Motif from Hammamet

In April 1914 Klee spent about two weeks travelling the Tunisian coast with two painter friends, August Macke and Louis Moilliet, carrying little more than watercolour boxes and paper. At Hammamet, a walled town by the sea, he sat down and let the place come apart in front of him. The tower and the low roofs are still there if you look for them, but the lower half of the sheet slips into transparent squares of pink, green and blue, with bare white paper left between the washes so the colours never turn muddy. Watercolour suited the heat and the speed of a trip like this. He kept these Tunisian sheets for years and went back to them in the studio at home.