Landscape with Poplars

Klee painted this in 1929, the year he turned 50, when Berlin and other cities were mounting exhibitions to mark the birthday of a painter now widely admired. The winter before, he had travelled up the Nile in Egypt, and the banded fields and layered light of that journey ran straight into the landscapes he made that year. Here a row of poplars stands as thin vertical marks against horizontal strips of colour, a whole stretch of country reduced to a few bands and a rhythm of trees. It is watercolour, worked in soft washes on a small sheet. He built many pictures this way in 1929, laying the land down in quiet horizontal registers.