Kampfscene aus der komisch-phantastischen Oper “der Seefahrer”

Klee grew up surrounded by music. His father taught it, his wife was a pianist, and he was a good enough violinist to have once weighed it as a career, so an imaginary opera was a natural thing for him to paint. He made this in Weimar in 1923 and gave it a mouthful of a title: a battle scene from a comic-fantastic opera called The Seafarer. There is no such opera. The battle is a musical one, the clash and answer of voices, a trio of dragons set against a lone tenor hero out at sea. The characters have been pushed almost all the way to abstraction, blocks and arrows of colour standing in for the singers. It lives today in the museum's cabinet of prints and drawings rather than the painting galleries.