircraft and stripping usable fabric from planes that had crashed. He kept making pictures in the barracks in his off hours, and this small watercolour comes from those months. Its title means In the Realm of Air, and it turns the sky he was surrounded by into a soft grid of coloured washes, with a few arrows and signs drifting through it like instruments read at altitude. There are no aircraft in it. A man who spent his days among machines built for war made, on paper, an airspace that is weightless and quiet.